Fragments of affinity: Photographic archives and the material performance of personhood in a zongo community of Ghana

Prelude

The burst of recognition and excitement that Kaaka's photograph initiated among Aisha and her family members, followed by their attempts to touch and see the photograph with their own hands and eyes, formed the beginning of my own exploration and gradual understanding of new layers of urban kinship, friendship, and personhood emerging in Accra's zongos. As we continued to rummage through piles of photographs, slowly going through Aisha's collection of old black-and-white pictures, tainted colour photographs, some crumpled up, others with missing corners or disappearing faces due to scratches or spots of dirt, she called out the names of those figuring in the photographs and told their histories, and above all how they were related to her. Quietly and with nostalgia in her voice, she would sometimes hold the photographs in her hands, often tenderly caressing or hugging them, going back and forth between the various smaller piles she had assembled. It was as if the small plastic bag contained Aisha's whole relational history and brought together the multiple fragments and figments that constituted her as a person. OPEN IN VIEWER

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Figure 2.

Aisha's plastic bag containing her personal collection of photographs (photo taken by the author in Accra, August 2017).

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Figure 3.

Two pages from Boston's album showing Boston himself in front of the airport in Lagos during the construction work (reproduced by the author in Accra, April 2018).

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Figure 4.

Hawa holding her personal collection of photographs (photo taken by the author in Accra, August 2018).

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Figure 5.

Hawa's father, a horsekeeper in Accra (photo reproduced by the author in Accra, August 2018).

The material biographies of intimate photographic archives

In this paper, I explore the relational and migratory biographies of zongo inhabitants as constructed, narrated, and performed through personal and family photographic archives. ² ‘Zongo’ is a Hausa word for a migrant neighbourhood, a predominantly Muslim Hausa-phone neighbourhood of people who hail from northern Ghana or from neighbouring West African countries. The result of an unequivocal segregationist colonial urban policy (Parker, 2000) that relegated incoming – mainly Muslim – ‘strangers’ or ‘non-autochthones’ to reserve-like areas, the zongos have developed today into dense, heterogenous neighbourhoods whose inhabitants continue to struggle with their ambiguous status and strive for full recognition by the Ghanaian state. To this day, zongo dwellers are labelled as ‘strangers’ or ‘migrants’ and are repeatedly treated with hostility and suspicion by others. ³ At the same time, the extended networks that most zongo dwellers have developed in their neighbourhoods, which link them to relatives living far outside the capital, and even outside Ghana and on whom they can rely for help and support, generate the social capital needed to endure the trials and tribulations of everyday life. Zongo people are known to be highly mobile, relying on extensive social webs, and displaying a kind of zongo cosmopolitanism. Kinship, friendship, and affiliation remain crucial lines of connection that continue to define loyalties cutting across zongo and national boundaries (Cassiman, 2018).

Personal photographic archives are usually kept in a plastic bag or album. These collections show condensed migratory biographies of family members who have travelled from neighbouring West African countries and others who are still in the countries of origin but who are remembered through their images and inserted into the webs of affiliation and the larger collective narrative. Others show records of the many social events in the zongo. One of my research participants, commonly known by his nickname Boston and the son of one of the first inhabitants of a zongo, had shown me his album while passionately sharing anecdotes about his family's history and his own whereabouts. The album contained allochronic fragments of Boston as a person, bringing together different aspects of his itinerant life, tokens of relationships scattered across Ghana, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and even the USA (see Figure 3). Boston is by no means an exception. Every inhabitant of the zongo can trace his or her roots back to several scattered origins. Kinship ramifications are always traced bilaterally, so men and women alike trace their origins back to both the father's and the mother's ancestors, often in different ethnic groups, even in different countries. Movement strengthens some affiliations and attenuates others. One needs to know their (imagined and real) histories of affiliation, so that they can be shown and reinterpreted to create belonging and propel oneself into the future. Boston speaks in an excited voice: ‘In the old days, people didn’t want to be photographed. They had no education. Now people like to send pictures to each other and print them out, because you lose them on the phone. Women, especially, like pictures and albums! They invite photographers to every event so that they can give pictures to each other after the event. But I have my own collection!’. Most men explain that they keep a few photographs for their historical value. They are particularly attached to archive material relating to their fathers, forefathers, and their villages of origin. It is mainly women who have large personal archives, which are constantly updated and kept in albums, bags, or drawers in their rooms. In a society often perceived as a hostile environment by the zongo inhabitants, taking photographs together and exchanging them among friends maintains relationships.

