Market Encounters. Bianca Murillo
binary that has shaded much of what we know about African economic and business history, especially regarding the twentieth century.25 Although narratives of resistance against extractive and violent colonial regimes—everything from worker’s strikes to hold-ups to boycotts—have been essential to uncovering African agency, this bifurcated view has actually narrowed our understanding of how imperialism and capitalism intertwine and how they play out in people’s lives. More importantly, it has obscured the fundamental contests and sophisticated cultural repertories that underlie consumer culture in Ghana. While battles against colonial and neocolonial domination undoubtedly shaped the trajectories of consumer markets, so too did ongoing controversies over the meaning of wealth and proper accumulation, the role of the state and political authority, and the formation of gendered and racial ideologies.26 I also argue that though the firms themselves, alongside government business policies and practices, are typically seen as inevitable or governed by sound economic logic, they have a contested social history that needs to be examined.
Market Encounters is an attempt to explore the multitude of relationships that shaped Ghana’s economic reality and structured capitalist exchange throughout the twentieth century. Anthropologist Brenda Chalfin, writing about the power of the state in contemporary Ghana, argues that “before we can understand how it is subverted and undermined” we need to consider how it is “manufactured, institutionalized, and recursively inscribed.”27 Shouldn’t we interrogate the economic in similar ways? My answer is yes. It is far too easy to consider the sometimes dry and impersonal specifics of economic data as wholly distinct from the highly charged and deeply personal experiences of which everyday life is composed. This division, all too common among scholars, blinds us from considering the relentless interweaving of both. Our blindness is particularly acute when it comes to economics. The discipline rests on claims of scientific objectivity, but like much of the substance of human life, it relies on a series of tropes, metaphors, and storytelling devices. Central to the story I tell here are what literary scholar Erika Beckman calls “capital fictions”—the process in which ideology and imagination are fashioned into commonsensical truths that allow capitalism to function.28 Our story, then, is an effort to fuse economics and business history with social and cultural history. Such a method attempts to uncover how economic power is “manufactured, institutionalized, and recursively inscribed” while interrogating the fictions from which that power emerges. By weaving together two seemingly distinct sources—corporate archives and oral histories—I hope to offer a more textured sense of how people navigated the complex social terrains that made the buying and selling of goods in modern Ghana possible.
LOCATING THE “AFRICAN CONSUMER” AND CHALLENGING CONSUMPTION STUDIES
Before delving into any history of consumption, we must contend with a more basic question: Who, exactly, was the “consumer”? Early scholarship on consumer culture, starting in the 1970s, tended to paint the consumer in one of two ways, as either a “passive creature created by cultural industries and advertising” or as an “‘active’ or ‘citizen consumer’—a creative, confident, and rational being articulating personal identity.”29 These tropes have dominated the field of consumption studies and the ways we have come to know the consumer, though they have not gone unchallenged. Over the past ten years, historians have argued that the category consumer needs to be interrogated rather than assumed.30 Most notably, Frank Trentmann argues that “while all human societies have been engaged in consumption and have purchased, exchanged, gifted, or used objects and services, it has only been in specific contexts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that some (not all) practices of consumption have been connected to a sense of being a ‘consumer,’ as an identity, audience, or analytical category.”31 Simply put, consumer is far from a timeless or inevitable category. The consumer did not magically appear from a world of goods, rather, the consumer was created in particular historical moments and in dynamic relations with other actors and agencies. Market Encounters carefully engages scholarship in consumption studies—both its older simplicities and its newer complexities—to understand the development of consumer markets in West Africa. In doing so I am not suggesting that we superimpose a Western model of consumption on African societies; rather, I contend that by directly engaging this literature, historians of Africa can offer fresh insights and develop new areas of inquiry that expand consumption studies altogether.
Yet identifying the consumer is not just the distant task of scholars looking back on the historical record. In Ghana’s case, as we will see, firms and colonial and postcolonial governments have been equally determined to figure out who they are selling to. Therefore, any history of consumer culture in Ghana must account for “locating the consumer” as an intellectual project initiated by the work of historians and consumer studies scholars, as well as a political project framed by the interests of capitalist firms and the different regimes that seized state power. In other words, the question of who the consumer was in Ghana is both a historiographical one and a historical one that emerges in different periods of the twentieth century.
In Ghana, consumer was a blurry and unstable category, but not exactly in the ways that scholars of consumption might expect. As with other former West African colonies, a large physical distance existed between African consumers and manufacturers abroad. The British colonial government was far more interested in resource extraction than in creating and supporting local industries.32 As historian Adu Boahen aptly puts it, essential to the political economy of colonialism was the “total neglect of industrialization and manufacturing and the refusal to process locally produced raw materials.” As a result, the majority of commodities had to be imported, from large items like building materials and cars, to popular food products like meats, vegetables, jams, milk, tomatoes, and sardines, to staples like rice, flour, sugar, and salt. The British government empowered a handful of foreign firms to control the flow of goods into and out of the colony. Those firms in turn relied heavily on local, often preexisting, trade networks to distribute the commodities. In this way a firm’s success depended on its ability to maintain relationships with thousands of African men and women who sold on the firm’s behalf, and who facilitated the movement of imported goods from the two major port cities, Accra and Takoradi, to small towns scattered throughout the interior.33 From a financial standpoint, this system allowed firms to keep their overhead costs low, saving them from having to invest money in building and maintaining physical retail structures. From a social standpoint, this system meant that Ghana’s economy was forged to a remarkable degree by a disparate blend of thousands of individuals. This web of distribution and sales, a group of what I call commercial intermediaries, encompassed a range of different people.34 It included those hired as shopkeepers, assistants, and clerks who received monthly salaries and worked at company-owned wholesale and retail stores as well as those entrusted as credit customers—people who bought goods from firms at wholesale prices, collected commission on sales, and sold mostly in areas where company-owned stores were nonexistent.
The reliance on intermediaries created a division between the firms and the actual consumers they (eventually) sold to, and was further complicated by the widespread practice of reselling. The breaking down of goods into smaller units for resale incorporated an even larger network of people into the pipeline of distribution and sales; this makes identifying the consumer even more difficult. The sale of matches is one of many examples. Several firms bought cases of matches from factories abroad, and imported them by boat to Accra. At the port, a firms’ receiving agent would divide the shipment, which typically contained hundreds of cases, and send some to both Accra and upcountry wholesale stores. A wholesale storekeeper would then break down cases into “zincs,” each containing about six metal containers. Those “zincs” would then be further broken up into packages and either distributed or sold, package by package, to retail shops owned by the firm or directly to credit customers. Each package contained ten to twelve boxes of matches, and retail storekeepers and credit customers often sold one box at a time to petty traders or consumers. Yet the point of sale did not stop there, as that same box, which contained seventy to eighty matchsticks, could then be divided by traders or the “consumer” into smaller and more affordable units of ten sticks for resale based on individual need.35
The business of reselling thus made divisions among the categories of wholesaler,