to threaten the image of white superiority.83 Categories based on race, class, and ethnicity were never clear cut, and the persistence of company policies to enforce them suggests that staff may have found prescribed boundaries either too burdensome or too difficult to uphold. After all, success in the merchandise business often meant deferring to African knowledge about the market, a reality that often made top-down company directives pointless—or simply not profitable. This was one of the major reasons for the lack of consistency between and among district branches and the inability of firms to fully control the market terms.
RECONCILING POLICY AND PRACTICE
Discrepancies between policy and practice repeatedly reveal the difficulties in policing boundaries—especially those prescribed by superiors who were hundreds of miles away—as well as contradictions in the racial logic that cast Africans as inferior and in need of guidance. For some European employees, their supervisors’ expectations to be morally superior and more knowledgeable about business proved difficult to uphold and created isolation—and, consequently, additional stress. In letters to their superiors, agents often described everyday life at district branches in the 1920s and 1930s as lonely, depressing, and friendless.84 One UTC agent wrote, “Nkoko [sic] is a completely different region than Saltpond. With the exception of one Swiss I did not cultivate any friends and it will remain this way in the future.” While the letter describes differences between doing business in Nkawkaw versus Saltpond, the agent’s inability to find friends in both towns was consistent. Meaningful friendships and relationships were defined by those made with other Europeans, not Africans. This social distance, which contributed to agents’ loneliness and isolation, was shaped by prior assumptions about racial difference and a company culture that promoted and attempted to enforce such attitudes.
Yet the organization of district branches and retail stores demanded that Europeans and Africans—staff and customers alike—work in intimate quarters. Wholesale and retail stores were often quite small, and always crowded (fig. 1.3). Typically, the area behind the counter had to accommodate all the goods for sale as well as the storekeeper and his assistants. Depending on where the store was located, around four to eight people could be working behind the counter at once, fetching items, operating the register, recording purchases in account books, and attending to customers. European and African staff also traveled together on stocktaking and debt collection trips at least every two months.85 These trips lasted anywhere from one to three days and often required overnight stays. A former SAT employee described visiting a total of thirty stores in one month, the farthest being 150 miles away from the district branch. This unavoidable closeness of employees is a primary reason why early handbooks prescribing the dos and don’ts of acceptable behavior were so detailed. The interactions that happened every day offered abundant instances where “common sense rubrics of racial differentiation failed to work” and also made clear how dependent European management was on African staff.86 While some European agents attempted to strictly abide by company policies—sometimes at the expense of their mental health, as illustrated by the Saltpond agent above—others abandoned rules altogether. A look at day-to-day encounters reveals this variation and shows how other factors like individual personalities and bonds forged between staff members could shape business operations in unpredictable and unintended ways.
FIGURE 1.3. Interior of provision store, Sekondi, ca. 1912. Reproduced with kind permission of Unilever from the original at the Unilever Archives, UAC11/11/9/12/44.
Standardization of corporate policy in order to maximize profits was a goal for all firms operating on the coast. Creating consistency across district branches and retail stores was especially important during the era of acquisitions, when firms like the UAC grew in size and expanded their operations. Standardizing selling practices was the primary method firms used to centralize their business in hopes of cutting costs and increasing efficiency. But many corporate policies, such as those relating to passbooks, debt collection, and relations with African staff, proved to be far too rigid to implement on the ground. As a 1943 colonial commission of inquiry would report, most district branches had been operating as “self-contained units for decades,” with each “estimating its own requirements, and placing its own orders, and enforcing policy haphazardly.”87 Another problem was the system of commodity distribution. While firms tried to ensure that all district branches were given equal amounts of goods and sold to customers at comparable prices, this was not always the case. In other words, what happened once goods arrived at branches often depended on the personal relationships among agents, their African staff (including clerks, salesmen, and storekeepers), and credit customers. Storekeepers often reserved choice goods for favored customers, agents reduced set prices to attract more sales, and African staff supplied credit customers with goods beyond the value of their credit limits and then split the profits. A 1930 report on internal organization by the UTC’s general manager further confirmed that the autonomy of district offices was not only a UAC problem. “Everybody acts according to his own opinion and head,” he argued. “We need to have stronger organization.”88
Poor coordination across a company’s various branches and internal competition within firms also made it difficult to implement and standardize policy. For instance, responding to instructions from the UTC’s general manager to terminate passbooks in the flour and sugar trade, the agent in Nkawkaw angrily wrote, “I have already stopped all the passbooks without exception . . . whatever is decided though needs to be carried out everywhere the same . . . we need a clear uniform system.”89 Some agents may have also intentionally ignored the policy. After all, the elimination of passbooks—a system that had rested on maintaining good relations with African retailers and was facilitated by credit—was commercial self-sabotage. A refusal to follow orders suggests that on occasion agents considered loyalty to customers in their district (supplying them with necessary goods on credit) as more important than complying with company rules or creating a united front with their European colleagues. Further exposing the extent of such disorganization and the lack of systematic consistency, another UTC agent at Kumasi notified head offices of mutual price undercutting and competition among stores within the UTC and not just with outside competitors.90 Similar offenses were recorded elsewhere by the UAC. After his 1929 inspection of more than thirty stores located in and around Kumasi, D. D. Pitcher reported, “In their anxiety to obtain maximum turnover, the Agents are inclined to allow internal competition to creep in.”91 Agents employed by the same firms, as well as those subject to the same agreed-upon selling prices, frequently sold at lower rates, willfully violating minimum price agreements to attract more sales.
The experiences of individual agents also contributed to a lack of consistency. District agents living near and working closely with African staff and customers did not always agree with the main office in Accra, the head office abroad, or even with each other on best policy. On the topic of the UTC’s inability to find “good African storekeepers,” some agents believed that factors like low pay and “miserable conditions” also came into play.92 One agent blamed constant turnover not on African unreliability but on the better wages offered by the other companies. UTC storekeepers often quit to work for other firms like GBO, Holt, and the UAC, all of which were known to pay higher wages.93 Another agent revealed that “good Africans” preferred a clerk position over that of storekeeper, which was considered a risky job.94 While agents may not have outwardly disputed the racial ideologies that categorized African storekeepers as suspicious, the fact that they provided alternative reasoning for the difficulty of identifying a stable African workforce challenged blanket assumptions that all Africans should not be trusted. It also shows how attitudes toward African staff differed among agents. Thus operations at district branches varied depending on the agent in charge and his ability to comply.
The unpublished memoir of long-term UTC employee Christian Spoerri, who began his career in 1915, further demonstrates these inconsistencies and the tensions
