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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 thinking about the fundamental inferiority of nonwhite subjects influenced how firms imagined and encountered the Gold Coast market, but those ideas were also shaped by day-to-day business interactions with firms’ African staff and customers themselves. This argument has far-reaching implications for rethinking the expansion of consumer capitalism in Ghana. We will see that the banal places of business—company offices, wholesale stores, and retail shops—became spaces where ideas about race, cultural difference, and development were constructed, reinforced, and institutionalized through corporate policy. By drawing on inspection reports, monthly circulars, and correspondence between firms’ headquarters in Europe, main offices in the Gold Coast, and district branches throughout the colony, I demonstrate that “doing business” was itself a process where fictions about the untapped African market and the inability of Africans to control its potential were created by foreign firms to justify their financial and cultural intrusions.³

Yet this process of imagining was never unidirectional. The power of these European firms, just like the colonial governments they supported, is obvious to us; it is easy to see African staff and consumers as merely on the receiving end of this power. And indeed, most of what we know about African consumer history is about how firms, manufacturers, and advertisers envisioned African markets and imposed their own commercial agendas. Here we will consider imagining as a reciprocal rather than a one-sided process; through oral histories, I will show how African staff and consumers constructed their own counterfictions about firms that emerged from local beliefs, including those about the circulation of wealth and proper accumulation. For instance, the United Africa Company was often associated with bad magic and witchcraft; such beliefs reflected popular anxieties about the power of foreign capital, but also the reality that Africans after World War I increasingly lost control over market terms. These rich criticisms of the practices and policies of foreign firms further demonstrate that African men and women were, and are, far from passive recipients of global economic change. Links made between firms and witchcraft, typically expressed through humorous tropes and cautionary tales, were acute analyses of the tendencies of capital to push excessive growth and foster fetishism in consumers. The resilience of these stories, which still circulate in historical memory, reveal the importance of theorizing about the global economy “from the south” to disrupt the common sense assumptions that underlie fictive visions of how capitalism works.

I will first analyze the expansion of consumer markets in the Gold Coast at the turn of the nineteenth century and then consider how everyday commercial interactions between firms’ directors and district agents and African staff and customers shaped this process. While this chapter focuses mainly on the activities of the United Africa Company and Union Trading Company before the Second World War, I will also draw on personal memoirs, commercial guides, and photographs and recollections by the staff from other firms such as G. B. Ollivant and John Holt & Company. My focus on the experiences of European management and staff is not to overshadow the contributions of African businesspeople, who will become central to our story in chapter 2, but to explore the role of this professional managerial class of men in shaping and mediating capitalist relations in the colonies. These foreign firms established power, at least in part, by fabricating ideas about Africa and Africans as inherently untrustworthy and immoral.⁴ Discrepancies between policy and practice within firms, as well as African staff members’ own narratives about capitalist expansion, worked to counter these misconceptions, however. As historian Frederick Cooper has argued, “the story of European firms in West Africa is neither a saga of triumph of superior organization nor a tale of every-growing monsters sweeping the innocent before them.”⁵ The tension between the available language used by European managers to describe and define Africa and the quotidian operations of the merchandise business that proved their conceptions otherwise offers a more nuanced picture of how colonial capitalism operated. Above all, the relationship between European management and African staff and consumers reveals imperialism as not only a political and military apparatus but also as a commercial one both created and contested by the daily—and inseparable—interactions of culture and commerce.

SETTING THE COMMERCIAL SCENE

Until about the 1880s, Africa’s commercial trade with Europeans was confined to a few coastal enclaves, and the import-export business was conducted in cooperation with African merchants. While much of this trade had been administered through state-chartered firms like the Royal African Company (established in 1672), the eighteenth century saw the rise of individual private traders—the British, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and occasionally Americans.⁶ Most of these private traders were active in the transatlantic slave trade. Among other works, Margaret Priestley’s history on the elite coastal trading family, the Brews, provides details about the formation of these early West African merchant societies. For the purposes of this study it is important to note that foreign merchants, like Irish slave trader Richard Brew, often lived on the coast for extended periods of time and were subject to intense bargaining with wealthy African merchants and middlemen who owned businesses as large as some of the European companies. Some of these foreign merchants also married African women according to local custom; the range of benefits gained from such unions were pivotal to European men’s commercial success prior to the second half of the nineteenth century.⁷ For the most part, however, the European trading community was restricted and small; this allowed the African elite merchant class, also known as “merchant princes,” to hold strong bargaining positions and to play European rivals against one another.⁸

