coup in 1972 and the violence undertaken to instill market discipline serve as the backdrop of chapter 5. Under dire economic conditions and commodity shortages, the National Redemption Council led by Acheampong seized power and aimed to legitimize their rule through a policy of state-guaranteed economic stabilization. Strict regulations (reminiscent of colonial market controls) required military and police involvement in all facets of the market. Via oral histories of this market scarcity, we reconstruct the experiences of those targeted by volunteer price inspectors and government-appointed antihoarding squads. I show how the criminalization of those buying and selling outside state-regulated guidelines shaped people’s relationship with goods and the ways in which they perceived themselves as consumers.
In sum, the book’s exploration of consumer politics in modern Ghana complicates the old “European exploitation versus African resistance” binary and disrupts representations of Africans as merely laborers or producers for consumers elsewhere. The analytical shift from consumer culture to consumer politics also allows us to account for how issues like gender and racial inequalities are implicated in—and act as driving forces behind—commercial and business networks that span the globe. By emphasizing the centrality of people and human relationships to Ghana’s economic past, Market Encounters introduces a radical rethinking of consumption studies from an African-centered perspective. Such a vantage point enhances our understanding of colonial capitalism in all of its intricacies, legacies, and contradictions.
1
A Door “Wide Open”
Imagining Gold Coast Markets
IN APRIL 1915, the African Mail, a weekly British trade publication, featured an editorial titled “Africa to the Fore.” Emphasizing the British public’s increasing knowledge about the continent, the article declared that “there has never been a period in the history of West Africa when she has been so much in the public eye. The ‘man in the street’ [is] rapidly becoming familiar with place names which a few months ago were undreamt of.” While the author of the editorial, Edmund D. Morel, was of course referring to World War I and events like the invasion of Germany’s West African colonies, which had made headlines around the globe, the piece was concerned with much more than the success of the Allied troops. Specifically addressing British “men of business,” Morel wrote, “The war is providing new opportunities, but are we taking them? Hardware, machinery, cycles, apparel, perfumery, drugs and medicines, disinfectants, agricultural implements, foodstuffs, motors, constructional buildings, all of these things find a ready and constantly expanding sale . . . the manufacturers of this country should be preparing their campaign . . . but the attack must be made now.” His conclusion was simple: “the door of Africa is lying wide open.”1 Morel’s use of “to attack” as a way to discuss economic expansion is particularly telling evidence of the imbrication of commerce and militarism.
This chapter situates Morel’s call to commercial action within the larger realm of the West African import-export trade after the First World War and, in particular, the increasing power of large European firms to shape that trade. We know that, from the late nineteenth century onward, firms forged relationships with colonial governments throughout Africa to monopolize markets and in the process seized power once shared with African businesspeople. But what we have not explored is how these efforts to consolidate and organize trade actually played out on the ground.2 Imperial thinking about the fundamental inferiority of nonwhite subjects influenced how firms imagined and encountered the Gold Coast market, but those ideas were also shaped by day-to-day business interactions with firms’ African staff and customers themselves. This argument has far-reaching implications for rethinking the expansion of consumer capitalism in Ghana. We will see that the banal places of business—company offices, wholesale stores, and retail shops—became spaces where ideas about race, cultural difference, and development were constructed, reinforced, and institutionalized through corporate policy. By drawing on inspection reports, monthly circulars, and correspondence between firms’ headquarters in Europe, main offices in the Gold Coast, and district branches throughout the colony, I demonstrate that “doing business” was itself a process where fictions about the untapped African market and the inability of Africans to control its potential were created by foreign firms to justify their financial and cultural intrusions.3
Yet this process of imagining was never unidirectional. The power of these European firms, just like the colonial governments they supported, is obvious to us; it is easy to see African staff and consumers as merely on the receiving end of this power. And indeed, most of what we know about African consumer history is about how firms, manufacturers, and advertisers envisioned African markets and imposed their own commercial agendas. Here we will consider imagining as a reciprocal rather than a one-sided process; through oral histories, I will show how African staff and consumers constructed their own counterfictions about firms that emerged from local beliefs, including those about the circulation of wealth and proper accumulation. For instance, the United Africa Company was often associated with bad magic and witchcraft; such beliefs reflected popular anxieties about the power of foreign capital, but also the reality that Africans after World War I increasingly lost control over market terms. These rich criticisms of the practices and policies of foreign firms further demonstrate that African men and women were, and are, far from passive recipients of global economic change. Links made between firms and witchcraft, typically expressed through humorous tropes and cautionary tales, were acute analyses of the tendencies of capital to push excessive growth and foster fetishism in consumers. The resilience of these stories, which still circulate in historical memory, reveal the importance of theorizing about the global economy “from the south” to disrupt the common sense assumptions that underlie fictive visions of how capitalism works.
I will first analyze the expansion of consumer markets in the Gold Coast at the turn of the nineteenth century and then consider how everyday commercial interactions between firms’ directors and district agents and African staff and customers shaped this process. While this chapter focuses mainly on the activities of the United Africa Company and Union Trading Company before the Second World War, I will also draw on personal memoirs, commercial guides, and photographs and recollections by the staff from other firms such as G. B. Ollivant and John Holt & Company. My focus on the experiences of European management and staff is not to overshadow the contributions of African businesspeople, who will become central to our story in chapter 2, but to explore the role of this professional managerial class of men in shaping and mediating capitalist relations in the colonies. These foreign firms established power, at least in part, by fabricating ideas about Africa and Africans as inherently untrustworthy and immoral.4 Discrepancies between policy and practice within firms, as well as African staff members’ own narratives about capitalist expansion, worked to counter these misconceptions, however. As historian Frederick Cooper has argued, “the story of European firms in West Africa is neither a saga of triumph of superior organization nor a tale of every-growing monsters sweeping the innocent before them.”5 The tension between the available language used by European managers to describe and define Africa and the quotidian operations of the merchandise business that proved their conceptions otherwise offers a more nuanced picture of how colonial capitalism operated. Above all, the relationship between European management and African staff and consumers reveals imperialism as not only a political and military apparatus but also as a commercial one both created and contested by the daily—and inseparable—interactions of culture and commerce.
SETTING THE COMMERCIAL SCENE
Until about the 1880s, Africa’s commercial trade with Europeans was confined to a few coastal enclaves, and the import-export business was conducted in cooperation with African merchants. While much of this trade had been administered through state-chartered firms like the Royal African Company (established in 1672), the eighteenth century saw the rise of individual private