Through the (material) engagement with, and the exchange, performance, and storage of photographs between (dispersed) family members, social ties are constructed, remembered, and reaffirmed, or sometimes abandoned or destroyed. Opening personal archives, exchanging photographs, and sharing histories are performative acts that can ‘engender contingent affects’ (Navaro-Yashin, 2007: 95) in their owners and viewers at the moment of encounter with the object of the photograph and the person portrayed. Plastic bags are containers of fragile histories and concealed webs of relations; they are like anthropological ‘silhouette[s] of [a] life histor[y]ies’ (Zeitlyn, 2008: 158), honest in their incompleteness, but as accurate as possible. Disclosing and sharing them further generates new webs of relations leading to moments when personhood is performed, recognized, or redefined. We will now see how these moments of haptic engagement with photographs (Campt, 2017) help to recalibrate women's positions and redefine gender grammars in the highly patriarchal communities of the zongos.

Opening up Aisha's personal archive unwrapped fragments of Aisha as a person which I had never discovered in the previous five years we had known each other. The little stories about her ancestors, her parents, and her kin near and far, posing in their homes, in studios, and at public events, or the images of Aisha herself in her various capacities as a mother, a wife, or a seamstress, revealed an entire world of relations contained and condensed in the small bag she kept in a particular corner of her room. Seeing and showing the photographs unleashed emotions in Aisha and the bystanders standing around us and such moments of familial intimacy inspired me to invite other research participants to unpack their personal photographic archives and tell the stories that came with them. From that day on, my research method involved delving into family albums, plastic bags and leather cases, photo etuis, small boxes, and large trunks, trying not only to trace the movements of my interlocutors and their families, but also to follow the biographies of the circulating photographs themselves as objects.

The main objective was to unpack the narrators’ migratory movements and various fragments of their personal histories, and this not only through the biographies of the images, that is, the (stories of the) people depicted in the photographs – the pictures’ ‘indexical value’ (Buckley, 2014: 573) – but even more through the biographies of the photographs as material objects and the affective encounters with these objects. Following Elizabeth Edwards’ distinction between the ‘social biography of image content’ and the ‘social biography of a particular photograph’ (2002: 68) and what she later on coins the ‘thingness’ of photographs, referring to the photograph as a material object in itself (2020: 79), I also disregard the common division made between the content (imagery) and the form (object) of the photograph but rather look at what the synchronization of image and object tells us. In doing so, this paper follows three women's intimate photographic archives and how the photographs move in and out of hands and in and out of personal collections, how and between whom they are exchanged, recounted, and (re)interpreted by inserting them in a different kind of ‘placement’ (Edwards and Hart, 2004), in an album, in a public display, or in a trunk or bag. While it has been demonstrated that albums have performative qualities and ‘their materiality dictates the embodied conditions of viewing, literally performing the images in certain ways’ (Edwards and Hart, 2004: 11), I show how in these placements, fragments of the zongo women's personhood are diffracted both materially and ontologically, as such performing personhood in line with gendered zongo ideals and the values of extended networks of affiliation and generosity. Such performance is controlled by the owners of the collection, thus creating opportunities for self-representation and social mobility, but also for contesting gender grammars in the zongos.

I intentionally refer to ‘gender grammar’ in a nod to Hortense Spiller's landmark work on Mama's baby, papa's maybe: An American Grammar Book (1987) in which she dissects the grammars (symbolic systems) of (histories of) the Transatlantic Slave Trade and chattel slavery, kinship, and race, and the way race and anti-blackness mark black females’ bodies with meanings that obfuscate their gendering and kinship, making for an ungendered grammar of black people, rendering them ‘kinless’. While zongo inhabitants have not undergone similar histories of brutal captivity and enslavement, they are day in, day out confronted with brutal national and hegemonic grammars establishing them as ‘not one of us’, or ‘not our kin’ and thus, kinless from the perspective of the nation-state. I argue that they themselves create new grammars – gendered and kin-related – through the circulation of photographs. In these circulations and exchanges, the women ‘perform’ new and other subaltern histories (Edwards, 2020: 107) and it is these histories that I engage with in this paper.

