the need to account for these conditions. Here, my intentions are aligned with the work of consumer historian Sherene Seikaly, who has argued that “managing scarcity” in British-ruled Palestine was crucial to a longer process of “creating needs and desires.”52 This is not to say that people did not make sophisticated shopping choices when goods were available. Rather, the impetus is to have us move from interrogating the consumer as an identity (both individual and collective) to exploring the historical processes that brought that identity to fruition.
While this book seeks to locate the consumer as part of larger developments in Ghana’s economic past, it is by no means an origins story. We will not find here a tale about the “birth of the consumer” in Ghana. In this sense, my research diverges from early consumer histories that traced the emergence of consumer culture during industrial revolutions in Britain and the United States or focused on a specific historical event like the American Revolution or World War II.53 As we have seen, the British colonial economy produced a system in which the identity of the consumer, as a subject of corporate policy and state regulation, was never clear. I interpret this elusiveness as an opportunity for a critical engagement into the operation of power rather than as an obstacle or gap in the historical record. As Jean and John Comaroff, following Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall, remind us, “At any particular moment, in any marked event, a meaning or a social arrangement may appear free floating, underdetermined, ambiguous. But it is often the very attempt to harness that indeterminacy, the seemingly unfixed signifier, that animates both the exercise of power and the resistance to which it may give rise. Such arguments and struggles though are seldom equal.”54 Specifically, this vagueness allows us to examine how the consumer was implicated in various projects that went beyond what might typically be defined as market or economic exchange.
As we shall see, for much of the twentieth century in Ghana consumer was used as both an aspirational category and a value term. Both private and, later, state-owned firms deployed the notion of the consumer in flexible ways to serve their interests and legitimize their authority. Ordinary Ghanaians similarly evoked the category to advocate for greater control over the political and economic life of their country, as well as for more accountability from leadership. Consequently, different versions of the consumer surfaced at specific historical moments. However, these versions were never universal, consistent, or equally acknowledged. By questioning the assumed identity of the consumer we can gain a deeper understanding of what was at stake for different people who participated in the market, and what knowledge, justification, and cultural values framed their encounters.
REWRITING AFRICAN CONSUMER CULTURE AND RETHINKING ECONOMIC HISTORY
While the formation and organization of colonial capitalism made the African consumer an ambiguous figure, perceptions of the continent—popular and academic alike—also color what we know about African consumer history. Typically we think of consumerism in Africa as either a recent phenomenon or a result of Western cultural hegemony. Media images of Asante chiefs using the latest iPhone model or Congolese youth donning Gucci and Christian Dior fashions are used as representations to both celebrate “third world advancement” and signify the dangers of globalization and capitalist culture. These images are sometimes intended to shock and surprise Western audiences, who tend to still see the continent as different, distant, and underdeveloped. In many ways, academic literature also perpetuates some of these tired tropes. For example, in global studies of consumption the development of African consumerism is often positioned as part of a linear progression that slowly creeps across the globe or as a “last stop” in a process that originated in Europe or North America.55 Additionally, histories of global commerce persistently portray African men and women as either producers of raw materials or as industrial laborers catering to the demands of Western markets and consumers.
Certainly this is not the case, as a number of scholars in the field of African history have shown. We know that West Africans participated in precolonial commercial networks and have traded long distance with Europeans since the fifteenth century, beginning with the Portuguese. In fact, the economic history of Ghana is extremely rich. Studies of African merchant communities and histories of prominent coastal trading families that predated colonial rule have been at the center of several foundational works.56 Despite Ghana’s significant economic past, Africans as consumers have not been the primary focus in the literature. Given that the trafficking in slaves (figured as “Atlantic commodities” by slave traders) and the violence that permeated it dominated commercial life on the Gold Coast,57 early economic scholarship concentrated mainly on the organization and impact of transatlantic slave trade economies. This lack of attention to the consumer was also shaped by theories of underdevelopment that dominated African economic scholarship in the 1970s. Walter Rodney’s influential study How Europe Underdeveloped Africa marked a crucial shift in African economic history from a Eurocentric to an African- and Caribbean-centered perspective, bringing to the forefront the term capitalist imperialism—the idea that imperialism was, and should be understood, as an economic phenomenon. Here Rodney directly took on a generation of European (and North American) economic historians like D. K. Fieldhouse, who argued against the severity of colonialism on the basis that it was “not that profitable” for Europeans. In attempting to counter these claims by tracing the roots of underdevelopment through centuries of institutions that exploited African labor and resources, however, Rodney’s work did not consider the role of Africans as consumers or active participants in a larger Atlantic economy of goods. The only mention of consumerism in his book was in combating the work of colonial apologists who used African consumerism as some sort of evidence that the European slave trade “was undoubtedly a moral evil, but it was economically good for Africa.”58 In many ways, African consumer histories have been trapped within this uncertain space, between bourgeois and radical Marxist debates that have persisted in various forms for decades.59
Within these confines, however, we can find glimpses of the goods being exchanged as well as the manners in which imports were first used. Challenging popular myths that Africa was a dumping ground for “assorted rubbish”—that early trade goods consisted of cheap liquor, useless trinkets, and defective firearms—historians of material culture have cataloged detailed lists of various commodities registered and sold along the coast. For instance, even before the eighteenth century, Dutch traders stored 218 types of merchandise in Elmina Castle. Indian textiles, European linen, felt hats, Venetian beads, smoking pipes, mirrors, and paper, along with fancier goods like multicolored umbrellas, silver-headed canes, velvet-upholstered armchairs, and Turkish carpets were among the items listed on customs records, trading post inventories, and orders placed by African merchants.60 Such evidence, however small, testifies to the engagement of Africans as consumers within the Atlantic economy. The variety of goods listed further demonstrates desires beyond those stereotypical staples of the slave trade, like guns and liquor—two commodities that are often blamed for perpetuating further violence and destruction on the West African coast.
Scholarship since the late 1960s on the ending of the slave trade and the shift to “legitimate” commerce introduced new areas of economic and historical study.61 Even so, the consumer still figures as only a marginal character in a larger story that tends to focus on two types of activities: the business of large colonial trading firms and changes in agricultural production. In the first type, historians focused on the rise of merchant capital and the relationship between European firms and the emerging colonial state. Some of this literature falls into the category of corporate or company history and was written by firms’ European employees. Frederick Pedler, a former colonial officer and the deputy chairman of the UAC from 1965 to 1968, wrote The Lion and the Unicorn in Africa, one of the first published histories of the UAC and the various British and Dutch firms that came to form it. Other studies were interested in evaluating the extent of collusion between merchant firms and the colonial administration. D. K. Fieldhouse made a distinction between the interests of colonialists and capitalists, while historians like Adu Boahen, Rhonda Howard, and certainly Walter Rodney saw their interests as basically one and the same. Another body of literature within this first type, written over the last two decades by business historians, explores the implications
