.
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 and protests, I see struggles over big market forces as happening all the time, within ordinary face-to-face interactions that took place in wholesale and supply offices, across retail and credit counters, at trade fairs and promotional events, and on department store selling floors. As Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton have argued, “Nuanced analyses of a range of cultural spaces—from the classroom to the hospital, the asylum to the family album, the nursery to the archive—have made it possible to understand how and why imperial power operated through the colonization of spatialized domains brought into the purview of the colonial state and its reformist agendas.”76 Commercial spaces are no different, though they may seem at first glance to be static or predictable. They, too, are always changing and animated by “the collusions and collisions” of bodies, power, and regimes—not unlike the spaces that Ballantyne and Burton describe. I therefore apply this spatial analytic to market encounters of all kinds in order to piece together the mixture of beliefs, emotions, and desires that dictated consumer exchange and persisted beyond the “end of empire.” Therefore, I define consumer politics as the everyday contests over access to goods and channels of distribution (retailing and wholesaling) as well as the regulation of consumer practices and consumer spaces by both the state and other systems of social authority and power.
To write about consumer histories in Ghana is also to write about the operation of global capitalism more broadly. My research shares the intentions of modern African business history and critical anthropological work, which has documented African businesspeople as everything from transporters to cattle suppliers, financiers to street vendors, and has shown them actively shaping local, regional, and international political economies. This research has uncovered transnational business networks from Freetown to Fouta Djallon, from Brazzaville to Paris, and in multiple routes across the Sahara that have long shaped the methods and modes of commercial exchange within and beyond the African continent.77 My analysis of similar linkages is further informed by feminist and critical race scholarship, two areas of study that have been essential to understanding the construction, circulation, and maintenance of power and inequality in Ghana. By applying these rigorous frameworks to the ways in which colonial and postcolonial consumer markets are constituted, I hope to offer new ways to think first about how gender and race are embedded in the policies and the practices of “doing business” and, second, about how the circulation of transnational capital is both a gendered and racialized experience.78 As Anna Tsing reminds us, “Rather than assume we know exactly what global capitalism is, even before it arrives, we need to find out how it operates in friction.”79 I argue that the history of consumer politics in modern Ghana provides one entry point for undertaking such a challenge.
CULLING THE CORPORATE ARCHIVE AND ANIMATING THE MARKET
My hope through this book is to offer a more interconnected vision of African consumer worlds. My aim in documenting the various social relationships that shaped the history of consumption is to not only show markets as contested spaces but also to encompass the range of experiences (excitement, hope, and determination, as well as fear, panic, and disillusion) that animated individual encounters with the market. To do so I draw on a wide range of sources, collected in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and throughout Ghana from a wide swath of both daily life and official business: government reports and correspondence, newspapers and magazines,