Une histoire politique du recensement au Ghana aux 20e et 21e siècles

This article studies population censuses in colonial and post-colonial Ghana by showing the inflections and developments that quantification tools have undergone there. The history of quantification, as shown by Emmanuel Didier in 2021, provides useful insight into the study of the transformation of society because it is consubstantial with the very foundation of society. Thus, it has long been thought that these quantification processes jointly participated in the constitution of different types of "data subjects", individuals as they are identified by means of data according to the definition given by Evelyn Ruppert in 2008. This article explores the limits within which the concept of "data subjects" applies to the postcolonial context. It pays particular attention to the need for reorganization imposed by technological developments and to the constant resistance to the colonizing power of the datafication process.