firms. Stephanie Decker and Sarah Stockwell, for instance, have traced the strategies used by British business to legitimize their continued presence amid nationalist agitation and protest in the years following the Second World War.62
The second type of economic scholarship centers on the activities surrounding agricultural production—specifically, the development of the Gold Coast cocoa industry. Scholarship by Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian, Gareth Austin, Polly Hill, Gwendolyn Mikell, and Ivor Wilks has been foundational in shaping the contours of this literature.63 By 1911 cocoa had become the colony’s largest export and main source of income. To illustrate, estimates from cocoa sales in Asante rose from £63,000 in 1909 to £700,000 in 1915.64 Unlike eastern and southern Africa, there was never a large European or white settler population in the Gold Coast, so profits from cash crop farming remained, for the most part, in African hands.65 Many cocoa-buying points, especially in the growing areas, had attached wholesale and retail stores where farmers were encouraged to spend their cash. Firms’ produce buyers therefore acted as storekeepers and took responsibility for both sides of the business: the buying of the cocoa crop for export and the selling of imports to consumers. Among some cocoa farmers, the two activities were synonymous; in his memoir about his childhood in Asante, Thomas E. Kyei equates traveling with his father to cocoa buying stations with opportunities to view and buy items from abroad or goods from “the country of white men.” 66 While the increase in consumer imports grew alongside the cocoa business, the production side of the cocoa industry has always overshadowed the consumption side in most of these histories.
Through a third type of scholarship framed by the concerns of early labor historians and feminist scholars that focused on women’s contributions, we are able to catch a small glimpse into the lives of consumers. We know from Gold Coast labor historians like Jeff Crisp, Raymond Dumett, and Richard Jefferies that access to consumer goods spurred industrial workers to strike for higher wages in the gold mines and on the railways as early as 1918.67 Furthermore, we learn how women came to dominate retail trade as men shifted their energies toward cocoa profits and wage employment. Studies by Gloria Addae, Gracia Clark, and Claire Robertson also reveal how Ghanaian women devised intricate strategies though market trading, temporary liaisons with European and African men (privileged in the colonial order), and economic solidarity with each other to obtain goods, from basic foodstuffs to kitchen utensils and cosmetics.68 As Clark eloquently puts it in her study on market women in Kumasi, “Whether this balancing act resembles harmonious orchestration or frantic juggling, in the experience of a trader it holds the key to daily survival and successful accumulation.” 69 Rather than positioning these struggles as reactions or responses to changing economic structures, I wish to explore them as fundamental to shaping how colonial capitalism was constituted in the first place. Through the lens of consumption rather than production, the present volume seeks to revisit this early economic literature and emphasize these “balancing acts” as embedded in the very fabric of African consumer histories.
Over the past ten years scholars of Africa have become increasingly interested in African consumer practices and the social logics of demand. Much of this literature, however, is dominated by research on specific commodities. Major works on African consumerism, including Timothy Burke’s 1996 groundbreaking study Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women, concentrate on the circulation and use of particular goods like cosmetics, cloth, and alcohol.70 Burke shows how African consumers rearticulated the meanings of foreign manufactured items like soap, cosmetics, and other toiletries prescribed by European companies, missionaries, and white settlers; he argues that African consumption practices became central to battles over economic power, white supremacy, and African respectability. Some whites viewed the consumption and adoption of their products by Africans as a sign of the pliability of the continent and a justification for their “civilizing mission.” Other white settlers perceived African consumption of certain items as a complete disregard for public codes of deference. As one anxious white settler expressed, “Our civilization is in the shop windows and if we don’t guide them carefully, they will come and get it.” Burke’s study reveals how deep-seated settler racism not only shaped Africans’ access to goods but also their perceptions of goods.
Reaching back into the nineteenth century, Jeremy Prestholdt demonstrates how East African consumer desire influenced global patterns of trade and stimulated the industrialization of cities like Bombay, India, and Salem, Massachusetts. The cultural process of domestication, or what he defines as the remaking of foreign goods into something familiar and usable, is at the core of Prestholdt’s analysis. Among Zanzabaris, for instance, the consumption of imported clocks, mirrors, and umbrellas was rearticulated to reflect ongoing debates about modernity, personhood, and status. While Prestholdt builds on Burke’s work, he argues that East African consumers used commodities to not only address the particularities of culture in the Indian Ocean region but also project new senses of self to the larger global world. By excavating these “forgotten histories of mutuality and global interdependence,” Prestholdt challenges long-standing assumptions about Africa’s relation to other parts of the world—namely, he refutes the idea that African consumerism has been largely shaped by the interests of others.71
While he categorizes his study on alcohol as a social history, I consider Emmanuel Akyeampong’s Drink, Power, and Social Change to be the first full-length consumer history of Ghana.72 Tracing alcohol’s role as a ritual object, a marker of personal identity, and an economic commodity, Akyeampong uses it to historicize the circulation and legitimization of power and authority. Focusing on Asante worldviews, he illustrates how access to alcohol informed intergenerational and gender conflicts in precolonial Ghana and shaped the formation of urban social life in the early colonial period. Akyeampong’s investigation into temperance agitation and the history of liquor legislation, which included tariffs on imported liquor and licensing fees for liquor outlets, is particularly insightful. As these tariffs and fees accounted for as much as 40 percent of total government revenues in the period immediately preceding World War I, debates over liquor prohibition became an important factor in the extension of colonial hegemony and key to solidifying indirect rule—the British policy of ruling through “traditional” chiefs and local authorities implemented throughout West Africa.
Taking the many insights of this diverse scholarship, we will here depart from the persistent focus on the social meaning of things and instead foreground the centrality of people—and, in particular, the human relationships that have created, constituted, and counteracted the participation of African consumers within the world of goods.73 Rendering visible these various encounters demands a rethinking of the very starting point for our inquiry—namely, the term consumer culture. Our decades-old concept of consumer culture has been generated predominately from research on mass consumption in Britain and the United States, and the resulting studies have primarily addressed the cultural meanings behind consumer choice and the construction of desire.74 These meanings are, of course, relevant to our study of Ghana, but our inquiry must move in many other directions, as well. Therefore, rather than focus on consumer culture, I use the term consumer politics instead. This shift in terms will, I hope, allow us to expand upon the definition of consumer culture and to emphasize the fact that consumer markets are the products of shifting power relations and competing interests. For instance, while elements like advertising, branding, salesmanship, and market research have shaped consumer markets in Ghana, just as they have done in Britain, the United States, and other places around the world, the restrictive nature of the colonial and postcolonial economies made other issues—including the regulation of retail stores and marketplaces, international supply networks and import licensing, and price controls and government contracts—equally significant.
Just as important, in relation to the specifics of our terms, is that I wish to redefine the way we currently use consumer politics, a term that has a much shorter academic history than consumer culture and a relatively slim historiography dating mainly from the last ten years. Additionally it has typically been linked to large-scale consumer revolutions, or at least consumer-led movements.75 But far beyond the obvious instances of boycotts