I show that in the circulation and collection of photographs, women work on the material sedimentation of zumunci (literally ‘togetherness’), one of the distinct social values among Hausa communities, mainly for women. It is my explicit choice, driven by the empirical material, to focus the analytical lens on the notion of ‘personhood’ rather than the more conflated terms of ‘identity’ and ‘self’. More so than the latter notions, personhood implies the social, cultural, ethical, and religious norms and expectations that people, here women, negotiate as they work towards socially recognized female personhood (see also Cole, 2012), which carries with it particular moral careers and legal entitlements. This involves work, not only in the sense of metaphorical self-construction (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2001), but also as ‘the work bodily practices perform in crafting a subject’ (Mahmood, 2012: 121). Personhood is resolutely dialectical and a way of ‘becoming’. It is precisely this kind of work that creates zumunci, a kind of kinwork in which women (can) negotiate their ethical and social personhood.

Zumunci in the zongos is a rather fluid notion with a positive and egalitarian feel that is usually translated as ‘unity’, ‘solidarity’ (Werthmann, 2002), or sometimes ‘kinship’ and includes those who are ‘kinned’ and referred to as brothers and sisters, but are strictly speaking beyond blood ties (peers, colleagues, neighbours) (Agier, 1981: 260). In essence, zumunci refers to the intimate relations of loyalty and reciprocity that are maintained in the zongo. Events that bring together kin, friends, and acquaintances, such as marriage and child-outdooring ceremonies, are said to ‘glue’ zumunci (kara dankon zumunci is a proverb that literally means ‘thickening the sticky gum of the community’) and create relations of reciprocity and affinity. Organizing and hosting these gatherings, which are attended by thick crowds of people who are properly welcomed with freshly cooked meals, is a crucial means of status production among women and is usually reciprocated by subsequent invitations. Women who attend many ceremonies and entertain numerous guests accumulate status and respectability that extend into the following generations. A woman's perceived capacity for zumunci may even determine the way she is welcomed and the type of seating, food, and gifts she receives when she is entertained. In the highly patriarchal communities of the zongos, where the older generation of married women is largely restricted to the confines of the home and needs their husband's permission to move around, social gatherings are the perfect pretext for meeting and competing – with men also – for public visibility and working on one's personal status in a culturally acceptable way.

Collections or albums are ‘flexible, changing place[s] of accumulation, always reflecting a changing network of social relations’ (Behrends, 2002: 58), thus building and reflecting zumunci. This paper shows how photographs are not dead objects (Zeitlyn, 2008) but registers of personhood that perform multiple narratives in their material trajectories of exchange and display. Moreover, people always relate to their personal archives in haptic and affective ways.

Aisha's plastic bag revisited: self-making and social performance

Aisha is a woman of considerable social status in the zongo community. She is respected as the chairperson of several women's associations and as the mother of numerous children (and grandchildren), some fostered and some she has given birth to herself; she has led community development projects, chaired major public events, organized child-outdooring and funeral celebrations, arranged marriages, and received visitors from all over the world. All these merits and achievements, which are highly valued in communities, find an echo in her personal archive, and in turn, this archive reinforces her reputation in the zongo.

Aisha eventually found her photo album, which included more recent photos from the period after her wedding, which brought her to the Accra zongo where she lives. Born Mossi in a zongo near Kumasi, Ghana's second largest city, she married a Mossi from Burkina Faso and moved to her current home to join her husband. Some of the photographs in the bag and the album were part of her (now late) husband's personal collection, consisting of studio portraits of him at different ages and in different outfits, which provide a good overview of the successive fashions of studio photography in Ghana; of family portraits taken in the house with their children; of the husband's travels to Burkina Faso – and his village of origin – to visit relatives and attend weddings and funerals. One odd photograph depicts him at his work site, in his security guard's uniform. A special series of pictures was taken when he was turbaned as the chief of the Mossi ethnic group in the zongo, showing the ceremony in the mosque. Most of the larger ethnic groups in the zongos have their own elected chiefs who represent their ethnic community in the Council of Zongo Chiefs and at formal and political events.

