An essential practice of the transport work at the station, one that focuses many of the concurrent and competing attempts to make a living, is the preparation of buses for departure. This is what the station workers refer to as ‘loading’, the significance of which highlights key aspects of hustle as activity. Chapter 4 looks at the practices and the various ruses, tricks, and bluffs that make up the task and craft of loading. It shows how changes in the organisational structure of the station, accelerated by the pressures of the urban labour market, have created a context of loading that is permeated by contingent constellations, a situation of constantly reproduced hustle. After detailing the practices of non-competitive and competitive loading, it turns the analysis around to describe the different ways in which station dwellers experience, accommodate themselves to, and try to exploit situations of hustle.

Chapter 5 focuses on the different temporalities that are interwoven in the station, feeding into everyday experiences and informing patterns of action. In Accra’s station, just as in most bus stations in Ghana, departures do not follow designated scripts dictated by clock time; instead, they are collectively timed by the inflow of passengers. These inflows follow different rhythmic temporalities co-composed in Accra and in the destinations served by the station. By detailing the daily work activities of an inexperienced and an experienced station worker, it teases out different levels of perceptual attunement to movement and rhythm taking shape hundreds of kilometres away. It argues that the tacit dimension of temporal and kinaesthetic enskilment highlights important qualities needed to make hustle successful, which essentially requires the ability to ‘read’ the different rhythms of eruptive situations and to align and time one’s actions accordingly.

Chapter 6 examines the social and economic implications of the station’s unscheduled departures by exploring the practices and experiences of waiting at the station, which, in a major public transport hub, is a quintessential property of social action. Building on a ‘slow’ ethnographic elaboration of the minutiae of loading a bus (which took six and a half hours), it presents the positions of three groups of actors in relation to the temporalities of waiting at the station: the passengers, the drivers, and the station workers responsible for organising departures. A focus on the dimensions of ‘empty time’ contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the station hustle, one that goes beyond its seemingly perpetual busyness and ceaseless activity, and that facilitates a subtle analysis of the social and economic relations in contexts of contingent and involuting organisations of labour and time.

The concluding chapter summarises the key findings of the book by juxtaposing the workings of Accra’s old, established station with the designated function of a government-mandated and top-down administered public road transport terminal – the ‘new station’, as Accra’s urbanites have pithily dubbed it. It scales up the comparison to consider the significance of urban infrastructure as a ‘hard’ technical system and as a ‘soft’ system of sociality in relation to questions of governance, social order, and the significance of usage. Finally, it reflects on the broader implications of this study by pointing out empirical and theoretical continuities with the practices, places, and politics of urban hustle that go beyond this particular case of a West African bus station.

Chapter 7 extends the typology of waiting at the station (established in Chapter 6) by considering the practices of two groups who exploit rather than endure periods of waiting: the station’s mobile vendors and service providers, and so-called ‘shadow passengers’, a group of professional ‘waiters’ deployed to entice passengers to enter the buses. By transforming what, to passengers, is often tantamount to ‘empty’ and ‘delayed’ time into a means of generating income, the commercial practices of station hawkers and shadows valorise the waiting time of others, thus harnessing economic margins as characteristic of hustle as activity. The close reading of different waiting temporalities as they unfold within and encompass the station hustle throws into sharp relief the irregularity of work engagements and the different ways in which people act on the temporal porosity that these engagements entail.

The introduction describes some of the key features and the wide range of actors and activities that characterise the workings of a long-distance bus station in Accra, Ghana’s capital. It then presents two meanings of hustle that capture the station’s workings: as a noun, describing crowded, hectic, and potentially confusing situations; and as a verb, denoting precarious yet venturesome economic activities. Building on the ambivalences evoked by the different uses and perspectives of the term, it situates the significance of this study in relation to scholarly discussions of transport work, the ‘informal economy’, (auto)mobility, infrastructure, and urban social life. It then outlines the diversity of functions and types of Ghanaian bus stations, and concludes with a reflection on methodology, highlighting the value of a single-sited ethnographic approach to urban complexity and trans-local mobility, and an itinerary of the book’s chapters.

Chapter 3 explores the multiplicity of ordering dynamics that are integral to the workings of the station, and the complex and contingent constellations that emerge from this multiplicity. Expanding on the notions of Guyer’s ‘niche economy’ and Geertz’s ‘involution’, it discusses the institutional arrangements through which people create and accommodate themselves to the hustle as situation, a process that reproduces the complexities that form the social space and social order of the station. The ethnography presented in this chapter focuses on the changing occupational organisation of the station’s transport trades. These shifting arrangements, it is argued, are characterised by involuting growth within a niche economy logic, and they offer a window onto the constituents of hustle as a distinct mode of production and organisation that prevails in many spheres of African cities.

Chapter 2 considers the historical context from which today’s station hustle has emerged as a distinct economic logic and mode of production. It relates the station’s contemporary workings to the history of local economic practices and the wider political and economic changes that have shaped commercial road transport since the early days of motorisation in the early twentieth century, emphasising the role that bus stations have played in these developments. It shows how local transport operators have long harnessed the logics of risk, competition, and shrewd resourcefulness as the principal properties of economic organisation and action, features that have allowed them to both capitalise on and compensate for the weakness of the services provided by the state. The ways in which they have accommodated the effects of state regulatory intervention are consistent with these logics: in most cases, state intervention has been considered just another element of market volatility.