some older firms, including John Holt & Company, outlasted this process, most did not. Independent African businessmen suffered most, however; African import-export businesses did not completely disappear, but many struggled to compete with the emergence of these large conglomerates. Operating with less capital, African-owned firms were more vulnerable to rapid changes in market fluctuations and could not match the capabilities of larger firms to import goods in large quantities at once. Combined with colonial policy that favored European business, these changes increasingly pushed African merchants “out to the margins in the system they had helped to create.” Specifically, they were “denied access to credit, price-fixing agreements, shipping rebates, and others sorts of concessions which Europeans enjoyed.”24 Additionally, there was fierce competition with Lebanese and Syrian businessmen, whose numbers grew steadily after the war. The Gold Coast government categorized Lebanese and Syrians as a single group, and commercial records often used the terms interchangeably. Thus, in West Africa, the terms Syrian and Lebanese encompassed both groups as well as other Eastern Mediterranean migrants.25 Commercial competition was further fueled by European firms that preferred to do business with these—slightly less foreign seeming—Lebanese businessmen over Africans. While historians have demonstrated how shrewd business strategies aided the success of Lebanese trading families, proximity to whiteness was also an important factor in their growing success as a new group of commercial middlemen operating between firms and African retailers and customers.26
By 1930, three large firms prevailed: the United Africa Company (UAC), the Union Trading Company (UTC), and the Compagnie Française de l’Afrique Occidentale (CFAO).27 In the Gold Coast, the main business activities of these commercial giants included the purchase, packaging, and export of raw materials (mainly cocoa) from producers and the importation, distribution, and sales of manufactured goods to consumers. All of these firms also operated shipping lines and owned large fleets of vehicles for delivery. Given that most manufacturers in Britain, Europe, and the United States did not build factories or open offices of their own, the services provided by large firms—shipping, distribution, sales, and promotion—were essential to reaching African markets. The commercial networks of these large firms were vast, comparable in size and importance to the administrative system operated by the colonial government, and as such a firm’s district agent in a single area often held more influence than the colonial district officer in charge. Timothy Burke refers to large firms like the UAC as “new modern monopoly firms” and argues that they became central to the operation and structure of colonial capitalism.28
Out of the three major firms that came to dominate the West African commercial scene, the UAC was the largest and most powerful. Known as the West African trading arm of the Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever, the UAC was established in 1929 through a series of mergers and the acquisition of a number of other firms, some of which had dated back to the seventeenth century. Among the most important were the Royal Niger Company and the African & Eastern Trade Corporation, the latter an amalgamation of a number of firms (F. & A. Swanzy, Miller Brothers, and the African Association). Through the process of amalgamation, the UAC would inherit more than twelve thousand retail stores, fifty-eight wholesale stores, and thousands of credit customer accounts.29 By the mid-1930s the UAC also purchased G. B. Ollivant (GBO) and the Swiss African Trading Company (SAT), yet these firms were allowed to retain their original company names, trademarks, and network of stores. By 1940 it also acquired the CFAO (a major competitor in French West Africa) and the German firm of G. Gottschalck. African customers often perceived of GBO and the SAT as separate from the UAC.30 While the UAC had business interests in Morocco, in almost every country along the West African coast from Senegal to Angola, in the east and south from Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania to Zambia and Zimbabwe, the bulk of its assets remained in Nigeria and the Gold Coast. Although its parent company Unilever was formed in part by Dutch investment, the UAC’s headquarters remained in London; its directors, as well as most of its management and staff in the Gold Coast, were British.31
In the Gold Coast the UAC’s major competitor was the UTC. While the structure of the UTC’s merchandise business was similar to that of the UAC, the history of its formation as a “Christian enterprise” was quite different. First registered in Basel in 1859 under its German name Missions-Handlungs-Gesellschaft Basel, the Basel Mission Trading Company (BMTC) was originally part of the Basel Mission Society (BMS)—a pietistic organization from Switzerland with strong ties to southern Germany. By 1900 the BMS recorded over eleven mission stations throughout the Gold Coast with about seventeen thousand members. Profits from the BMTC were intended to finance the activities of the mission society, and BMTC stores were to provide missionaries with a regular supply of goods from Europe. From its inception, the BMTC was used by the BMS as an “instrument in transmitting their ethic and practices of work to their converts.”32 Through the teaching of “fair trading practices,” missionaries believed that qualities like self-discipline, hard work, and thriftiness could be cultivated. During the First World War, the British government regarded the company as “enemy property” and confiscated the BMTC due to the company’s high number of German personnel; the government deported the BMTC’s European staff. After a long legal battle, however, the company was awarded ₤250,000 and was allowed to reenter the Gold Coast in 1928 under its new name—the Union Trading Company.33 While the UTC legally decoupled itself from the BMS after the war, the firm still expected its staff members to uphold and regularly practice Christian values through their work. The correlation between Christianity and commerce was central to the UTC’s operations in the Gold Coast and, as others have shown, integral to the way in which consumer capitalism developed in other African colonies.34
PLACES OF BUSINESS AND PROFILES
Before examining places of business and the people who embodied them, let us first consider how channels of commodity distribution in the Gold Coast were structured.35 Here I focus mainly on the merchandise side of business or the activities involved in the purchase and resale of manufactured goods rather than the produce side or the activities involved in cocoa buying and export. All imported goods—everything from farm equipment and toiletries to leather boots and automobiles—arrived via steamship at one of several ports spread along the coast. After its completion in 1928, the deepwater port at Takoradi would facilitate most of this traffic. Merchandise was received on-site by a firm’s agent, and a small army of African port workers divided it up and loaded it into trucks that transported it to district branches run by district agents or managers (the two titles were often used interchangeably). Each district branch acted as the main wholesale store for a region. Branches were typically located in highly populated coastal cities or in towns situated near busy transportation links. For the UAC these originally included branches in the cities of Aboso, Accra, Bekwai, Cape Coast, Koforidua, Konongo, Kumasi, Nkawkaw, Nsawam, Obuasi, Saltpond, Sekondi, Suhum, and Tarkwa.36 At each district branch goods were further divided and were sent either to company-owned retail stores or sold to company credit customers. District branches responsible for overseeing larger regions, like the one at Kumasi, also had to supply various sub-branches. Both company credit customers and retail storekeepers then sold to three constituencies: independent storekeepers, petty traders, and individual consumers (meaning anyone who bought an item for personal consumption rather than to resell it). The petty traders and independent storekeepers, in turn, sold their goods to the same constituency of “end-use” consumers.37
While branches located in coastal towns typically experienced a steady flow of customers, the pace of business at inland branches was dominated by the cocoa-growing season. Because the main cocoa harvest marketed from mid-October to mid-February, sales of goods peaked between October and December; the number of staff members thus fluctuated depending on a branch’s location and the time of year. In a detailed account of daily tasks and staff relations in a “typical cocoa town,” a European agent employed by John Holt & Company listed a total of nine permanent or salaried staff, as well as a number of other nonsalaried workers. Salaried staff positions included a bookkeeper, a main shop clerk, a wholesale shopkeeper, a cashier, a debt note clerk, an assistant debt note clerk, a statistics clerk, a truck driver, and a typist. The agent also included two salaried
