link me to those who held high-level positions and would speak favorably of their experiences. While in some instances this was the case, in others I found that interviewees spoke rather freely about blatant racism and poor treatment. Through these interactions I also learned that many interviewees had been employed in various positions throughout the course of their working lives. For instance, those who had started as storekeepers or clerks in the 1940s and 1950s had become managers by the end of their careers, and this allowed them to speak from multiple perspectives on a wide range of topics and various aspects of the business. Most of these interviewees, however, were predominantly men who had received some sort of postsecondary education in Ghana or abroad.
To gain access to a larger, more diverse group of interviewees, I cast my net wider. I shared my research with practically everyone I met, including neighbors, friends, colleagues, and strangers, asking if people knew of men or women who had worked as storekeepers, credit customers, or employees of foreign firms. This method proved extremely successful—particularly in smaller towns, where I was usually connected with someone who either agreed to be interviewed or put me in contact with others. Another technique was locating interviewees through the tried-and-true snowball sampling method: after each interview, I asked interviewees if they would introduce me to others in their social network. Both of these strategies expanded the scope of the project to include not only employees of the UTC and the GNTC but also a range of people who worked with firms but were not formally employed by them.87 These methods also led me to a number of women, including one of Accra’s most infamous credit customers. Finally, I gained a deeper understanding of how people conducted business in spite of the various restrictions that limited their autonomy and under conditions that at moments made it risky to sell even a tin of milk.
Although historians have used interviews with former African staff to reconstruct corporate histories, few have investigated how local employees navigated the various colonial and postcolonial social worlds of which they were a part.88 While I did ask structured questions about firms’ practices (selling, storekeeping, advertising, relating to customers) to begin and guide conversations, I also asked more open-ended questions about interviewees’ backgrounds, education, families, and day-to-day lives. These questions varied from interview to interview based on individuals’ willingness to share and their interest in a given topic. With those who were particularly enthusiastic, I conducted follow-up interviews. I also shared materials from the corporate archive with interviewees; copies of the Unicorn, old advertising campaigns, and photographs of stores and shoppers sparked vivid memories and led us to new topics and unintended conversations about changing tastes and desires, cautionary tales about certain products, and the pleasures and dangers of consuming.
The result is a history of African consumer politics, but also—and notably—an exploration of the social relations, practices, beliefs, and sentiments responsible for that history. While Market Encounters is organized chronologically, the structure is not linear. Instead, it reads as a series of case studies; sometimes these overlap, sometimes they stand alone. Each chapter emerges from a specific historical moment and space to capture the varied interactions and encounters that animated Ghana’s commercial landscape. District wholesale offices, shops and market stalls, urban department stores, international trade fairs, and military barracks provide the backdrops for these histories. Anxious European managers, energetic storekeepers, glamorous saleswomen, frustrated consumers, and opportunistic soldiers serve as some of the book’s central characters.
I begin by placing the expansion of consumer markets at the center of the social, cultural, and political transformations that not only shaped the colonial period but also Ghana’s relationship to the global economy. I uncover transnational business networks as key sites where knowledge about Africa, African markets, and the nature of global exchange were produced by foreign trading firms to establish commercial superiority. The growth of foreign capital after the First World War required fabricating a parallel narrative about African businesspeople as untrustworthy and immoral and the African market as a space of commercial chaos and danger. Chapter 1, which focuses specifically on the relationships between foreign firms and their African employees and consumers, reveals the colonial state as not just a political and military apparatus but a commercial one that produced a specific set of social relations for its own benefit. Yet those efforts were fraught and often illusory. The superior market knowledge of Africans, the contradictions between a firm’s policy and its practice, and the dilemmas of on-the-ground interactions all demonstrated the limits of colonial capitalism, as did African counternarratives about capitalist expansion and the potential dangers of consuming, which persistently disrupted efforts by the UAC and UTC to fully control and dictate market terms.
This fundamental struggle of foreign firms—between the desire to maintain commercial authority and their reliance on African knowledge about the market—defined commercial life in the first of half of the twentieth century. However, tensions escalated during World War II; shortages and the inability of firms to implement government-imposed quotas and price controls revealed the extent of this dependency. Set in the 1940s and 1950s, chapter 2 takes a closer look at the specific strategies employed by African shopkeepers and credit customers in shaping corporate policies and the international circuits through which firms operated. My analysis of the UAC’s credit customer business, in particular, asks us to consider how preexisting ideas about racial and gender inferiority affected market relations and how these constructs were produced within the ongoing structuring of global capitalism. Through the corporate language of professionalization, we see how the market expertise of African women was refigured as deceptive and outdated, and thus how these women were placed at a distance from and at odds with modern economic development.
The book’s remaining chapters address the late 1950s through the 1970s—the decades that spanned the movement toward independence, self-rule under Kwame Nkrumah and the CPP, and control of the government by two different military regimes. The debates surrounding the planning, construction, and operation of Kingsway, one of Ghana’s largest and most famous department stores, are the backbone of chapter 3. Embedded in the politics of decolonization, this centerpiece of Accra’s shopping district demonstrated a new relationship with foreign capital and symbolized Nkrumah’s hopes for legitimizing Ghana as a newly independent nation. Owned and operated by the UAC, Kingsway was part of a larger public relations strategy prompted by decolonization. Fueled by demands from Nkrumah and Accra residents, the building of Kingsway revealed a temporary inversion of a past colonial relationship. Yet the project of postcolonial nation building and the fulfillment of consumer aspirations were often at odds. Beneath the store’s sleek exterior, modern technologies, and promises of convenience and efficiency festered generational conflict and inequalities of class and gender. Young salaried saleswomen became objects of desire and disgust, while young, educated managers found it difficult to assert their authority over older employees who refused to see a fancy education as trumping age and experience.
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the militarization of the market—namely, the efforts undertaken by military regimes to control the consumer market and define the boundaries of consumption. After the 1966 coup, the National Liberation Council (NLC) used ideologies of consumerism to attract foreign investors and the support of local businessmen who had been neglected under Nkrumah’s socialist agenda. Chapter 4 analyzes Ghana’s first International Trade Fair as part of a larger NLC refashioning project that celebrated the country’s transition to a free market capitalist economy. Through the fair, the NLC also reintroduced older ideas about wealth and accumulation considered vital for the country’s economic, political, and moral reconstruction. The NLC accused Nkrumah and the CPP of dismantling the authority of chiefs, elders, and parents and corrupting the morals of youth—especially young women. The fair thus established a new, more disciplined form of consumerism that proscribed
