‘It Is Like a Funeral’

Abstract

‘It is like a funeral, you will weep’, said Waheeb, a local guide, describing the scene of Kayayei women, migrant head-porters from northern Ghana, sleeping in Accra’s lorry stations, their bodies wrapped in black plastic against the night. This article advances feminist urban scholarship by theorizing how gendered survival, affective infrastructures, and necropolitical abandonment intersect to shape the everyday geographies of life and loss among Kayayei women. Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, it extends Mbembe’s concept of death-worlds beyond contexts of overt conflict to show how urban planning failures, informal governance, and state-enabled neglect produce sustained exposure to harm within ostensibly ‘peaceful’ cities. The article mobilizes Butler’s grievability to illuminate how Kayayei lives are rendered visible as nuisance but invisible as lives worth protecting, how unsafe sleeping, cumulative injury, reproductive precarity, and suicidal despair erode bodily integrity over time. Integrating Ahmed’s account of affective economies and Oliver’s framework of affective witnessing, the study treats emotion and embodiment as central evidentiary registers of abandonment and endurance. Empirically, the article offers a rare ethnographic account of homelessness, unsafe abortions, and survival economies among Kayayei women, grounding global theories in African urban realities. Theoretically, it develops a gendered and racialized account of necropolitics, showing how the colonial racialization of northern Ghanaians conditions exposure to premature death reframes resilience as survival under attrition, and positions affective infrastructures as central to urban inequality. Methodologically, it demonstrates how integrating embodied, emotional, and reflexive registers into feminist ethnography produces humanizing analyses of marginalization.

Citation: Amamnsunu, Johnson Elijah, ‘“It Is Like a Funeral”: Gendered Precarity and Necropolitical Survival Among Homeless Kayayei Women in Accra’ (2026), in Patricia Daley (ed.), Place and Environment, in Meena Dhanda (ed.), Oxford Intersections: Racism by Context (Oxford, online ed., Oxford Academic, 20 Mar. 2025), DOI, accessed date.