The abolition and suppression of the transatlantic slave trade at the turn of the nineteenth century began to reshape the terms of business between European and African merchants. Referred to by historians as a shift to “legitimate” commerce (in order to distinguish it from the illegal trade in slaves), this era saw the replacement of the trade in human beings with the trade in raw materials such as palm oil, groundnuts, rubber, timber, and minerals.⁹ Propelled in part by the spread of industrial capitalism and the need to supply new factories in Europe, the import-export trade among British, French, German, Swiss, and occasionally US firms in West Africa grew increasingly competitive.¹⁰ The circulation of standardized currencies, the absence of tariff barriers, and the mass production of consumables further contributed to this surge. The pace of trade also sped up with the invention of the steamship. As A. G. Hopkins points out, “in the middle of the century sailing ships took about thirty-five days to reach West Africa, but by 1900 the steamer had reduced this time by half.”¹¹

Such developments made it easier for both African and European newcomers to enter the commercial scene. As a result, a number of small private firms popped up along the coast. In contrast to the merchants before them, these people had little to no previous connection to West Africa. The Manchester firms John Walkden and Pickering & Berthound, as well as the Liverpool brothers who formed John Holt & Company, were some key examples (fig. 1.1). Likewise, shifting trading conditions introduced a new group of African businessmen. Distinct from wealthy African merchant princes who dictated the terms of overseas trade and agreements with foreigners, this new group mainly consisted of people who acted “either as independent wholesalers and retailers, or as agents selling goods on commission for manufacturing firms in Europe.”¹² This was a transition from previous decades in which African merchants operated mostly independent businesses outside the purview of European firms and supervisors.

FIGURE 1.1. Exterior of provision store, Sekondi, ca. 1910. Reproduced with kind permission of Unilever from the original at the Unilever Archives, UAC/1/11/9/12/31.

Thus, when British colonial officials arrived and officially claimed Accra as the capital of their crown colony in 1874, they carried forward an economic process that was already under way. In 1902 the creation of the Gold Coast colony was completed when the British annexed Asante and the Northern Territories and brought both regions under their jurisdiction. Most foreign firms continued to conduct business as usual with little interference from the colonial state. Major changes to the commercial landscape were the size, structure, and geographical location of firms’ operations; companies that had been situated on the coast for decades started to establish wholesale and retail stores inland. According to historian Kwame Arhin, in 1897 “trade in goods of European manufacture was microscopic” within northern Asante and the Northern Territories, but this trade expanded significantly after colonialism. Within “five years of the establishment of colonial rule,” demand soared for items including silk handkerchiefs, cheap cloth, assorted perfumes, combs, knives, tin spoons, hairpins, buttons, pomade, and mirrors.¹³ The imposition of colonial caravan tolls in 1898 to control trans-Saharan commerce and a general policing of trade routes in the two regions also contributed to this shift. We know that in the precolonial era trade with other West African countries had been particularly important. What was left of these networks with the imposition of colonialism was mainly trade with other British West African colonies.¹⁴

The expansion of firms into the interior was further aided by improvements in transportation and communication networks. To facilitate the extraction and export of raw materials such as cocoa, gold, and rubber, the Colonial Office began improving transportation, mostly through railway construction. Completed by 1902, new railway routes from Sekondi to Tarkwa to Kumasi were equipped with a telegraph system, a technology that improved internal communication within firms.¹⁵ The increasing number of all-weather roads was, however, the result of African rather than British achievement. These road networks made it easier for merchants to travel hundreds of miles from the coast to sell all types of goods, and to sell them more cheaply, to towns deep in the interior.¹⁶ (Before this time, porters balanced goods on their heads and carried them for several miles on foot—a journey that often took several days.) The new mobility shortened distances between population centers, areas of production, and ports. Imports of motor vehicles for commercial use, mostly Ford cars and light American trucks, rose from twenty-one in 1912 to 133 by 1913.¹⁷ New roads and railways determined the location and construction of new stores. Firms’ employees, as well as African chiefs, often cited “good roads” in appeals to firms for opening stores in their towns.¹⁸

New thinking in Britain about colonial markets also refocused manufacturers’ and exporters’ attention on Africa. British imperialists had long dreamed of their colonies as a vital market for British goods. Men like Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlin invoked the image of “new markets” abroad to “woo support for their imperial ambitions” among the British working class. Access to new markets, they assured the voting public, “would secure the future of British capitalism and thus British jobs.”¹⁹ Yet, it was not until after World War I that imperialist fantasies would begin to materialize. As historian Richard Rathbone argues, Africa before 1914 “was for the most part a dream for the greedy speculator.”²⁰ The devastation of the war and the economic stagnation that followed it introduced a new sense of urgency; imperial markets became essential to Britain’s recovery. This sentiment was echoed in British commercial publications, reinforced at public events like the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–25, and bolstered by individual businessmen who claimed that the African market was “one of the world’s hopes for the future.”²¹ Strengthening economic links between Britain and its colonial possessions became central to parliamentary discussions and was reflected in a series of tariff reforms throughout the interwar period. These initiatives allowed exports from the colonies free entry into Britain, whereas those outside the empire had to pay duties and set limits on the amount of goods imported into British West Africa from other countries. The rhetoric of imperial preference further increased awareness of the colonies as economically vital to the metropole. In 1926 the colonial secretary established the Empire Marketing Board as a means of promoting intra-empire trade and, through public marketing campaigns, convincing British consumers to buy commodities from the colonies.²² Interwar development efforts initiated by the Colonial Office further encouraged financial links between Britain and its imperial possessions. The Colonial Development Act of 1929, for instance, incentivized British capital investment throughout the empire.²³

