Apart from its name and the many businesses to be found along the Street, however, the most visible yet unassuming dimension of the peculiar character of Oxford St is actually to be experienced beneath one’s feet, that is, upon the sidewalk itself. In the December 18, 1926 entry to his Moscow Diary, Walter Benjamin writes: ‘It has been observed that pedestrians [in Moscow] walk in “zigzags”. This is simply on account of the overcrowding of the narrow sidewalks; nowhere else except here and there in Naples do you find sidewalks this narrow. This gives Moscow a provincial air, or rather the character of an improvised metropolis that has fallen into place overnight’. Even though Oxford St cannot be said to have materialized overnight from the sky, it is true that here, too, one is forced to walk in zigzags. But this is not merely due to the narrowness of the sidewalk. For the Oxford St sidewalk is marked first and foremost by its almost determined evanescence as a sidewalk (i.e., it looks anything but a sidewalk), and the fact that the distinction between it and the tarmac roadway itself is practically obliterated. One reason why the sidewalk does not look or feel like one is that as Oxford St evolved into the high energy commercial street that it is today the sidewalk progressively became not the broad strip specifically designed for pedestrians to traverse but merely the stripped down extension of the interior of the many commercial enterprises along the Street. Thus the sidewalk in front of various businesses on Oxford St is taken over by them, either for customer parking extending from demarcated parking areas (in front of Frankie’s or Ecobank for example, or simply for the sprawl onto the sidewalk of manufactured goods, such as in the case of the many electronic, hardware and bicycle stores along both sides of the street. The colonization of the sidewalk by commerce from shops and stores is augmented by the presence of vendors of various kinds, both itinerant and stationary. The items that vendors peddle vary: secondhand clothes, bags and shoes (popularly known as obroni wa wu, or ‘the white man is dead’); fruits of all vintage, but with fresh mango, papaya and pineapple to be peeled, sliced or diced up on the spot; Coca-Cola, Sprite and Fanta in blue ice buckets; red snapper caught fresh from the sea that is sold by women at the seashore but along Oxford St is mongered by young men with connections to fishing communities. Pushcarts with various goods abound and there are also vendors of newly manufactured products covering everything from dog chains and flashlights to soccer balls, shoe polish, toothpicks, vibrators and Time Magazine.

Cars and pedestrians mix freely on the roadway itself. Even though the sidewalk is demarcated from the tarred roadway by the notorious and practically ubiquitous open sewage gutter, the sidewalk and the road remain at an uneven height (i.e., while the sidewalk is supposed to be raised some four or five inches above the roadway it is actually for long stretches at par with it on both sides of the Street). To walk along Oxford St is also to be constantly invited to pause and look at things: not in the manner by which shop windows in commercial boulevards elsewhere pose various enticements for the pedestrian to stop, take a quick cosmetic look at their reflection in the glass, and perhaps enter the store (the window displays performing the function of whetting your desire and inducing a crossing of the boundary between inside and outside), but rather by the constant barrage of vendors of all manner of goods vying to make a sale. The invitations to treat, to use a well-known phrase in commercial law, are only an irritation if one is actually in a hurry to get to a fixed destination. If not, the invitations to treat proffered by vendors on Oxford Street may open up into varied kinds of culturally saturated modes of haggling and bargaining, with jokes, teasing and overall good humor thrown in for good measure. There is a distinctly carnivalesque quality to this aspect of the Street. But this also means that the character of walking on Oxford St and the human interactions one has on it are very different from that of commercial streets elsewhere, in London, or Singapore, or Johannesburg, to cite but three contrasting examples.

