all the time, within ordinary face-to-face interactions that took place in wholesale and supply offices, across retail and credit counters, at trade fairs and promotional events, and on department store selling floors. As Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton have argued, “Nuanced analyses of a range of cultural spaces—from the classroom to the hospital, the asylum to the family album, the nursery to the archive—have made it possible to understand how and why imperial power operated through the colonization of spatialized domains brought into the purview of the colonial state and its reformist agendas.”76 Commercial spaces are no different, though they may seem at first glance to be static or predictable. They, too, are always changing and animated by “the collusions and collisions” of bodies, power, and regimes—not unlike the spaces that Ballantyne and Burton describe. I therefore apply this spatial analytic to market encounters of all kinds in order to piece together the mixture of beliefs, emotions, and desires that dictated consumer exchange and persisted beyond the “end of empire.” Therefore, I define consumer politics as the everyday contests over access to goods and channels of distribution (retailing and wholesaling) as well as the regulation of consumer practices and consumer spaces by both the state and other systems of social authority and power.
To write about consumer histories in Ghana is also to write about the operation of global capitalism more broadly. My research shares the intentions of modern African business history and critical anthropological work, which has documented African businesspeople as everything from transporters to cattle suppliers, financiers to street vendors, and has shown them actively shaping local, regional, and international political economies. This research has uncovered transnational business networks from Freetown to Fouta Djallon, from Brazzaville to Paris, and in multiple routes across the Sahara that have long shaped the methods and modes of commercial exchange within and beyond the African continent.77 My analysis of similar linkages is further informed by feminist and critical race scholarship, two areas of study that have been essential to understanding the construction, circulation, and maintenance of power and inequality in Ghana. By applying these rigorous frameworks to the ways in which colonial and postcolonial consumer markets are constituted, I hope to offer new ways to think first about how gender and race are embedded in the policies and the practices of “doing business” and, second, about how the circulation of transnational capital is both a gendered and racialized experience.78 As Anna Tsing reminds us, “Rather than assume we know exactly what global capitalism is, even before it arrives, we need to find out how it operates in friction.”79 I argue that the history of consumer politics in modern Ghana provides one entry point for undertaking such a challenge.
CULLING THE CORPORATE ARCHIVE AND ANIMATING THE MARKET
My hope through this book is to offer a more interconnected vision of African consumer worlds. My aim in documenting the various social relationships that shaped the history of consumption is to not only show markets as contested spaces but also to encompass the range of experiences (excitement, hope, and determination, as well as fear, panic, and disillusion) that animated individual encounters with the market. To do so I draw on a wide range of sources, collected in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and throughout Ghana from a wide swath of both daily life and official business: government reports and correspondence, newspapers and magazines, economic and household surveys, advertising copy and images, private papers and memoirs. While each of these sources introduces its own set of problems and challenges, together they enable the book’s larger goal of putting disparate sources into conversation in order to offer a more holistic understanding of consumer politics. Nowhere is this disparate feeling, and both the problems and challenges that accompany it, more evident than with my two most important types of sources: corporate archives and oral histories.
Economic and business historians regularly rely on corporate sources to reconstruct economic pasts; I believe that corporate archives have untapped potential for reconstructing social and cultural history.80 Such history, particularly for this time and place, usually relies on the records kept by governments and religious missions—and as a result, these histories tend to focus on how people’s lives intersected with such institutions as schools, courts, and hospitals. Yet these sources often lack a sense of how Africans engaged with private industry and business; therefore, the resulting histories too often ignore African relationships with the market beyond top-down legislation. In contrast, my use of staff correspondence, managers’ circulars, and district reports provide crucial details about the role that Africans—not to mention Europeans, Indians, and Lebanese—played in the rocky terrain of West African commerce.
The contents of these corporate sources are surprisingly rich. Firms like the UAC and UTC had much to gain or lose with regard to their West African businesses, and they kept impressive records on all aspects of Ghana’s import-export trade that span both the colonial and postcolonial periods. Furthermore, some European managers wrote extensively about the lives of individual African employees on issues that extended beyond what would be considered a typical business, including family and inheritance, religion and the supernatural, and entertainment and leisure activities. One European manager even took it upon himself to produce a type of amateur ethnography on his African coworkers—unbeknownst to them.81 Other groups were included in these reports as well; the business of Indian and Syrian merchants (whose numbers had increasingly grown after the First World War) and the recruitment of Greeks as salesmen served as additional topics of inquiry.82
There is one aspect of these corporate archives that is, not surprisingly, lacking. Aside from a few responses to managers’ inquiries and the UAC’s in-house staff magazines—the Gold Coast UAC News and the Unicorn—I found very little material authored by Africans. Because most company records were written by and for European employees, I was constantly aware of the power of the corporate archive to both document and also silence African experiences. As a result, I approached the corporate archive not as a depository of facts but as a space to investigate the negotiation of power.83 A critical reading of corporate sources demanded both the unpacking of contradictions and inconsistencies in firms’ policy versus practice and an interpretation of what these moments of dissonance revealed about the development of consumer markets in Ghana more broadly. I read hundreds of districts reports, nearly all of them dry and obligatory, but when I viewed them not merely as catalogs of dutifully noted events but as active sites of contestation, I turned my focus from what was reported to how it was written. Such an analysis also demanded situating corporate sources within a broader context. To do so I drew on a number of African-authored newspapers and magazines (especially editorials), letters from readers, opinion and advice columns, and business publications like Business Weekly and the Ghana Trade Journal.
The accumulation of all this material, written both by and for Africans, is abundant and rich, but it was not sufficient. Thus, at the heart of this work are oral interviews I conducted with a wide range of men and women throughout Ghana, including former managers, wholesale and retail storekeepers, and credit customers and consumers.84 Talking with these people proved invaluable to understanding shifts in consumer practices and generated new questions about the boundaries and limitations of consumer capitalism.85 I use oral history not as a tool to “identify or extract overlying falsities to get an underlying truth” but as a method to comprehend how “Africans saw their lives, their worlds, their histories” and how they “felt about—or understood and represented” their experiences.86 Simply put, I did not use oral sources to supplement or fill in missing gaps from the corporate record. Instead I attempted to create a dialogue between corporate and oral sources to uncover the intricacies of colonial capitalism. Uncovering the ways in which such an economic system structured a variety of institutional and intimate relationships, as well as affective experiences, was central to this process.
Most interviews took place inside private homes, as well as in public spaces like stores and offices, and were informal and conversational. The average age of interviewees was sixty-eight, with the youngest being fifty-five and the eldest around ninety-five. I first located interviewees through the public relations office at Unilever Ghana in Tema. I was aware that this was not a
