attract potential retailers to sell on their behalf; the need to cultivate and stimulate consumer demand for a particular product seemed secondary. Furthermore, in times of commodity rationing and scarcity, product-directed advertising became obsolete.
During the period of decolonization and in the years following Ghanaian independence, firms appropriated advertising for another purpose—namely, they used advertisements as a tool to build up goodwill toward a company and publicize corporate policies. The goal was to link the firm to ideas of reciprocity and quality rather than to promote a particular product. UAC campaigns and advertisements announcing their role in “Africanization,” or policies focused on promoting Africans to managerial positions that were formerly reserved for Europeans, were some key examples.47 While firms paid lip service to courting the African consumer, advertising and marketing were not the primary ways they did so. Prior to the 1950s, efforts were limited mainly to questioning African staff about what products they preferred and used. The first large-scale market research project, titled Project Joseph, was not undertaken until 1954. Paid for by the UAC and conducted by the Export Advertising Service to test West African reactions to different forms of press advertising, the project was primarily geared toward helping the firm improve its public image in response to anticolonial activism. As a result, whatever market research was gained was not specific enough to actually change a product’s design or production, nor was it apparently intended for that purpose. Furthermore, tests were conducted on six hundred of the UAC’s own staff from the Gambia, the Gold Coast, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. While recognizing that the firm must have considered its own African staff members as archetypal middle-class shoppers who warranted research, its strategy also showed a continued reliance on information from intermediaries. Thus, drawing on market research and advertising to uncover the underlying assumptions and changing values of consumers, as a number of other studies on consumerism have done, carries certain limitations when applied to the Ghanaian context.
The “ultimate consumer” did not become any easier to single out after independence in 1957. As foreign firms retreated due to nationalist pressures and a number of policies put in place to curb their power, state-owned corporations like the Ghana National Trading Corporation (GNTC) were established and replaced many of the firms’ long-standing functions. By 1961 the GNTC, under President Kwame Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party (CPP), took over a number of wholesale and retail outlets across the country as well as credit customer accounts. Though it was intended to protect the consumer, state ownership did not introduce any major changes in how people accessed and purchased goods, and the GNTC reproduced some of the same problems identified by ordinary Ghanaians during the colonial period. In the years following independence, similar accusations of favoritism and the creation of artificial shortages emerged. Like many African nationalist leaders, Nkrumah hoped to reduce dependency on foreign firms through investment in local manufacturing and by implementing import substitution strategies via state-owned enterprises.48 But industrial development did not catch up with the demand for goods. Additionally, the world market price of cocoa (the country’s primary source of foreign exchange) plummeted; the years 1964–66 were especially bad. Commodity shortages swept through the country, and irregular issuing of import licenses and the funneling of state funds for personal use by select CPP members and high-ranking government ministers further reduced the number of goods available on the market.
By the mid-1960s, it was not uncommon to see hundreds of people lining up for long hours outside retail stores. Shoppers regularly lined the street in front of Ghana House, the GNTC’s Accra department store, well before opening hours in hopes of buying the most basic items. While the GNTC claimed that lines were necessary to weed out reselling and ensure that each person received his or her fair share of milk, rice, and sugar, customers developed a whole range of sly tactics to evade government control. As an official commission of inquiry into trade malpractices reported, these lines “should not fool anyone into thinking that the distributor firms are issuing goods to consumers.” Instances of customers rejoining the line two or three times after each sale, and of customers hiring four or five other people to stand in on their behalf, were common.49 Thus, the imposition of lines as a method for firms to ensure fair distribution by identifying and selling to the “real” consumer was largely unsuccessful.
While the CPP government claimed that tighter control over distribution through the GNTC was a method of protecting consumers from unfair trading practices, such strategies frustrated customers even more. It became a common practice for stores to stagger their business hours to coincide with the off-duty hours of workers and to regulate the release of goods at specific times. Debates about identifying the genuine consumer persisted and were manifested in the state-controlled media, pitting consumers and retailers against one another. Above all, the consumer was depicted as a victim of self-serving traders who ransacked store shelves, hiked up prices, and hoarded essential commodities for profit. Inflation and shortages were framed as a by-product of greedy retailers who monopolized goods rather than the result of state mismanagement. Efforts to distinguish the genuine consumer from a person who intended to purchase goods for resale were reminiscent of attempts undertaken by European firms during the colonial period. Echoing reports like the 1943 Conway Commission, the GNTC accused market women in particular of undermining Ghana’s economic stability. Stories of crowds of women stampeding GNTC stores, abusing staff, and intimidating “respectable” shoppers were featured in the national news.50 Described in a newspaper article as “human vultures,” market women’s practices were positioned as the antithesis of modern economic development. Indeed, these criticisms also revealed a larger ongoing social concern—specifically, the threat posed by women’s financial autonomy.
General discontent with the economy provided part of the momentum for the 1966 military and police coup that overthrew President Nkrumah. As commodity shortages persisted in the 1970s, Ghana’s second military government—the National Redemption Council, under Ignatius Kutu Acheampong—empowered the army and police to ensure fair distribution and price controls by force. Soldiers patrolled retail centers and commercial main streets, and violence was inflicted on retailers as well as consumers thought to be selling and buying beyond permissible daily usage, or what the government called “normal requirements.” During what is now remembered by older Ghanaians as “Acheampong’s time,” stores and marketplaces throughout Ghana became sites of fear and intimidation. The military arrested hundreds of people accused of kalabule, a term that came to define a number of unlawful selling and consumption practices including hoarding, profiteering, smuggling, and selling on the black market. Soldiers also seized goods from private homes in military exercises like Operation Bring Out. In some regions, like Brong-Ahafo, military barracks became retail sites as soldiers took control of selling confiscated items to people they deemed “real” consumers. The category consumer thus continued to bedevil, even amid the supposed idealism of postrevolution rule; now one was deemed an authentic consumer through military discretion, a judgment backed by the threat of physical punishment, jail time, and exorbitant fines for those who failed to fit the image.
I begin with this brief genealogy of the consumer to encourage a rethinking of consumer studies from an African-centered perspective. The focus on consumer choice, demand, and desire, which has been the usual terrain of studying consumer culture, has limitations when applied to Ghana’s history.51 First, the organization and regulation of distribution channels were often as important to accessing commodities and shaping the consumer’s experience as was the amount of money in that consumer’s pocket. I therefore argue that histories of commodity distribution, typically the domain of economists and development policy planners, are not separate from consumer culture and have an economic and social history that demand examination. Second, to study consumerism in Ghana also requires that we take seriously an economic past characterized by boom and bust cycles and a general lack of stability. Such an economic reality created dramatic shifts from periods in which people enjoyed relative abundance to periods in which people suffered debilitating scarcity. So stark were some years that people remember month-long shortages that were interrupted only by an occasional flooding of a commodity that lasted for mere hours and then disappeared once more. The popular saying “plenty money, no goods” that was frequently evoked to describe the market (particularly