Other photographs were Aisha's own. Some showed her new-born children and her daughter's departure for Spain, while others showed her as a young apprentice in a sewing shop. Aisha became a renowned seamstress, converting a room of her husband's house into a workshop and training young seamstresses herself. Her album contains a number of photographs of the graduation ceremonies she organized as a ‘madam’, handing over the sewing certificates to her apprentices. Most of these photographs were presented to her as gifts, showing her apprentices’ gratitude and respect. Others were gifts from friends or relatives on the occasion of the birth or outdooring of their children or weddings. When she attends special events with her friends, it is commonplace for them to exchange photographs of the event afterwards, as a sign of friendship and gratitude. The feast of Eid-ul-Fitr, which marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, is one of the most important moments to take photos with friends and relatives. After collective prayers, everyone cooks food for each other, visits each other in newly sown dresses of the latest style and with new hairstyles, jewellery, and make-up. Photographs and selfies are taken in abundance and some young women's Facebook accounts crash due to the sheer volume of posts. Photographers go around with instant printing devices or they write down the names and phone numbers of the people photographed so they can later track them down and sell their prints. Despite the proliferation and democratization of digital photography, printed photographs remain hugely popular and many digital photos are rematerialized (see Rose, 2014 in Edwards, 2020) because they can be physically exchanged and displayed in one's archive or room.

Part of the work of photographs is to create and store future remembrances (Wendl, 2001). Every self-respecting Muslim in the zongo has a pile of souvenir photographs of the Eid celebrations, in graceful attire and glittering company. Particularly for women of Aisha's generation (in their fifties or sixties), these memories are crucial as they contribute to the self-making of these women as respectable women, mothers, leaders, or ‘madams’. Similarly, in the self-portraits of Felicia Abban, known as Ghana's first female photographer, Bowles (2016) discerns the projection of success and cosmopolitanism that Abban embodied in the 1950s to 1970s through her graceful postures and sophisticated dresses, representing an ideal and aestheticized femininity and modernity. Among the contemporary Ghanaian diaspora in London, Fumanti (2013) observes how videos and photographs of social events depict people in their most fashionable attires and circulate as symbolic capital testifying to the migrants’ success. They are ‘living visual maps of personal networks’ (Fumanti, 2013: 213), displayed in the migrants’ homes. In addition to these visual projections, I argue that women perform their personhood and (re)articulate social and gendered values and concerns in the very act of exchanging photographs as objects.

Some pages in Aisha's album contained empty spots, with yellowed stains indicating where photographs had disappeared. ‘I must have given them to my friends’ she would say, or, ‘oh, maybe the children have taken them away!’. Other research participants, too, grumbled about children ‘misplacing’ or snatching their photographs, all the while stressing that their collections were dynamic and also belonged to their children. Some new photographs were loosely inserted between the older black-and-white prints. The album looked like it pieced together disparate moments and appearances of Aisha's personal life. The most recent photographs were of Aisha's pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca, one of the most important events in a devout Muslim's life and a highly significant marker of status in the zongo, increasingly so for women. Several postcards were also contained in the plastic bag: one of the founding father of the Ghanaian nation, Kwame Nkrumah, others of foreign celebrities, such as the popular American actor and iconic cowboy John Wayne, and one of Lady Diana, the princess of Wales. This last one was sent to her by her husband's brother who lives in the UK. This also shows how public objects sometimes find their way into private archives and are reworked in the process. Banks and Vokes (2010: 339) refer to this as ‘slippage’ which occurs when photographs move between private and public realms.

Aisha's personal photo archive, consisting of an album and a plastic bag stuffed with photographs, alluded to who she once was, who she is today, and who she aspires to become. Photographs reveal transient notions of self and the ways in which the self seeks to assert itself in the future (Barthes and Howard, 1981). Aisha's collection thus echoed similar techniques of self-representation, ‘showing off’ (Fumanti, 2013), and modes of projection as described by Bowles (2016) and Wendl (2001) in relation to other Ghanaian photographic archives. In narrating how photographs had been given or exchanged, Aisha revealed a world of entanglement through the many and varied fragments, or fractions, of herself as a person, that were constantly in-the-making in the condensed spacetime of her album. As a well-known leader in the community and a skilled organizer of religious and other activities, she was considered to be an important ‘glue’ in the zongo, cementing new ties across and beyond the neighbourhood, and thus performing ‘phatic labour’ (Elyachar, 2010) in shaping and displaying zumunci. Elyachar defines phatic labour as productive work that Cairene women perform through language, thus creating ties and social infrastructures for their own sake (Elyachar, 2010: 453), in much the same way as women like Aisha do in the performance of zumunci. As the following sections show, Aisha's phatic work of exchanging photo prints that led to zumunci was translated into moral and religious capital.

