went to a store in Accra. I saw four cases of beer behind the counter and two on the counter. I presumed they had been sold, and I asked the European in charge for two cases. He told me he had no beer. I asked him, ‘Why is it that there are four cases of beer behind the counter and yet you say there is none for sale?’ He said I should not trouble him.”23 What angered consumers was not only that employees of trading firms and their “favorites” reaped high profits by increasing the price of commodities in short supply, but that their activities also determined who had the right to buy.
While the commission recommended that colony-wide fixed prices or price controls on scarce goods, although difficult to enforce, could alleviate high costs, it considered unfair allocations and distribution by firms through “parasitic middlemen”—those petty and private traders described by witnesses—a larger problem. At the same time, however, it recognized that petty traders or “keepers of small stores, market traders, and hawkers” were absolutely essential to consumer markets: “The petty trader plays a very important part in the distribution of goods to the actual consumer . . . he sells in units within the spending power of the poorest members of the community and reaches the smallest villages in the bush.”24 While the resale of goods through middlemen by foreign firms had been an integral part of the West African economy since the inception of overseas trade, wartime shortages exposed the complexities of this system and made clear that consumption was not only an economic transaction guided by the laws of supply and demand but also one that was deeply embedded in the social.
As the complaints about “certain Kwahus,” men in Winneba, and “market women friends” reveal, the clash between European trading firms and African consumers, driven by what some scholars have identified as a growing sense of economic nationalism, was only part of the story. Such a narrow focus also fails to explain how similar conflicts over the market persisted in the decades following political independence. To better understand the complexities of Ghana’s economic landscape both before and after independence, we must go back and consider a variety of other encounters and exchanges responsible for its creation. Both fierce opposition and unlikely alliances—forged between people as different as European managers and African market women, nationalist politicians and foreign investors, and military soldiers and chiefs—together shaped how goods made their way off shelves and into consumers’ hands. Yet these personal and often unexpectedly intimate social relations have largely been forgotten in accounts of Ghana’s economic past.
To uncover how people actively engaged consumer markets requires that we first move beyond the standard explanations of how African economies work. Here I refer particularly to the “European exploitation versus African resistance” binary that has shaded much of what we know about African economic and business history, especially regarding the twentieth century.25 Although narratives of resistance against extractive and violent colonial regimes—everything from worker’s strikes to hold-ups to boycotts—have been essential to uncovering African agency, this bifurcated view has actually narrowed our understanding of how imperialism and capitalism intertwine and how they play out in people’s lives. More importantly, it has obscured the fundamental contests and sophisticated cultural repertories that underlie consumer culture in Ghana. While battles against colonial and neocolonial domination undoubtedly shaped the trajectories of consumer markets, so too did ongoing controversies over the meaning of wealth and proper accumulation, the role of the state and political authority, and the formation of gendered and racial ideologies.26 I also argue that though the firms themselves, alongside government business policies and practices, are typically seen as inevitable or governed by sound economic logic, they have a contested social history that needs to be examined.
Market Encounters is an attempt to explore the multitude of relationships that shaped Ghana’s economic reality and structured capitalist exchange throughout the twentieth century. Anthropologist Brenda Chalfin, writing about the power of the state in contemporary Ghana, argues that “before we can understand how it is subverted and undermined” we need to consider how it is “manufactured, institutionalized, and recursively inscribed.”27 Shouldn’t we interrogate the economic in similar ways? My answer is yes. It is far too easy to consider the sometimes dry and impersonal specifics of economic data as wholly distinct from the highly charged and deeply personal experiences of which everyday life is composed. This division, all too common among scholars, blinds us from considering the relentless interweaving of both. Our blindness is particularly acute when it comes to economics. The discipline rests on claims of scientific objectivity, but like much of the substance of human life, it relies on a series of tropes, metaphors, and storytelling devices. Central to the story I tell here are what literary scholar Erika Beckman calls “capital fictions”—the process in which ideology and imagination are fashioned into commonsensical truths that allow capitalism to function.28 Our story, then, is an effort to fuse economics and business history with social and cultural history. Such a method attempts to uncover how economic power is “manufactured, institutionalized, and recursively inscribed” while interrogating the fictions from which that power emerges. By weaving together two seemingly distinct sources—corporate archives and oral histories—I hope to offer a more textured sense of how people navigated the complex social terrains that made the buying and selling of goods in modern Ghana possible.
LOCATING THE “AFRICAN CONSUMER” AND CHALLENGING CONSUMPTION STUDIES
Before delving into any history of consumption, we must contend with a more basic question: Who, exactly, was the “consumer”? Early scholarship on consumer culture, starting in the 1970s, tended to paint the consumer in one of two ways, as either a “passive creature created by cultural industries and advertising” or as an “‘active’ or ‘citizen consumer’—a creative, confident, and rational being articulating personal identity.”29 These tropes have dominated the field of consumption studies and the ways we have come to know the consumer, though they have not gone unchallenged. Over the past ten years, historians have argued that the category consumer needs to be interrogated rather than assumed.30 Most notably, Frank Trentmann argues that “while all human societies have been engaged in consumption and have purchased, exchanged, gifted, or used objects and services, it has only been in specific contexts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that some (not all) practices of consumption have been connected to a sense of being a ‘consumer,’ as an identity, audience, or analytical category.”31 Simply put, consumer is far from a timeless or inevitable category. The consumer did not magically appear from a world of goods, rather, the consumer was created in particular historical moments and in dynamic relations with other actors and agencies. Market Encounters carefully engages scholarship in consumption studies—both its older simplicities and its newer complexities—to understand the development of consumer markets in West Africa. In doing so I am not suggesting that we superimpose a Western model of consumption on African societies; rather, I contend that by directly engaging this literature, historians of Africa can offer fresh insights and develop new areas of inquiry that expand consumption studies altogether.
Yet identifying the consumer is not just the distant task of scholars looking back on the historical record. In Ghana’s case, as we will see, firms and colonial and postcolonial governments have been equally determined to figure out who they are selling to. Therefore, any history of consumer culture in Ghana must account for “locating the consumer” as an intellectual project initiated by the work of historians and consumer studies scholars, as well as a political project framed by the interests of capitalist firms and the different regimes that seized state power. In other words, the question of who the consumer was in Ghana is both a historiographical one and a historical one that emerges in different periods of the twentieth century.
In Ghana, consumer was a blurry and unstable category, but not exactly in the ways that scholars of consumption might expect. As with other former West African colonies, a large physical distance existed between African consumers and manufacturers abroad. The British colonial government was far more interested in resource extraction than in creating and supporting local industries.32 As historian Adu Boahen aptly puts it, essential to the political
