Doing politics on walls and doors: a sociolinguistic analysis of graffiti in Legon (Ghana).

Abstract

Graffiti act as a medium through which political (including socio-political unmentionables are mentioned without the writer attracting any political or social sanctions. Graffiti in Legon (Ghana) have anonymous authors. Through graffiti, people of lower social/political status (students) express their opinions on political actors (people holding public office) and political decision making processes. They also express their anger and frustration about Ghana's political situation. Sequentially, the graffiti consist of stimuli followed by responses. They could therefore be said to constitute discourses with participants taking turns. Syntactically, the sentences are often short, and are of a simple sentence type. Graffiti exhibit all the properties of interaction - turn-taking, repair, opening and closing, adjacency pairs, indirectness, among other features.