Personal archive as performance: Adiza's collection

Adiza's mother was a Fanti from Ghana, her father was a Fulani from Mali. She was born in 1964 and grew up with her grandmother who was a police inspector in Kumasi. Her aunt took her to Salaga in northern Ghana but she felt uncomfortable there because people insulted her for being the child of a pepe (insult used by Akan people to refer to non-Akan ethnic groups from northern Ghana). At the age of 12, she ran away to Accra, where she was able to find her father in one of the zongos. When she was 19, she married Faisal, a man from a zongo in Accra with roots in Burkina Faso. They had nine children, two of whom died, and the two eldest now live in Germany. Almost all the photographs in Adiza's album are of her children and grandchildren, her relatives (brothers, cousins, sisters, in-laws), her friends, and her husband with his relatives and peers. Some of the people figuring in the photographs are distant family members of whom she remembers the degree of affiliation, but not their names or whereabouts. The daughters in Germany send her printed photographs of the grandchildren and Adiza explains how important it is to keep an album with pictures of relatives. Many of the pictures show Adiza herself with her friends at social events, posing gracefully in various outfits. She refers to several of the friends as her ‘sisters’, a form of ‘kinning’ (Howell, 2003) that is common among people living in migration situations. She explains that when taking a photograph with a group of friends, distributing the prints afterwards is essential and strengthens zumunci. Female friendship (kawa in Hausa) is central to the women's lives. It is a source of care, solidarity, and support, even if it sometimes generates competition and envy. Some friendships date back to childhood and these friends are often treated and referred to as kin.

A few months before we met, Adiza's husband had married again and was living alternately with each wife in two different households, as is common in a polygynous household in the zongo. The announcement of the marriage had come as a shock to Adiza who spoke of the pain and frustration that the new situation had caused her. One of the most painful moments for her was the comment made by her husband's sister on the day of the wedding – ‘finally Faisal is marrying a real wife!’ – referring to the fact that the new wife had brothers living in the UK and the USA, unlike Adiza. Adiza felt disowned and insulted by her sister-in-law and, by extension, by her husband's entire family. ‘I have given him seven children, isn’t that enough?’ As we talked and as she pieced together her life story, I realised that she had been choosing those photographs that demonstrated her own transnational relations: her daughters in Germany, a cousin in the Netherlands, another daughter on a visit to Hong Kong, grandchildren in Germany – photographs sent by her daughters. Others testified to the long and seemingly happy marriage to her husband: photographs of them as a couple in fashionable clothes, in different parts of the country, attending weddings and funerals, or celebrating Eid with family and friends. All these pictures showed them posing side by side, smiling, looking good, and sharp. In selecting these photographs and discussing them with me, she was performing her status as the first, and therefore more esteemed, wife. A ‘real’ wife, with tentacles all over the world.

Personal photographic archives are actively produced and materially sedimented through the exclusion and inclusion of photographs circulating in gift-giving relations. They can be removed and new ones can be inserted in a process of self-making elicited by the owner and his or her alliances, and as such the collections not only reflect a world of memories and past relationships, but they also allow for expressions of possible future selves. The creative and transformative capacities of the collections resonate with Barber's (2006) analysis of written archives (diaries and letters) and ‘tin-trunk texts’ as spaces of self-fashioning and windows into interpersonal relationships in a historical perspective. New identities can be performed through new assemblages, as Adiza attempted to do after facing the disavowal and pain of her husband's marriage to a second wife.

Personal collections thus allow for the telling of ‘potential histories’ (Azoulay, 2019), not so much histories that are told, or – intentionally maybe – untold, but creating potential presents and as such making one's personhood in line with core female values in Hausa communities. Showing and sharing one's photographic archive is at the same time a personal act of relating to one another and a technique of the self, performing and generating knowledge about the self. As the next section shows, exchange is part of this performance.

Exchange value and unstable collections

Zongos are highly stratified communities in which one can become a popular big man or woman in a number of ways: by belonging to a well-known wealthy family, by being successful in business and generous, by organizing big events attended by large groups of people from the community, by exposing and strengthening zumunci. Crucial to all this is the ability to display kirki, piety, and social skills. This Hausa term is commonly translated as ‘kindness, excellence, virtue’ or simply ‘doing good’ or ‘goodness’. Showing kirki is a form of moral capital and someone has kirki if they are gentle, selfless, and pious, and show ‘generosity often through overt actions at appropriate times’ as Salomone and Salomone (1993: 93) note in reference to the Hausa of northern Nigeria.

