of merchandise when they arrived. These laborers were also responsible for checking for breakage and theft and rounding up additional workers when big shipments came in. Nonsalaried staff included other people like the wholesale keeper’s apprentice (who was often a relative) and the truck driver’s partner. Based on other reports, salaried staff could also include a day and night watchman and a few salesmen attached to the branch; these sales positions were often filled temporarily by existing African clerks, during the slow selling months, or by others, like young men from Greece, recruited specifically for this purpose. The main tasks of salesmen included attracting new credit customers, converting those who worked for competitors, and promoting the use and sale of new products.
All district branches, and thus all district agents, were under the administration of a general manager in the firm’s main office, typically located in Accra.38 The general manager was responsible for overseeing operations throughout the entire colony and directly answered to a firms’ board of directors, who were based at its headquarters abroad. A district agent was charged with overseeing all wholesale activities, managing the company-owned retail stores, stocktaking, and debt collection. In almost all cases district agent and other supervisory positions were held by European men; it was not until the 1930s that these managerial types of jobs were opened to a selected few Africans, and even then transition was slow and varied from firm to firm.39 Both Europeans and Africans filled staff or clerk positions, but this depended on a branch’s location. The UAC used clerk as an umbrella term that could include a bookkeeper, a cashier, a typist, and anyone in charge of debit notes and credit accounts. Monthly salaries were varied based on a pay grade or a company’s compensation system based on a worker’s experience, performance evaluations, and length of service. Company-owned retail stores also followed a hierarchy based on race. One European storekeeper and a few African assistants usually ran the stores in larger towns, while firms entrusted African storekeepers to oversee entire stores in smaller towns, though—unlike European staff members—most African staff members, including clerks, had to be secured by a bond. The UTC, for instance, issued contracts that required Africans holding positions “where there was a possibility of theft and fraud” to pay a cash deposit as a form of security or insurance. Even though they did not receive salaries, company credit customers were also required to provide a deposit before being issued a company passbook, a paper book used to record transactions on a deposit account. The terms of these agreements varied considerably, and as I will show in chapter 2, both company storekeepers and credit customers actively evaded oversight by European agents.
The primary sites of contact between European staff and African staff and customers were district branches (wholesale stores) and company-owned retail stores. Upon entering a typical early twentieth-century wholesale or retail store, contemporary observers would immediately be struck by the organization, the variety of goods on display, and the heavy wooden counter that separated the customer from the storekeeper and his assistants (fig. 1.2). With few exceptions, most goods were kept behind the counter and sold for set prices that could not be negotiated. Almost any and every type of commodity could be bought in these stores. Felt hats, metal pots and buckets, biscuits, oil lamps, a variety of liquor and tinned provisions, cloth, canvas shoes and leather boots, trunks, and umbrellas were stacked high on shelves behind the storekeeper. Bicycles, buckets, and lanterns hung from hooks attached to beams or railings that crisscrossed the ceiling. More expensive items including watches, sewing machines, drugs, perfumes, and silk heads-carves were displayed in locked glass cases. How a storekeeper displayed an item was often more important than the item itself; glass protected an item from dust and dirt, but also added to the overall prestige of a commodity and the store that sold it.40 In his urgent request for a “huge vitrine,” for instance, a UTC agent at Akuse reported to the head office that items like “shirts, pajamas and trousers are only bought when they are properly displayed”—that is, behind glass.41 Except for a cash register or the storekeeper’s credit account book, store counters were to be kept bare. To create even more of a barrier between buyer and seller, some firms installed tall metal gates that sat on top of sales counters. These partitions were used to prevent theft, but also to create a certain type of commercial order that made distinctions between the role of the storekeeper and that of the customer.
FIGURE 1.2. Interior of provision store, Accra, May 1907. Reproduced with kind permission of Unilever from the original at the Unilever Archives, UAC/1/11/9/10/17.
Most district branches, and some larger retail stores, were also places of residence: the first floor consisted of the warehouse, store, and offices, and the second floor was typically reserved for living quarters. While the district agent and senior staff could occupy a private corner of the building or live off-site in a bungalow (usually in the European part of town), junior staff shared accommodations. More than just places of business, district branches were often where European staff slept, ate, and socialized, though all the domestic labor, including cooking, cleaning, and grounds keeping, was done by African staff. In some cases a sole European staff member was assigned to an “outstation”—a sub-branch or store located outside the major towns and cities; miles away from the coast, he often lived alone.
One of the major differences between this group of European men who filled agent and staff positions and managed the operations of district branches and stores, versus those who came before them, was the amount of time spent in the Gold Coast. In striking contrast to the past generations of European men who stayed for long periods of time—some who even settled permanently in coastal towns, married African women, and raised children—this newer group worked on short, renewable, two-year contracts.42 It was commonly held that two years was the minimum time required for “a man to get used to his job.” 43 Indeed, some men did stay on twenty to thirty uninterrupted years, without periodic leaves to Europe, and they built long careers, but by the early twentieth century these Old Coasters, as they were known, would grow to be the exception. Besides senior management, who presumably served multiple contracts working their way up to such positions, most European staff were unmarried men in their early twenties. UAC directors preferred men around the age of twenty-two and while they allowed youth “who appeared to have a matured physique and mentality at an earlier age,” they refused to hire men over the age of twenty-six.44 Initially, firms did not generally allow staff to bring their wives or families from Europe, but with special permission, European wives of staff often worked alongside their husbands. Some even gained “manageress” titles and kept stores in their husbands’ absence or independently. This, was not common practice however, as most men sent to the Gold Coast were young and single.
By the time this new generation of men entered the commercial scene, images of Africa as wild, dangerous, and primitive were well established. The first internationally circulated commercial guide, the Red Book of West Africa (1920), echoed nineteenth-century pseudoscientific racist tropes that upheld ideals of white supremacy and were used to justify European imperial expansion. Belief in the “white man’s burden,” the idea that it was the moral duty of white men to civilize and rule black and brown people, was also upheld in European commercial circles. Since the nineteenth century, European thinkers and economists positioned the consumption of goods as a key attribute of a “civilized” society. Lack of this desire in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, they argued, was a sign of these societies as primitive and backward.45 Employees of predecessor firms, like F. & A. Swanzy, for instance, were celebrated in Europe as “white pioneers” who “laid the foundations of civilization” through commerce. According to the Red Book, it was commercial men—not explorers, travelers, or missionaries—who had tamed “one of the most appalling territories in the world,” described in detail as the “headquarters of the slave trade, where death in innumerable ways menaced the white man, and fierce tribes exemplified the lowest forms of savagery and horror indescribable.” 46 Such images not only bolstered imperial expansion but positioned the existence of
