Market Encounters. Bianca Murillo
agents that credit to Africans was to be given sparingly, citing “the Negro’s unreliable character and his natural bent for the untruth and fraud.” According to the manual, agents were to exercise caution in all business dealings with Africans; “bad characteristics” including carelessness, deceit, incompetence, and immorality were named as prime examples.59 Not much had changed in these attitudes thirty years later. In a 1936 report to one of the UAC’s managing directors, D. D. Pitcher advised agents to more carefully control and manage the issuing of credit. The accumulation of large debts was due in part to lack of self-restraint and ease of temptation. Rather than account for poor economic conditions or call into question the firms rigid credit terms, Pitcher blamed the accumulation of large debts on “the African” who “so invariably cannot resist.” 60 These accusations, produced three decades apart, reveal the persistence of such beliefs among firms—particularly in crafting guidelines for their European staff.
This general mistrust of Africans was echoed by branch agents, especially in letters to their superiors concerning the hiring and supervising of African staff. In response to queries about his inability to find an African storekeeper, one UTC agent from Akuse complained that identifying good Africans in his district required time and patience because most were “not honest.” 61 He therefore explained the need to scrupulously evaluate the character, outlook, background, and family of potential candidates. By deploying familiar tropes about Africans as fundamentally suspect, the Akuse agent was able to avoid accountability, if only temporarily, for what may have been his own ineptitude in recruiting and retaining local staff. The agent’s fear of being terminated was a legitimate concern; other firms, like GBO, considered similar instances as grounds for dismissal. For example, in a series of letters concerning a European agent at Tarkwa, his superiors concluded that the agent’s failure to “bring African storekeepers into line” called for his replacement by “a much stronger type of man.” 62 The cumulative effect of all of these laments, instructions, and insinuations was to pathologize the behavior of Africans. As with endless other instances of colonial thinking, these Europeans rarely seemed to acknowledge that they were making vast generalizations about an entire country’s people, often on the basis of a few brief encounters.63
Such attitudes further shaped the practice of shopkeeping. Product display and surveillance policies were of particular concern. While the UTC reminded its European storekeepers in a 1939 instruction manual to “never forget that the black trader, the modest worker or the small bushman in front of the counter are all his customers bringing in earnings/income,” the firm also emphasized the need to maintain “strict control” of the staff and of African customers inside a store. The manual is worth quoting at length:
The European shopkeeper is not allowed to leave the shop without calling another European as a replacement . . . blind corners in the shop have to be eliminated because black employees or customers could get into mischief. We need to pay attention that there are no goods piled up that would impede the view over the store. The supervision of the black staff is [also] very important. This strict control is necessary because of these people’s tendency towards unjust good. . . . It is important never to turn against the counter and to always watch closely so that no goods disappear whilst helping customers.64
Even though firms later noted that most theft was by customers, not employees, and occurred at the sales counter, it was not uncommon for European agents and storekeepers to search African employees’ pockets at the end of each day. In some instances, African staff were required to walk by supervisors with “reversed pockets” after every shift before heading home. African clerks and shop assistants were also forbidden from handling a customer’s money and from handing over the items purchased. Such guidelines suggested that tills or cash registers were to be operated by Europeans only. African staff that acted otherwise were subject to fines or dismissal. Thus, the organization of company-owned stores was premised on the understanding that African staff and shoppers were inherently suspect, and the daily work of transactions with shoppers and relations with staff was saturated in racial mistrust. With such constant reminders that European staff must proceed with caution, shopkeeping entailed more than just selling goods; firms also constructed it as a defensive position.
Relations with African women, both professional and personal, were also a topic of official policy, and the most vivid demonstration of firms’ attempts to enforce racial separation between their white staff and local communities. As a former UTC employee hired in the 1960s, Arthur Wettstein explains that the distance between African and European employees was actively promoted by the UTC’s “policy of prudence.” He remembers, “It was not without purpose that prior to departure from the Head Office in Basel a voluminous document on do’s and don’ts was handed to every candidate, which among other prominent rules contained a prohibition of intense contact with African women on threat of dismissal.” 65 Such efforts to restrict intimate relations between Europeans and Africans, particularly African women, confirms that company employees were not adhering to the rules.66 As former SAT manager Hans Rudolf Roth recalled, many of his coworkers in Kumasi had African girlfriends, including his supervisor who lived in town with his Swiss wife. While the “intense contact” rule did not prevent sexual relationships, it did deter many European employees from legally marrying their African girlfriends and from fulfilling obligations to children from these relationships.67 Efforts to enforce rules on staffs’ private and sexual lives reveal the measures firms undertook to police racial boundaries in the name of commerce. Such top-down policies suggest that company leaders believed interracial unions—even when their relationships were publicly recognized and legitimated through marriage—could threaten a staff members’ loyalty, could tarnish a firm’s reputation, and were bad for business overall.
Another important aspect of company policy, and another effort to maintain divisions, was the expectation that European employees were there to set an example for Africans. For instance, Wettstein remembers, “We often heard that ‘we are a Christian enterprise’ and were obviously expected to act accordingly in private and business life.” 68 Based on notions that African men and women lacked the capacity to conduct business without European guidance, the UTC claimed that, without its leadership, business would “end in chaos.” 69 Modeling proper behavior could mean everything from upholding company policies to demonstrating cleanliness and proper sartorial practices.70 A 1931 circular to all UTC district agents justified the importance of these tasks as necessary to “encourage further reflection, and initiative and that also teaches independence.”71 For the UTC, upholding Christian values, hard work, self-discipline, and frugality through moral education defined commercial relations with Africans long after its formal ties with the BMS were severed. As Stephan Miescher has shown, Basel missionaries expected converts to live according to the Gemeindeordnung, a set of rules that intervened in every aspect of daily life including gender relations, living arrangements, and time management and “made conscious efforts to reshape African personhood.”72 Although less overtly religious, the UAC also considered itself a model for proper selling, through a responsibility for upholding retail standards and teaching Africans the correct way to do business. Corporate policy continued to position commerce as a civilizing force and the market as a space that held transformative power. It is no accident that African men and women would grow increasingly suspicious of its operation and effects.
Not all Africans were considered equally dishonest or untrustworthy. Correspondence with headquarters back in Europe reveals an ongoing quest by agents for good and truthful staff—particularly shopkeepers. In the process, firms created ethnic hierarchies based on what groups proved easiest to manage. According to the UTC, the Kwawu were considered the most dependable.73 Originally itinerant traders from a region about one hundred miles from the coast (on Asante’s eastern border), the Kwawu had by the 1920s settled in prosperous cocoa towns and also based themselves, often temporarily, in commercial cities along the coast.74 In a 1927 general report the UTC agent at Saltpond described good storekeepers in the Fante districts, located along the coast, as “rare as gold!”75 Three years later, another agent in Saltpond offered his own reasoning to explain the storekeeper shortage. He claimed that Fantes did not understand proper store management or the importance of cleanliness. “These people are very stubborn,”