In the zongo, moral personhood or kirki is affirmed through the act of exchanging photographs. It epitomizes one's moral and cultural capital which is nurtured by social competences and a wide transnational network of kin and friends. A gifted photograph not only gives a glimpse of a memorable moment, but also makes present the person who gave it. In her research on the role of photographs in transatlantic caregiving in The Gambia, Kea refers to a ‘transatlantic visual economy’ (2017: 54), building on Poole's notion of visual economy as ‘a comprehensive organization of people, ideas, and objects’ (1997: 8 in Kea, 2017: 53). Poole (1997 in Kea, 2017: 53) differentiates between two kinds of value that are ascribed to photographs as part of such a visual economy: firstly, their indexicality, or how the image conveys a truthful representation of its subject, also called use value, and, secondly, their exchange value, ‘the value that images accrue through social processes of accumulation, possession, circulation and exchange’.

As I have illustrated above, photographs have a high exchange value in the zongos. This value is linked to the phatic labour invested in shaping the zumunci of those depicted, thereby bolstering ties within and beyond the neighbourhood and defining one's social status and reputation in the community. A personal archive discloses the transformations in one's life, not so much as a mnemonic device to remember those events through images, but as constituents and fragments of who one is today. All the albums and plastic bags that I explored were unstable material assemblages that were accumulated and modified through exchange, adding value to one's morality as a person. Collections act as interfaces that allow women to reinvent themselves, concealing pains, remembering losses but also rewriting personal histories, thereby moulding their own persona on (censored) display.

While exchange does add value to a photograph as part of a visual economy, the essence of exchange can be framed within the gendered grammar and ideologies that are dominant in zongos. In the highly Islamized zongo communities, public appearances are controlled and performed by men. Women are relegated to spaces distant from public view and their primary space of action and autonomy is the home. Assembling mixed photographic collections over time is one of the ingenious techniques that women use to accrue social and moral weight and awe.

One day I walked into Aisha's room and it looked like there had been an explosion. There were folders, bags, boxes, and envelopes everywhere, photos scattered here and there on the couch and the floor of her room; photo calendars from NGOs, little souvenirs of winning awards or outings with the women of the association she ran. She apologetically said she was trying to tidy up a bit but sighed that she really could not throw any of the photos away. Photo collections create a platform for women to engineer a – relatively – public persona in an environment with clear rules and restrictions regarding women's public roles. The very act of exchanging not only generates zumunci, consolidating affinities between women, but also in the exchange, women build fragments of their personhood, and part of this is their public personhood. Paradoxically, this takes place in the private spaces of the women's homes and rooms, where collections are kept or framed in glass, and displayed on specific occasions. The revisiting of these fragments, in the moments of viewing or exchanging photographs, not only builds personhood, but also generates affect through sensorial engagements with the material qualities of the photographs.

Haptic engagements: Hawa's collection

Alongside this visual economy of personal photographic archives, the particular material histories of the photographs as objects and the sensorial engagements with them were significant in themselves. Some parts of the albums were folded, stained, damaged, and some photographs were missing, leaving darkened silhouettes on some pages of the albums; others were marked with a cross to indicate that the person in the image had died.

The material interventions and marks of the objects’ histories where revelatory, in the sense that they hinted at specific patterns of circulation and disclosed extended gift trajectories within the zongo. Our first conversation with Hawa, for example, took place in the shady courtyard of her family home. My collaborator and I met her through a mutual friend but she was shy and at first seemed uncomfortable talking about her personal life. Hawa was a Fulani from Mali on both her paternal and maternal side and her husband was also a Fulani, from a famous and wealthy family in the zongo. As we talked and she told us the history of her two families, she began to open up a little. Sensing our genuine interest in her family biography, she went into her room and popped out proudly holding a brown envelope containing photographs (Figure 4).

The first picture she showed us was of her parents’ wedding. She held the black-and-white photograph tenderly in her hands, stroking it, lost in thought. Both of her parents had died so the photo elicited a strong affect. When she handed it to me, I was very careful about how I held it in my hands, not only because of the open and honest gaze of the posing parents, but also to respect the sharing of her loss. She asked me to take a picture of the photo. As the conversation continued, the parents lay on her knees, staring at us with a serious but friendly gaze. From time to time, Hawa touched them with her fingers, fleetingly. Suddenly, my research collaborator and I recognized one of Hawa's uncles in one of the photographs; he happened to be one of our main interlocutors on the history of the zongos. The surprise recognition and the pride it instilled in Hawa changed the entire conversation. She ran back inside and enthusiastically pulled out an old leather case stuffed with photographs, official documents (passports, ID cards) and old, stained paperwork. The stories began to flow as soon as she took the photographs out of the leather pouch. They showed her father-in-law keeping horses (Figure 5) and her husband studying in Egypt. She also showed some wedding photos of herself, posing in the various dresses she had to wear that day. Later in the conversation, she shyly revealed how her husband's second wife had taken the rest of her archive to their house outside Accra, despite Hawa's own strong affective attachment to her collections. Who gets to keep personal collections also depends on relations of power, and in Hawa's case her husband's second wife clearly overpowered her and even appropriated her personal photographs.

