with shoppers and relations with staff was saturated in racial mistrust. With such constant reminders that European staff must proceed with caution, shopkeeping entailed more than just selling goods; firms also constructed it as a defensive position.
Relations with African women, both professional and personal, were also a topic of official policy, and the most vivid demonstration of firms’ attempts to enforce racial separation between their white staff and local communities. As a former UTC employee hired in the 1960s, Arthur Wettstein explains that the distance between African and European employees was actively promoted by the UTC’s “policy of prudence.” He remembers, “It was not without purpose that prior to departure from the Head Office in Basel a voluminous document on do’s and don’ts was handed to every candidate, which among other prominent rules contained a prohibition of intense contact with African women on threat of dismissal.” 65 Such efforts to restrict intimate relations between Europeans and Africans, particularly African women, confirms that company employees were not adhering to the rules.66 As former SAT manager Hans Rudolf Roth recalled, many of his coworkers in Kumasi had African girlfriends, including his supervisor who lived in town with his Swiss wife. While the “intense contact” rule did not prevent sexual relationships, it did deter many European employees from legally marrying their African girlfriends and from fulfilling obligations to children from these relationships.67 Efforts to enforce rules on staffs’ private and sexual lives reveal the measures firms undertook to police racial boundaries in the name of commerce. Such top-down policies suggest that company leaders believed interracial unions—even when their relationships were publicly recognized and legitimated through marriage—could threaten a staff members’ loyalty, could tarnish a firm’s reputation, and were bad for business overall.
Another important aspect of company policy, and another effort to maintain divisions, was the expectation that European employees were there to set an example for Africans. For instance, Wettstein remembers, “We often heard that ‘we are a Christian enterprise’ and were obviously expected to act accordingly in private and business life.” 68 Based on notions that African men and women lacked the capacity to conduct business without European guidance, the UTC claimed that, without its leadership, business would “end in chaos.” 69 Modeling proper behavior could mean everything from upholding company policies to demonstrating cleanliness and proper sartorial practices.70 A 1931 circular to all UTC district agents justified the importance of these tasks as necessary to “encourage further reflection, and initiative and that also teaches independence.”71 For the UTC, upholding Christian values, hard work, self-discipline, and frugality through moral education defined commercial relations with Africans long after its formal ties with the BMS were severed. As Stephan Miescher has shown, Basel missionaries expected converts to live according to the Gemeindeordnung, a set of rules that intervened in every aspect of daily life including gender relations, living arrangements, and time management and “made conscious efforts to reshape African personhood.”72 Although less overtly religious, the UAC also considered itself a model for proper selling, through a responsibility for upholding retail standards and teaching Africans the correct way to do business. Corporate policy continued to position commerce as a civilizing force and the market as a space that held transformative power. It is no accident that African men and women would grow increasingly suspicious of its operation and effects.
Not all Africans were considered equally dishonest or untrustworthy. Correspondence with headquarters back in Europe reveals an ongoing quest by agents for good and truthful staff—particularly shopkeepers. In the process, firms created ethnic hierarchies based on what groups proved easiest to manage. According to the UTC, the Kwawu were considered the most dependable.73 Originally itinerant traders from a region about one hundred miles from the coast (on Asante’s eastern border), the Kwawu had by the 1920s settled in prosperous cocoa towns and also based themselves, often temporarily, in commercial cities along the coast.74 In a 1927 general report the UTC agent at Saltpond described good storekeepers in the Fante districts, located along the coast, as “rare as gold!”75 Three years later, another agent in Saltpond offered his own reasoning to explain the storekeeper shortage. He claimed that Fantes did not understand proper store management or the importance of cleanliness. “These people are very stubborn,” he argued, “which is not the case with the Kwahus or Asante.”76 In an earlier, private letter an agent in Kumasi reported just the opposite, however, asserting that the Asante made bad storekeepers because they were “obsessed with money and profit” and his preference was for “Fante people.”77 Through the hiring process, agents evoked and reinforced ethnic stereotypes, somewhat arbitrarily, to describe and categorize African ability. Church membership was also used to categorize potential hires, and agents made sharp distinctions between Africans belonging to the various missionary societies. Certainly the UTC preferred to hire Christian converts associated with the Basel Mission, but agents also considered those who were part of the Wesleyan Church acceptable and indeed much preferred over Catholics.78
UAC employees’ relations with Greek staff were also a point of contention. In 1933, the company began recruiting employees from poor areas of Greece to fill what they described as the “intermediate positions between Europeans and African staff” similar to those of Lebanese businessmen.79 Jobs for Greeks, however, were specially classified as “salaried salesmen” positions. While Greeks were never labeled as untrustworthy or dishonest, as African staff were, company directors argued that “differences in background, racial characteristics, and temperament” made them a problem for senior management.80 Such differences were used to explain difficulties with Greek staff and to instruct agents on how best to manage them. That Greek staff were considered lower class, and not white, contributed to what company directors described as their “excitable and sensitive” character.81 Conflicts with management may have instead stemmed from frustration and anger felt by Greek staff who saw themselves as equal to and just as capable as their British employers or who sought distance from any association with those Lebanese and Africans who also held “intermediate positions.”
It should be noted that the character of non-Africans, including other Europeans, was also a topic of concern among company executives and management. Responding to a 1928 letter of inquiry into an incident that occurred at his previous post, a UTC agent at Nkawkaw blamed problems associated with his twenty-nine-year-old Swiss wife’s smoking, drinking, and late nights out on her interactions with British women whom he defined as “bad friends.” He explained to the regional office that “in general British women are not the right friends for our women.”82 The statement suggests that his wife’s nightly antics, details that were never fully disclosed, may have been considered grounds for termination. He begged, “I swear that the things that happened at Saltpond will not happen here. . . . You can trust me, I will live an orderly family life based on Christian norms with my wife.” According to the agent, the “British ladies” in question had disrupted his Swiss wife’s moral compass. The agent’s inability to manage his wife’s behavior must have been amusing to the African staff, but most of all it called into question his capacity to manage a district branch and his role as an authority figure. Certainly the head office was concerned with upholding the firm’s reputation, but the poor behavior of the agent’s wife had larger implications. It troubled notions about white superiority and the sanctity of white womanhood—ideas on which the UTC’s business, and colonial race relations more broadly, rested.
As is recorded in correspondence between headquarters in Europe, main offices, and district branches, “doing business” not only drew on preexisting attitudes about Africa and Africans but was itself an act of knowledge production. European agents and staff in the Gold Coast constructed racial hierarchies and cultural differences between themselves and African staff and customers through their daily work. Yet they also had to contend with corporate policies handed down by headquarters. These directives, printed in staff manuals and instructional guides, were just as much about the imaginings and fears projected by senior management back in Europe. Moreover, as Ann Stoler reminds us, racist ideology and a preoccupation with white prestige were not only statements about Africans but also directives
