consumer markets at the center of the social, cultural, and political transformations that not only shaped the colonial period but also Ghana’s relationship to the global economy. I uncover transnational business networks as key sites where knowledge about Africa, African markets, and the nature of global exchange were produced by foreign trading firms to establish commercial superiority. The growth of foreign capital after the First World War required fabricating a parallel narrative about African businesspeople as untrustworthy and immoral and the African market as a space of commercial chaos and danger. Chapter 1, which focuses specifically on the relationships between foreign firms and their African employees and consumers, reveals the colonial state as not just a political and military apparatus but a commercial one that produced a specific set of social relations for its own benefit. Yet those efforts were fraught and often illusory. The superior market knowledge of Africans, the contradictions between a firm’s policy and its practice, and the dilemmas of on-the-ground interactions all demonstrated the limits of colonial capitalism, as did African counternarratives about capitalist expansion and the potential dangers of consuming, which persistently disrupted efforts by the UAC and UTC to fully control and dictate market terms.
This fundamental struggle of foreign firms—between the desire to maintain commercial authority and their reliance on African knowledge about the market—defined commercial life in the first of half of the twentieth century. However, tensions escalated during World War II; shortages and the inability of firms to implement government-imposed quotas and price controls revealed the extent of this dependency. Set in the 1940s and 1950s, chapter 2 takes a closer look at the specific strategies employed by African shopkeepers and credit customers in shaping corporate policies and the international circuits through which firms operated. My analysis of the UAC’s credit customer business, in particular, asks us to consider how preexisting ideas about racial and gender inferiority affected market relations and how these constructs were produced within the ongoing structuring of global capitalism. Through the corporate language of professionalization, we see how the market expertise of African women was refigured as deceptive and outdated, and thus how these women were placed at a distance from and at odds with modern economic development.
The book’s remaining chapters address the late 1950s through the 1970s—the decades that spanned the movement toward independence, self-rule under Kwame Nkrumah and the CPP, and control of the government by two different military regimes. The debates surrounding the planning, construction, and operation of Kingsway, one of Ghana’s largest and most famous department stores, are the backbone of chapter 3. Embedded in the politics of decolonization, this centerpiece of Accra’s shopping district demonstrated a new relationship with foreign capital and symbolized Nkrumah’s hopes for legitimizing Ghana as a newly independent nation. Owned and operated by the UAC, Kingsway was part of a larger public relations strategy prompted by decolonization. Fueled by demands from Nkrumah and Accra residents, the building of Kingsway revealed a temporary inversion of a past colonial relationship. Yet the project of postcolonial nation building and the fulfillment of consumer aspirations were often at odds. Beneath the store’s sleek exterior, modern technologies, and promises of convenience and efficiency festered generational conflict and inequalities of class and gender. Young salaried saleswomen became objects of desire and disgust, while young, educated managers found it difficult to assert their authority over older employees who refused to see a fancy education as trumping age and experience.
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the militarization of the market—namely, the efforts undertaken by military regimes to control the consumer market and define the boundaries of consumption. After the 1966 coup, the National Liberation Council (NLC) used ideologies of consumerism to attract foreign investors and the support of local businessmen who had been neglected under Nkrumah’s socialist agenda. Chapter 4 analyzes Ghana’s first International Trade Fair as part of a larger NLC refashioning project that celebrated the country’s transition to a free market capitalist economy. Through the fair, the NLC also reintroduced older ideas about wealth and accumulation considered vital for the country’s economic, political, and moral reconstruction. The NLC accused Nkrumah and the CPP of dismantling the authority of chiefs, elders, and parents and corrupting the morals of youth—especially young women. The fair thus established a new, more disciplined form of consumerism that proscribed certain limitations and restrictions in the name of national reform. Ghana’s second coup in 1972 and the violence undertaken to instill market discipline serve as the backdrop of chapter 5. Under dire economic conditions and commodity shortages, the National Redemption Council led by Acheampong seized power and aimed to legitimize their rule through a policy of state-guaranteed economic stabilization. Strict regulations (reminiscent of colonial market controls) required military and police involvement in all facets of the market. Via oral histories of this market scarcity, we reconstruct the experiences of those targeted by volunteer price inspectors and government-appointed antihoarding squads. I show how the criminalization of those buying and selling outside state-regulated guidelines shaped people’s relationship with goods and the ways in which they perceived themselves as consumers.
In sum, the book’s exploration of consumer politics in modern Ghana complicates the old “European exploitation versus African resistance” binary and disrupts representations of Africans as merely laborers or producers for consumers elsewhere. The analytical shift from consumer culture to consumer politics also allows us to account for how issues like gender and racial inequalities are implicated in—and act as driving forces behind—commercial and business networks that span the globe. By emphasizing the centrality of people and human relationships to Ghana’s economic past, Market Encounters introduces a radical rethinking of consumption studies from an African-centered perspective. Such a vantage point enhances our understanding of colonial capitalism in all of its intricacies, legacies, and contradictions.
1
A Door “Wide Open”
Imagining Gold Coast Markets
IN APRIL 1915, the African Mail, a weekly British trade publication, featured an editorial titled “Africa to the Fore.” Emphasizing the British public’s increasing knowledge about the continent, the article declared that “there has never been a period in the history of West Africa when she has been so much in the public eye. The ‘man in the street’ [is] rapidly becoming familiar with place names which a few months ago were undreamt of.” While the author of the editorial, Edmund D. Morel, was of course referring to World War I and events like the invasion of Germany’s West African colonies, which had made headlines around the globe, the piece was concerned with much more than the success of the Allied troops. Specifically addressing British “men of business,” Morel wrote, “The war is providing new opportunities, but are we taking them? Hardware, machinery, cycles, apparel, perfumery, drugs and medicines, disinfectants, agricultural implements, foodstuffs, motors, constructional buildings, all of these things find a ready and constantly expanding sale . . . the manufacturers of this country should be preparing their campaign . . . but the attack must be made now.” His conclusion was simple: “the door of Africa is lying wide open.”1 Morel’s use of “to attack” as a way to discuss economic expansion is particularly telling evidence of the imbrication of commerce and militarism.
This chapter situates Morel’s call to commercial action within the larger realm of the West African import-export trade after the First World War and, in particular, the increasing power of large European firms to shape that trade. We know that, from the late nineteenth century onward, firms forged relationships with colonial governments throughout Africa to monopolize markets and in the process seized power once shared with African businesspeople. But what we have not explored is how these efforts to consolidate and organize trade actually played out on the ground.2 Imperial