Showing photographs opens up affective registers that elicit tactile moments of engagement with them. In biographical work, ‘affect can be considered a moment of history in itself’ (Eng, 2014: 331) and in the interplay of showing and viewing, family, and kinship are redefined. In his seminal work on photography, Camera Lucida, Barthes and Howard (1981) emphasized the active participation of the viewer in creating the meaning of the photograph. Practices of touching and sharing, but also the viewer's intentions, produce affect and meaning. Elizabeth Edwards (2020: 99) emphasizes the materiality, or ‘thingness’ of photographs as ‘embodied and sensorially apprehended artifacts’ which are ‘constituted through co-presences of the visual image and its material and performative qualities that enable the image to function in specific ways’. It is the thingness that shapes the way in which photographs are put to work, bundling – a notion Edwards (2020: 104) borrows from Webb Keane – sensory and material affects. As photographs move from hand to hand or collection to collection, the images take on a life of their own (Campt, 2017) and the compositions or ‘types of assemblages (…) reveal meaning between different image-objects’ (Banks and Vokes, 2010: 340, italics in original).

Tina Campt (2017) refers to the affective gestures with photographs as haptic acts that pass through multiple sensory registers. The haptic involves ‘the link between touching and feeling, as well as the multiple mediations we construct to allow or prevent our access to those affective relations (…) the hands are only one conduit of their touches’ (Campt, 2017: 100). These haptic gestures, or ‘tactile eye’ (Taussig, 1991: 152), were essential parts of the material and cultural work set in motion by the photographs in Campt's work. In response to their photographic collections, research participants demonstrated an ‘everyday tactility of knowing’ (Taussig, 1991: 152) in the way they touched, embraced, and caressed their photographs. ‘The photo album is an indisputably haptic repository of re/collection’ (Campt 2017: 79). In the same vein, Pinney (2004), who studies the consumption of printed images representing gods in an Indian village, uses the term ‘corpothetics’, which is a bodily performance involving all the senses as part of the visual experience. Corpothetics is unrelated to the artist's intention but takes place between the image and the viewer, transforming both. Viewing and leafing through a personal archive involves corpothetics and takes images beyond the representational register. Images are ‘history in the making’ (Pinney 2004: 8) as we could see in the collections of Aisha, Adiza, and Hawa.

For Campt (2017: 81) too, the sensory modalities of contact are not only visual (seeing), which is related to the indexicality of the image, or physical (touch or the tactile), but also psychic (related to feeling) and ‘most counterintuitively of all, the sonic contact that I have described as a frequency that requires us to listen to as well as view images’. Campt listens to various archival collections and understands listening as linking feeling and touching. She discerns different haptic temporalities in listening to the images. The first haptic temporality is when the image was captured. Each time an archive is opened or listened to, a new haptic temporality is inscribed in the collection. Her own listening to the collections also adds a new haptic temporality (Campt, 2017: 90). It is significant that Hawa only opened her archive to us after we had shared our own personal relationship with one of her relatives who appeared in the photographs. As we listened to Hawa's collection, and as the photographs were passed on, touched, and re-photographed, we added a new haptic temporality to the collection, a temporality that rearticulated Hawa's family biography while continuing to shape it. In the circulation of photographs among affines and friends, women create new haptic temporalities in their collections that allow them to rearticulate their identities. An archive always has a permeable temporality because it also actively shapes new histories as a site of self-projection. Disclosing their collections to me added another haptic temporality, and for some of the women I became close to, this materialized in the inclusion of a photograph of me in their collections.

