refusal to process locally produced raw materials.” As a result, the majority of commodities had to be imported, from large items like building materials and cars, to popular food products like meats, vegetables, jams, milk, tomatoes, and sardines, to staples like rice, flour, sugar, and salt. The British government empowered a handful of foreign firms to control the flow of goods into and out of the colony. Those firms in turn relied heavily on local, often preexisting, trade networks to distribute the commodities. In this way a firm’s success depended on its ability to maintain relationships with thousands of African men and women who sold on the firm’s behalf, and who facilitated the movement of imported goods from the two major port cities, Accra and Takoradi, to small towns scattered throughout the interior.33 From a financial standpoint, this system allowed firms to keep their overhead costs low, saving them from having to invest money in building and maintaining physical retail structures. From a social standpoint, this system meant that Ghana’s economy was forged to a remarkable degree by a disparate blend of thousands of individuals. This web of distribution and sales, a group of what I call commercial intermediaries, encompassed a range of different people.34 It included those hired as shopkeepers, assistants, and clerks who received monthly salaries and worked at company-owned wholesale and retail stores as well as those entrusted as credit customers—people who bought goods from firms at wholesale prices, collected commission on sales, and sold mostly in areas where company-owned stores were nonexistent.
The reliance on intermediaries created a division between the firms and the actual consumers they (eventually) sold to, and was further complicated by the widespread practice of reselling. The breaking down of goods into smaller units for resale incorporated an even larger network of people into the pipeline of distribution and sales; this makes identifying the consumer even more difficult. The sale of matches is one of many examples. Several firms bought cases of matches from factories abroad, and imported them by boat to Accra. At the port, a firms’ receiving agent would divide the shipment, which typically contained hundreds of cases, and send some to both Accra and upcountry wholesale stores. A wholesale storekeeper would then break down cases into “zincs,” each containing about six metal containers. Those “zincs” would then be further broken up into packages and either distributed or sold, package by package, to retail shops owned by the firm or directly to credit customers. Each package contained ten to twelve boxes of matches, and retail storekeepers and credit customers often sold one box at a time to petty traders or consumers. Yet the point of sale did not stop there, as that same box, which contained seventy to eighty matchsticks, could then be divided by traders or the “consumer” into smaller and more affordable units of ten sticks for resale based on individual need.35
The business of reselling thus made divisions among the categories of wholesaler, retailer, and consumer highly ambiguous. In a 1950 company publication, the UAC admitted that “apart from high class retail stores in large towns, it is difficult if not impossible to know which of the buyers are ultimately consumers . . . [this] applies not only to divisible merchandise such as matches in bulk, but also to indivisible items, such as bicycles.”36 Even this confession was an understatement. A former African employee of Kingsway Department Stores also described difficulties in identifying “real consumers,”37 and store policies that prohibited the sale of large quantities to suspected resellers further illustrate the dilemma. But trouble locating the consumer was not strictly the concern of firms and their employees; colonial governments also tried to make distinctions between people who bought for personal use and those who intended to engage in resale. A whole assortment of names cropped up around efforts to pinpoint this difference. “The ultimate consumer,” “the end-use consumer,” and the “the bona-fide customer” were used in both corporate and government documents in attempts to make this distinction. At this point, we need to consider a question: If firms were still collecting profits and keeping overhead costs low, why would they care about identifying the “ultimate” or “end-use” consumer? One reason was that the system of reselling made collecting statistics on sales and creating standardized policies extremely difficult; it also made firms’ compliance with postwar government-imposed price controls and quotas an arduous, and often expensive, task.
However, the other, more profound reason, was about power. This system of commodity distribution could be quite profitable, but it had a lasting consequence: it created a large gap in what the firms actually knew about local consumer demand and desire. On the West African coast, trends changed rapidly, especially in the sale of textiles or wax prints. As an agent of the UTC stationed in Akuse warned, “any European staff taking a leave lasting more than two months” would have to completely relearn consumer tastes.38 Gaps in market knowledge led to huge profit losses. As a former UTC manager reflecting on his forty-year career wrote in 1961, “Nobody took pains to do market research . . . the stores were filled with products that were many times useless.”39 Full shelves of rotting supplies, the overstocking of unpopular brands, and unsold items sitting in warehouses for years: all these realities were a constant source of frustration among firms. As we all know from every trip to the grocery store, changes in packaging and a product’s overall aesthetic can also affect sales.40 Bottles of Brilliantine hair product would only sell if wrapped in paper; sugar sold in cardboard boxes was preferred to that sold in paper bags; sleeping mats had to have red instead of blue trim, and only blue and green cars should be ordered, as red cars were “very unpopular.” Even details like an item’s smell had to be considered; on a stocktaking visit to various stores, one UAC employee asked, “Can we not obtain tablet soap similar to White Windsor with Eucalyptus scent?” 41 What Africans perceived as poor packaging, the wrong color, or an unpleasant smell were as consequential to an item’s saleability as they were baffling to the firms’ management a world away in London or Basel.
As in most aspects of colonialism, stereotypes framed by racialized assumptions about the colonized abounded; firms often classified African consumer behavior as conservative, selective, and overly brand conscious. One reason cited for this selectiveness was that African consumers had particular difficulties in obtaining redress for defective merchandise from overseas producers.42 Another reason was the low income of farmers and wage earners, who had to shop carefully because of limited funds. What is less apparent in these observations is that when firms described “the African consumer” they were mainly referring to the demands of their storekeepers and credit customers who were responsible for resale. This gap between firms and ordinary consumers put European managers in a difficult predicament: invaluable market knowledge could only be gained through the feedback of African intermediaries, and this dependency was fragile—it had to be cultivated, maintained, and renewed. Of course, commercial intermediaries reflected the preferences of those they sold to; they, too, wanted to make a profit, but this was not always the case. Intermediaries thus wielded power in determining which goods gained popularity in the market and had a huge impact on shaping and translating consumer demand.
Let us now turn to the role of advertising in locating the consumer. As one of the primary means through which historians have studied how consumers were imagined and created, advertising often had different objectives in Ghana. The practice of using advertisements, and the principles of marketing, developed in their current form around the 1920s in the United States and other Western markets, were neither as established nor as meaningful in West Africa.43 Even after the Second World War, advertising geared toward African audiences was considered “in its infancy,” according to one UAC merchandise director.44 A large percentage of early print advertising in Ghana was focused on promoting the reputation of certain firms rather than endorsing specific products. Many ads were produced to convince African businessmen and retailers to buy stock from firms (rather than from other sources like mail-order catalogs) and thus carried a different message. The hope was to deter African retailers from importing on their own. Of course, print advertisements geared toward elite and middle-class African shoppers existed. Early Gold Coast newspapers were full of ads for brands like Ideal milk, Ovaltine, Wright biscuits, Tin-apa pilchards, and Waterman pens, but the images in the ads featured mostly Europeans.45 Posters and signboards hanging in stores and high–traffic areas like railway stations were also part of urban landscapes.46 In most cases, however, print advertisements