Since, as we have seen, much of the length of the sidewalks on both sides of the Street have been taken over by businesses and vendors, and cars have no monopoly over the roadway, the experience of walking along Oxford St involves a lot of zigzagging, moving off and onto the sidewalk or roadway with the negotiation of one’s peregrinations amidst various kinds of vehicles, vendors, goods and pedestrians as convenience and inclination dictate. The walk on Oxford Street, as in many parts of Accra, is thus an object of improvisation. (I have also spent many fine hours watching how people walk on the Street: the gentle swagger led by the left shoulder slightly tilting the body to one side, the constant ‘flexing’ with cell phones, and the bemusement and otherwise irritated hurrying-to-get-somewhere-yet-being-constantly-interrupted quality of walking. With the proliferation of mp3 players, iPods and their attendant ear-plugs there is also a dimension of distractedness that is introduced into people’s gait. Yet oddly enough, listening to something else whilst walking on the Street is not very common; it demands attention in a way that does not allow zoning out of its ambient sounds. Oxford St proffers a form of sensorial totality that is only unpleasant if you go against the flow of its multimodal sensory offerings). If there is a performative dimension to the Street it is not to be mistaken for the performativity of occasional theatrical and political events, such as the annual December carnival, or the spontaneous outpourings of jubilation whenever Ghana makes strides in the international soccer tournaments it has had the unalloyed ecstasy to participate in. Rather, the character of walking on the Street that has just been described exposes itself to the possibility of spontaneous ‘events’ that themselves follow sets of performative scripts and reveal what we shall come to see as certain important spatial logics.

The messy interaction of pedestrians with other pedestrians, with pushcarts, with itinerant hawkers on the sidewalks and with vehicles on the roadway means that misunderstandings regularly breakout as to the proper courtesies of street use. These are not reducible to the ordinary road rage variety of misunderstandings. Insults may be quickly traded between pedestrian and pedestrian, pedestrian and hawker, pedestrian and motorist or between one motorist and another. Rhetorical mastery may involve the clever deployment of local language proverbs, but not exclusively. However, the traded insults turn out to be an important aspect of the intersection of spatiality and spectatoriality endemic to Accra’s street life, such that the ultimate fact of seeing and being seen translates everything in the heated altercation into the display of mastery of unstated yet critical cultural codes of rhetoric and delivery. Reference to various parts of the human anatomy and its effusions proliferate in such exchanges but the hyper-inflation of the body is not the real point of the scatological insults. Nor are the irreverent speculations on the wanton happenings that must take place routinely in your opponent's family, near and far. What is crucial is to produce a memorable twist on a known theme or themes both to show superiority over your opponent and to raise a laugh from casual observers that will quickly have gathered to enjoy a spot of spontaneous street theatre.

The question to ask is: How do we define the altercation as a moment of communication out of which we might, following Henri Lefebvre, extrapolate the spatial practice(s) of a place such as Oxford St? For far from connoting a breakdown of communication, altercations regarding road use divulge the character of spatial practice precisely manifested as a flashpoint of rhetorical intensity. In other words, such rhetorical flashpoints, coded at the simplest level as debates about the civilities of road use are actually the points at which spatial practices reveal themselves. Such moments may be taken in the form of a multi-layered expressive fragment that must be assumed to encapsulate a larger social totality. But our interpretation of the expressive fragment must be conducted carefully. The fact that unlike other streets in Accra, Oxford Street is lined on both sides by a phalanx of billboard advertisements large and small means that it is at once a permeable yet also strictly demarcated spatial theatre. At the highest register of articulation, then, all of Oxford Street may be taken as a geographically demarcated expressive fragment constituted by a number of common and distinct spatial and discursive features, some of which are nodal expressive fragments in and of themselves. With the proliferation of languages (Ga, Twi, Pidgin, English, etc.) and discourses (those of bill board advertising, tro-tro inscriptions, etc.) our interpretation of such an expressive fragment may be made exclusively on the basis of socio-linguistic and discursive considerations, but with an eye to the effect of the material dimensions of the Street (such as the evanescence of the sidewalk, for example). The expressivity of the fragment must ultimately be charged to the nature and variety of interpersonal interactions on the Street. The interpersonal interactions manifest different dimensions of economy, culture and society and their transformations through time. Language is thus only the entry point into a broader structure of multilayered levels and relations. It is out of the interactive multidimensionality of all such levels that we gain a sense of the spatial practice(s) to be seen on Oxford St. And critical to understanding the form of Oxford Street and its spatial practivs as sonstituting an expressive totality is the place of what appear to be ephemeral or passing, such as the altercations that I am pointing to. Thus, instead of an all-that-is-solid-melts-into-air attitude with regard to urban ephemera, we might underscore the direct opposite approach for Oxford Street and indeed the African city in general: nothing is ephemeral or concrete, but framing makes it so. The discourse of urban crisis enamoured of urban policy makers must be read alongside what appear to be just quirky and yet reiterated persistently in everyday street life as a means of thoroughly understanding the African city.