Market Encounters. Bianca Murillo
in Kumasi reported just the opposite, however, asserting that the Asante made bad storekeepers because they were “obsessed with money and profit” and his preference was for “Fante people.”77 Through the hiring process, agents evoked and reinforced ethnic stereotypes, somewhat arbitrarily, to describe and categorize African ability. Church membership was also used to categorize potential hires, and agents made sharp distinctions between Africans belonging to the various missionary societies. Certainly the UTC preferred to hire Christian converts associated with the Basel Mission, but agents also considered those who were part of the Wesleyan Church acceptable and indeed much preferred over Catholics.78
UAC employees’ relations with Greek staff were also a point of contention. In 1933, the company began recruiting employees from poor areas of Greece to fill what they described as the “intermediate positions between Europeans and African staff” similar to those of Lebanese businessmen.79 Jobs for Greeks, however, were specially classified as “salaried salesmen” positions. While Greeks were never labeled as untrustworthy or dishonest, as African staff were, company directors argued that “differences in background, racial characteristics, and temperament” made them a problem for senior management.80 Such differences were used to explain difficulties with Greek staff and to instruct agents on how best to manage them. That Greek staff were considered lower class, and not white, contributed to what company directors described as their “excitable and sensitive” character.81 Conflicts with management may have instead stemmed from frustration and anger felt by Greek staff who saw themselves as equal to and just as capable as their British employers or who sought distance from any association with those Lebanese and Africans who also held “intermediate positions.”
It should be noted that the character of non-Africans, including other Europeans, was also a topic of concern among company executives and management. Responding to a 1928 letter of inquiry into an incident that occurred at his previous post, a UTC agent at Nkawkaw blamed problems associated with his twenty-nine-year-old Swiss wife’s smoking, drinking, and late nights out on her interactions with British women whom he defined as “bad friends.” He explained to the regional office that “in general British women are not the right friends for our women.”82 The statement suggests that his wife’s nightly antics, details that were never fully disclosed, may have been considered grounds for termination. He begged, “I swear that the things that happened at Saltpond will not happen here. . . . You can trust me, I will live an orderly family life based on Christian norms with my wife.” According to the agent, the “British ladies” in question had disrupted his Swiss wife’s moral compass. The agent’s inability to manage his wife’s behavior must have been amusing to the African staff, but most of all it called into question his capacity to manage a district branch and his role as an authority figure. Certainly the head office was concerned with upholding the firm’s reputation, but the poor behavior of the agent’s wife had larger implications. It troubled notions about white superiority and the sanctity of white womanhood—ideas on which the UTC’s business, and colonial race relations more broadly, rested.
As is recorded in correspondence between headquarters in Europe, main offices, and district branches, “doing business” not only drew on preexisting attitudes about Africa and Africans but was itself an act of knowledge production. European agents and staff in the Gold Coast constructed racial hierarchies and cultural differences between themselves and African staff and customers through their daily work. Yet they also had to contend with corporate policies handed down by headquarters. These directives, printed in staff manuals and instructional guides, were just as much about the imaginings and fears projected by senior management back in Europe. Moreover, as Ann Stoler reminds us, racist ideology and a preoccupation with white prestige were not only statements about Africans but also directives aimed at “dissenting European underlings” whose behavior had the potential to threaten the image of white superiority.83 Categories based on race, class, and ethnicity were never clear cut, and the persistence of company policies to enforce them suggests that staff may have found prescribed boundaries either too burdensome or too difficult to uphold. After all, success in the merchandise business often meant deferring to African knowledge about the market, a reality that often made top-down company directives pointless—or simply not profitable. This was one of the major reasons for the lack of consistency between and among district branches and the inability of firms to fully control the market terms.
RECONCILING POLICY AND PRACTICE
Discrepancies between policy and practice repeatedly reveal the difficulties in policing boundaries—especially those prescribed by superiors who were hundreds of miles away—as well as contradictions in the racial logic that cast Africans as inferior and in need of guidance. For some European employees, their supervisors’ expectations to be morally superior and more knowledgeable about business proved difficult to uphold and created isolation—and, consequently, additional stress. In letters to their superiors, agents often described everyday life at district branches in the 1920s and 1930s as lonely, depressing, and friendless.84 One UTC agent wrote, “Nkoko [sic] is a completely different region than Saltpond. With the exception of one Swiss I did not cultivate any friends and it will remain this way in the future.” While the letter describes differences between doing business in Nkawkaw versus Saltpond, the agent’s inability to find friends in both towns was consistent. Meaningful friendships and relationships were defined by those made with other Europeans, not Africans. This social distance, which contributed to agents’ loneliness and isolation, was shaped by prior assumptions about racial difference and a company culture that promoted and attempted to enforce such attitudes.
Yet the organization of district branches and retail stores demanded that Europeans and Africans—staff and customers alike—work in intimate quarters. Wholesale and retail stores were often quite small, and always crowded (fig. 1.3). Typically, the area behind the counter had to accommodate all the goods for sale as well as the storekeeper and his assistants. Depending on where the store was located, around four to eight people could be working behind the counter at once, fetching items, operating the register, recording purchases in account books, and attending to customers. European and African staff also traveled together on stocktaking and debt collection trips at least every two months.85 These trips lasted anywhere from one to three days and often required overnight stays. A former SAT employee described visiting a total of thirty stores in one month, the farthest being 150 miles away from the district branch. This unavoidable closeness of employees is a primary reason why early handbooks prescribing the dos and don’ts of acceptable behavior were so detailed. The interactions that happened every day offered abundant instances where “common sense rubrics of racial differentiation failed to work” and also made clear how dependent European management was on African staff.86 While some European agents attempted to strictly abide by company policies—sometimes at the expense of their mental health, as illustrated by the Saltpond agent above—others abandoned rules altogether. A look at day-to-day encounters reveals this variation and shows how other factors like individual personalities and bonds forged between staff members could shape business operations in unpredictable and unintended ways.
FIGURE 1.3. Interior of provision store, Sekondi, ca. 1912. Reproduced with kind permission of Unilever from the original at the Unilever Archives, UAC11/11/9/12/44.
Standardization of corporate policy in order to maximize profits was a goal for all firms operating on the coast. Creating consistency across district branches and retail stores was especially important during the era of acquisitions, when firms like the UAC grew in size and expanded their operations. Standardizing selling practices was the primary method firms used to centralize their business in hopes of cutting costs and increasing efficiency. But many corporate policies, such as those relating to passbooks, debt collection, and relations with African staff, proved to be far too rigid to implement on the ground. As a 1943 colonial commission of inquiry would report, most district branches had been operating as “self-contained units for decades,” with each “estimating its own requirements, and placing its own orders, and enforcing policy haphazardly.”87