Conclusion: fragmented personhood and a new gendered grammar

In a highly stratified community like a zongo, there is a constant need to assert who one is in relation to others. Photographs do not constitute the kind of possession that makes someone materially rich, powerful, or influential, but as a form of soft power they bring one's historical past into the present as part of a process of making and even devising one's personhood, which in turn generates a certain kind of social power. Albums are material sedimentations of a person's accumulated past and current social connections. Sharing photographs is a crucial way of endorsing and reinforcing kinship and friendship ties, especially among women in the zongo. It is a mode of keeping-while-giving (Weiner, 1985) in that by giving a photograph one gives part of oneself as a person. Portrait photographs are most commonly exchanged, and because they cannot be detached from their original owners, they are inalienable wealth or ‘expansions of the self’ (Weiner, 1985). Keeping-while-giving them forms ‘attempts to give the fragmentary aspect of social life a wholeness that ultimately achieves the semblance of immortality, thereby adding new force to each generation’ (Weiner, 1985: 224). Sometimes albums are all that remain of extended family networks, containing memories of phantom kin in unknown distant places. Children are given or confiscate their parents’ photographs in order to know their ancestors and origins, and all the collections that I was shown contained references to ancestors and pre-migration hometowns. As they move in and out of personal collections, photographs gain power and value and are imbued with new layers of meaning. As they are touched and circulated, new temporal layers are added to the materiality of the archive. Collections are more than visual maps; they are history in the making.

Ultimately, a photograph contains different layers of oneself, and an album or a collection, some of which have swarmed out to other albums and collections, shows various fragments of who one used to be, and who one has become. The entity of the person thus implicitly includes one's expansive relationships. Personhood in this sense is distributed or ‘multiply authored’ (Strathern, 1988) as all those affiliates who are holding fragments of the person (in the form of photographs) co-define who one is and who one can become.

Living in the zongo, one usually tries to choose from the numerous personae one can display or perform, be it the persona of a mother, a wife, a seamstress, a pilgrim performing hajj, or a ‘madam’, while hiding other identities, hence bolstering and enhancing one's social weight and importance, and making oneself less vulnerable in a hostile environment.

One's personal archive and its extensions assembles all the facets of personhood. The archive condenses various fragments and endows its owner with the agency to piece them together into ‘a whole’ in its very fragmentation. Unfolding or unwrapping the album then marks a very personal and intimate moment of revelation that my interlocutors were initially wary of, while the collections are kept and stored precisely for this reason: to testify to and perform who one has become and whether one has ended up being a good mother, a ‘real’ wife or an exemplary madam who has accumulated wealth in persons and wealth in achievements, thus exemplifying zumunci. Giving and receiving photographs and showing collections are haptic moments in which personhood is performed (Behrend, 2002) and summated. Leafing through an album together with its owner then becomes an affective and haptic act of ‘existential denouement’, or existential ‘unravelling’. It is reminiscent of that moment during a Tswana funeral when the deceased's various identities are named and praised in a ‘summation of a biography that had, until now, been an inscrutable work-in-progress’ and concealed (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2001: 276).

However, unlike the final unravelling of one's fragmented personhood that takes place during the Tswana funeral ritual, in the zongo, it is essential that one's personal photographic collection remains dispersed or fragmented, even beyond death, for this is the essence of personhood in the zongo. One can only build up personhood by accumulating immortal fragments, including those of others, and by distributing one's connections within and beyond the zongo. This is continued by one's descendants and does not really converge at some final point such as a funeral. On the contrary, to remain scattered and fragmented in one's images is to become a moral person. Each moment of opening up the archive involves a momentary performance of personhood in which moral, religious, and gendered statements are made, adding a haptic temporality, sedimented in the material assemblage of the collection. In the performance of their collections, the women renegotiate gendered grammars and attempt to repair their positions. While they are almost absent from formal and oral historical accounts, and while they are invisible on the public stages of the mosque and the political events in the zongos, they create their own platforms on which to perform relations of power, loyalty, and respectability.

As such, in personal photographic collections, meanings are constructed, not just derived. One's personal archive is an articulation of past, present, and future, of here and elsewhere; it is a material performance of the various relations and fragments that a person possesses and is constituted by, as it documents and summates the multiple components of the person. The assemblages of personal photographic archives stand for the possibilities of renewed social connections and future mobility, and of redefined personhood, as they are stored and exchanged within complex webs of affective relations. Each moment of unveiling and sharing adds a new haptic temporality, and thus a new layer of meaning.

In this construction, the materiality and ‘thingness’ of the albums articulate a new gendered grammar in which women negotiate their place by making their own articulations of personhood on display. The more one features in various collections, the more one shows extended affiliations, the more one is respected as a patron, a leader, a big woman. It allows women, and to a lesser extent men, to redefine themselves as persons, as ‘real’ and moral women, wives, husbands, mothers, imams, migrants, or friends, or as morally and socially competent zongo dwellers.