This paper will explore the contested dynamics between (representatives of) the nation-state, the local experience and non-human dimensions over and in relation to the power of water in Ghana. The focus site for this nexus is the Volta River’s flow as manipulated by and to the Akosombo hydro-electric dam. Constructed amidst post-independence fervour under President Kwame Nkrumah’s leadership, this dam created Lake Volta and resulted in a mass government-led forced resettlement of 78,000 people that vastly altered local human relationships to their water environment. The state-induced blockage of the Volta’s water for hydro-energy, as well as increased internal migration for livelihood opportunities, significantly altered local hydro-sociality as stipulated by the pre-dam Akwamu population and other communities. But water, as a somewhat inherently unpredictable material, can also undermine human assertions of control and threaten to produce unexpected outcomes.
Interrogating ideas of water as an index of power, this paper will explore human attempts to manipulate the flow and power of water, and by control over water to also manipulate people, through infrastructure. To do so, I will unpack consultations between hydro-electric and environmental technocrats and impacted community members located downstream of the Akosombo dam in the Akwamu traditional area. These consultations, as attended in 2016 and 2017 as part of broader ethnographic research, explored the potential for humans to re-instate ‘nature’ through dam infrastructure manipulation and considered whether to re-establish pre-dam conditions of flow along the Volta River. Conversely, the consultations also considered the threat to humans by this very ‘nature’ due to water’s unpredictable power to overrule dam infrastructure through overflow, thus making humans vulnerable by the same means through which they seek to control water. By exploring the potentials and limitations of human manipulation to allow flow, to block and to control water’s power through infrastructure, I seek to unpack hydro-social tensions between national and local human actors and to ponder where the ultimate (hydro-)power rests.