State of Slum

Home to eighty thousand people, Accra's Old Fadama neighbourhood is the largest illegal slum in Ghana. Though almost all its inhabitants are Ghanaian born, their status as illegal ?squatters' means that they live a precarious existence, marginalised within Ghanaian society and denied many of the rights to which they are entitled as citizens. Drawing on rich, ethnographic fieldwork, the book takes as its point of departure the narratives that emerge from the everyday lives and struggles of these people, using the perspective offered by Old Fadama as a means of identifying wider trends and dynamics across African slums.