Christian Dior fashions are used as representations to both celebrate “third world advancement” and signify the dangers of globalization and capitalist culture. These images are sometimes intended to shock and surprise Western audiences, who tend to still see the continent as different, distant, and underdeveloped. In many ways, academic literature also perpetuates some of these tired tropes. For example, in global studies of consumption the development of African consumerism is often positioned as part of a linear progression that slowly creeps across the globe or as a “last stop” in a process that originated in Europe or North America.55 Additionally, histories of global commerce persistently portray African men and women as either producers of raw materials or as industrial laborers catering to the demands of Western markets and consumers.
Certainly this is not the case, as a number of scholars in the field of African history have shown. We know that West Africans participated in precolonial commercial networks and have traded long distance with Europeans since the fifteenth century, beginning with the Portuguese. In fact, the economic history of Ghana is extremely rich. Studies of African merchant communities and histories of prominent coastal trading families that predated colonial rule have been at the center of several foundational works.56 Despite Ghana’s significant economic past, Africans as consumers have not been the primary focus in the literature. Given that the trafficking in slaves (figured as “Atlantic commodities” by slave traders) and the violence that permeated it dominated commercial life on the Gold Coast,57 early economic scholarship concentrated mainly on the organization and impact of transatlantic slave trade economies. This lack of attention to the consumer was also shaped by theories of underdevelopment that dominated African economic scholarship in the 1970s. Walter Rodney’s influential study How Europe Underdeveloped Africa marked a crucial shift in African economic history from a Eurocentric to an African- and Caribbean-centered perspective, bringing to the forefront the term capitalist imperialism—the idea that imperialism was, and should be understood, as an economic phenomenon. Here Rodney directly took on a generation of European (and North American) economic historians like D. K. Fieldhouse, who argued against the severity of colonialism on the basis that it was “not that profitable” for Europeans. In attempting to counter these claims by tracing the roots of underdevelopment through centuries of institutions that exploited African labor and resources, however, Rodney’s work did not consider the role of Africans as consumers or active participants in a larger Atlantic economy of goods. The only mention of consumerism in his book was in combating the work of colonial apologists who used African consumerism as some sort of evidence that the European slave trade “was undoubtedly a moral evil, but it was economically good for Africa.”58 In many ways, African consumer histories have been trapped within this uncertain space, between bourgeois and radical Marxist debates that have persisted in various forms for decades.59
Within these confines, however, we can find glimpses of the goods being exchanged as well as the manners in which imports were first used. Challenging popular myths that Africa was a dumping ground for “assorted rubbish”—that early trade goods consisted of cheap liquor, useless trinkets, and defective firearms—historians of material culture have cataloged detailed lists of various commodities registered and sold along the coast. For instance, even before the eighteenth century, Dutch traders stored 218 types of merchandise in Elmina Castle. Indian textiles, European linen, felt hats, Venetian beads, smoking pipes, mirrors, and paper, along with fancier goods like multicolored umbrellas, silver-headed canes, velvet-upholstered armchairs, and Turkish carpets were among the items listed on customs records, trading post inventories, and orders placed by African merchants.60 Such evidence, however small, testifies to the engagement of Africans as consumers within the Atlantic economy. The variety of goods listed further demonstrates desires beyond those stereotypical staples of the slave trade, like guns and liquor—two commodities that are often blamed for perpetuating further violence and destruction on the West African coast.
Scholarship since the late 1960s on the ending of the slave trade and the shift to “legitimate” commerce introduced new areas of economic and historical study.61 Even so, the consumer still figures as only a marginal character in a larger story that tends to focus on two types of activities: the business of large colonial trading firms and changes in agricultural production. In the first type, historians focused on the rise of merchant capital and the relationship between European firms and the emerging colonial state. Some of this literature falls into the category of corporate or company history and was written by firms’ European employees. Frederick Pedler, a former colonial officer and the deputy chairman of the UAC from 1965 to 1968, wrote The Lion and the Unicorn in Africa, one of the first published histories of the UAC and the various British and Dutch firms that came to form it. Other studies were interested in evaluating the extent of collusion between merchant firms and the colonial administration. D. K. Fieldhouse made a distinction between the interests of colonialists and capitalists, while historians like Adu Boahen, Rhonda Howard, and certainly Walter Rodney saw their interests as basically one and the same. Another body of literature within this first type, written over the last two decades by business historians, explores the implications of Gold Coast nationalist politics and decolonization on European firms. Stephanie Decker and Sarah Stockwell, for instance, have traced the strategies used by British business to legitimize their continued presence amid nationalist agitation and protest in the years following the Second World War.62
The second type of economic scholarship centers on the activities surrounding agricultural production—specifically, the development of the Gold Coast cocoa industry. Scholarship by Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian, Gareth Austin, Polly Hill, Gwendolyn Mikell, and Ivor Wilks has been foundational in shaping the contours of this literature.63 By 1911 cocoa had become the colony’s largest export and main source of income. To illustrate, estimates from cocoa sales in Asante rose from £63,000 in 1909 to £700,000 in 1915.64 Unlike eastern and southern Africa, there was never a large European or white settler population in the Gold Coast, so profits from cash crop farming remained, for the most part, in African hands.65 Many cocoa-buying points, especially in the growing areas, had attached wholesale and retail stores where farmers were encouraged to spend their cash. Firms’ produce buyers therefore acted as storekeepers and took responsibility for both sides of the business: the buying of the cocoa crop for export and the selling of imports to consumers. Among some cocoa farmers, the two activities were synonymous; in his memoir about his childhood in Asante, Thomas E. Kyei equates traveling with his father to cocoa buying stations with opportunities to view and buy items from abroad or goods from “the country of white men.” 66 While the increase in consumer imports grew alongside the cocoa business, the production side of the cocoa industry has always overshadowed the consumption side in most of these histories.
Through a third type of scholarship framed by the concerns of early labor historians and feminist scholars that focused on women’s contributions, we are able to catch a small glimpse into the lives of consumers. We know from Gold Coast labor historians like Jeff Crisp, Raymond Dumett, and Richard Jefferies that access to consumer goods spurred industrial workers to strike for higher wages in the gold mines and on the railways as early as 1918.67 Furthermore, we learn how women came to dominate retail trade as men shifted their energies toward cocoa profits and wage employment. Studies by Gloria Addae, Gracia Clark, and Claire Robertson also reveal how Ghanaian women devised intricate strategies though market trading, temporary liaisons with European and African men (privileged in the colonial order), and economic solidarity with each other to obtain goods, from basic foodstuffs to kitchen utensils and cosmetics.68 As Clark eloquently puts it in her study on market women in Kumasi, “Whether this balancing act resembles harmonious orchestration or frantic juggling, in the experience of a trader it holds the key to daily survival and successful accumulation.” 69 Rather than positioning these struggles as reactions or responses to changing economic structures, I wish to explore them as fundamental to shaping how colonial capitalism was constituted in the first place. Through the lens of consumption rather than production, the present volume seeks to revisit this early economic literature and emphasize these “balancing acts” as embedded in the very fabric of African consumer histories.
Over the past ten years scholars of Africa have become increasingly interested in African consumer practices and the