commercial men arriving in Africa to work for large firms, and many of these men adopted imperial rhetoric to describe and make sense of their experiences.47 But as we shall see, profit making in the Gold Coast merchandise business required other types of myths and stories.
CONSTRUCTING A COMMERCIAL BATTLEFIELD
In his impressive 832-page history of merchant capital in West Africa, historian D. K. Fieldhouse characterizes the West African economy, prior to 1939, as a “commercial jungle.” Because it was geared to the international commodity market, which was highly speculative, Fieldhouse argues that “its domestic market fluctuated far more erratically than that of industrialized countries.” 48 The initial absence of trade barriers also led to market crowding and intense competition among British, French, German, Swiss, and occasionally US companies. His description of West Africa as a wild and dangerous place, economically speaking, further captures the era of acquisitions and company mergers after the First World War. According to Fieldhouse, economic conditions in West Africa resembled Thomas Hobbes’s definition of the state of nature: “the life of most firms proved to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” 49 It is unclear if Fieldhouse’s analysis of the West African market as a “jungle” comes from his own perceptions or was gleaned from his research in corporate archives, mainly those of the UAC; regardless, the imperialist connotations of his language are striking.
Among European directors, agents, and staff of foreign firms, the Gold Coast market was relentlessly represented as a place of uncertainty, opposition, and conflict. At their extreme, the firms’ records and correspondence compared doing business in Africa to going to war, not unlike the African Mail editorial that opened this chapter. Especially during times of heightened competition, firms’ employees likened the African market to a battlefield, a place to attack and conquer; directors and general managers equated their European staff with troops in combat.50 War rhetoric was used to encourage district agents to fight like soldiers on the firm’s behalf and thus inspire a sense of duty and allegiance to the firm.51 Less clear is where this war imagery situated Africans; sometimes they seem to be considered subjects—far from equal, but hopefully loyal—in a larger fight between competing firms, and at other times they are implied as potential enemies or as prizes to be “won.”52
Battlefield and market comparisons further constructed the Gold Coast itself as a place of danger, fear, and disease. Descriptions of physical exhaustion and poor health are constant in correspondence between district branches and headquarters. In a 1923 letter, an agent at Saltpond went as far as to describe the Gold Coast as the “land of death” and European employees as its “victims.”53 While malaria, yellow fever, and other illnesses did affect a number of staff in the years before the regular use of quinine (around 1906), the idea that doing business in West Africa was dangerous, and could literally kill, was constructed and reinforced through letters from younger staff long after.54 For instance, the UTC published death tolls among its staff in official company histories meant for European readership.55 The image of Africa as the “White Man’s Grave,” which referred to the high mortality rates of early white missionaries and colonists, was evoked frequently to explain poor business conditions and to request a leave back to Europe.56 As other scholars have demonstrated, narratives that dramatized the physical vulnerability of Europeans in the colonies were not limited to Africa. A similar phenomenon in nostalgic narratives about the British-ruled Raj also constructed India as a place of death.57 While it is difficult to measure the extent to which fears about life in the tropics affected firms’ staff physically and mentally, the fact that employees wrote about such concerns with regularity in their letters home suggests they either believed sincerely in such dangers or had a stake in continuing this vision of the land around them.58
If West Africa was figured as a place of potential death and the market as a place of combat, how did these representations influence day-to-day business relations? Within European business circles there was widespread suspicion of Africans in general, and these attitudes manifested themselves in firms’ policies. Strict credit terms, for example, were premised on the idea that Africans were inherently dishonest; in its 1909 instruction manual the BMTC advised its agents that credit to Africans was to be given sparingly, citing “the Negro’s unreliable character and his natural bent for the untruth and fraud.” According to the manual, agents were to exercise caution in all business dealings with Africans; “bad characteristics” including carelessness, deceit, incompetence, and immorality were named as prime examples.59 Not much had changed in these attitudes thirty years later. In a 1936 report to one of the UAC’s managing directors, D. D. Pitcher advised agents to more carefully control and manage the issuing of credit. The accumulation of large debts was due in part to lack of self-restraint and ease of temptation. Rather than account for poor economic conditions or call into question the firms rigid credit terms, Pitcher blamed the accumulation of large debts on “the African” who “so invariably cannot resist.” 60 These accusations, produced three decades apart, reveal the persistence of such beliefs among firms—particularly in crafting guidelines for their European staff.
This general mistrust of Africans was echoed by branch agents, especially in letters to their superiors concerning the hiring and supervising of African staff. In response to queries about his inability to find an African storekeeper, one UTC agent from Akuse complained that identifying good Africans in his district required time and patience because most were “not honest.” 61 He therefore explained the need to scrupulously evaluate the character, outlook, background, and family of potential candidates. By deploying familiar tropes about Africans as fundamentally suspect, the Akuse agent was able to avoid accountability, if only temporarily, for what may have been his own ineptitude in recruiting and retaining local staff. The agent’s fear of being terminated was a legitimate concern; other firms, like GBO, considered similar instances as grounds for dismissal. For example, in a series of letters concerning a European agent at Tarkwa, his superiors concluded that the agent’s failure to “bring African storekeepers into line” called for his replacement by “a much stronger type of man.” 62 The cumulative effect of all of these laments, instructions, and insinuations was to pathologize the behavior of Africans. As with endless other instances of colonial thinking, these Europeans rarely seemed to acknowledge that they were making vast generalizations about an entire country’s people, often on the basis of a few brief encounters.63
Such attitudes further shaped the practice of shopkeeping. Product display and surveillance policies were of particular concern. While the UTC reminded its European storekeepers in a 1939 instruction manual to “never forget that the black trader, the modest worker or the small bushman in front of the counter are all his customers bringing in earnings/income,” the firm also emphasized the need to maintain “strict control” of the staff and of African customers inside a store. The manual is worth quoting at length:
The European shopkeeper is not allowed to leave the shop without calling another European as a replacement . . . blind corners in the shop have to be eliminated because black employees or customers could get into mischief. We need to pay attention that there are no goods piled up that would impede the view over the store. The supervision of the black staff is [also] very important. This strict control is necessary because of these people’s tendency towards unjust good. . . . It is important never to turn against the counter and to always watch closely so that no goods disappear whilst helping customers.64
Even though firms later noted that most theft was by customers, not employees, and occurred at the sales counter, it was not uncommon for European agents and storekeepers to search African employees’ pockets at the end of each day. In some instances, African staff were required to walk by supervisors with “reversed pockets” after every shift before heading home. African clerks and shop assistants were also forbidden from handling a customer’s money and from handing over the items purchased. Such guidelines suggested that tills or cash registers were to be operated by Europeans only. African staff that acted otherwise were subject to fines or dismissal. Thus, the organization of