It is from this interwar context that large foreign firms—which are central to the present study’s analysis—would emerge. In contrast to state-chartered companies and private firms, formed by one man or a partnership, twentieth-century firms were large limited liability companies established through the taking over of other firms. Among economic historians the years between 1880 and 1930 are known as the era of acquisitions. As smaller firms were swept up through mergers and takeovers, commercial power was concentrated in the hands of a few large firms. While some older firms, including John Holt & Company, outlasted this process, most did not. Independent African businessmen suffered most, however; African import-export businesses did not completely disappear, but many struggled to compete with the emergence of these large conglomerates. Operating with less capital, African-owned firms were more vulnerable to rapid changes in market fluctuations and could not match the capabilities of larger firms to import goods in large quantities at once. Combined with colonial policy that favored European business, these changes increasingly pushed African merchants “out to the margins in the system they had helped to create.” Specifically, they were “denied access to credit, price-fixing agreements, shipping rebates, and others sorts of concessions which Europeans enjoyed.”²⁴ Additionally, there was fierce competition with Lebanese and Syrian businessmen, whose numbers grew steadily after the war. The Gold Coast government categorized Lebanese and Syrians as a single group, and commercial records often used the terms interchangeably. Thus, in West Africa, the terms Syrian and Lebanese encompassed both groups as well as other Eastern Mediterranean migrants.²⁵ Commercial competition was further fueled by European firms that preferred to do business with these—slightly less foreign seeming—Lebanese businessmen over Africans. While historians have demonstrated how shrewd business strategies aided the success of Lebanese trading families, proximity to whiteness was also an important factor in their growing success as a new group of commercial middlemen operating between firms and African retailers and customers.²⁶

By 1930, three large firms prevailed: the United Africa Company (UAC), the Union Trading Company (UTC), and the Compagnie Française de l’Afrique Occidentale (CFAO).²⁷ In the Gold Coast, the main business activities of these commercial giants included the purchase, packaging, and export of raw materials (mainly cocoa) from producers and the importation, distribution, and sales of manufactured goods to consumers. All of these firms also operated shipping lines and owned large fleets of vehicles for delivery. Given that most manufacturers in Britain, Europe, and the United States did not build factories or open offices of their own, the services provided by large firms—shipping, distribution, sales, and promotion—were essential to reaching African markets. The commercial networks of these large firms were vast, comparable in size and importance to the administrative system operated by the colonial government, and as such a firm’s district agent in a single area often held more influence than the colonial district officer in charge. Timothy Burke refers to large firms like the UAC as “new modern monopoly firms” and argues that they became central to the operation and structure of colonial capitalism.²⁸

Out of the three major firms that came to dominate the West African commercial scene, the UAC was the largest and most powerful. Known as the West African trading arm of the Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever, the UAC was established in 1929 through a series of mergers and the acquisition of a number of other firms, some of which had dated back to the seventeenth century. Among the most important were the Royal Niger Company and the African & Eastern Trade Corporation, the latter an amalgamation of a number of firms (F. & A. Swanzy, Miller Brothers, and the African Association). Through the process of amalgamation, the UAC would inherit more than twelve thousand retail stores, fifty-eight wholesale stores, and thousands of credit customer accounts.²⁹ By the mid-1930s the UAC also purchased G. B. Ollivant (GBO) and the Swiss African Trading Company (SAT), yet these firms were allowed to retain their original company names, trademarks, and network of stores. By 1940 it also acquired the CFAO (a major competitor in French West Africa) and the German firm of G. Gottschalck. African customers often perceived of GBO and the SAT as separate from the UAC.³⁰ While the UAC had business interests in Morocco, in almost every country along the West African coast from Senegal to Angola, in the east and south from Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania to Zambia and Zimbabwe, the bulk of its assets remained in Nigeria and the Gold Coast. Although its parent company Unilever was formed in part by Dutch investment, the UAC’s headquarters remained in London; its directors, as well as most of its management and staff in the Gold Coast, were British.³¹

In the Gold Coast the UAC’s major competitor was the UTC. While the structure of the UTC’s merchandise business was similar to that of the UAC, the history of its formation as a “Christian enterprise” was quite different. First registered in Basel in 1859 under its German name Missions-Handlungs-Gesellschaft Basel, the Basel Mission Trading Company (BMTC) was originally part of the Basel Mission Society (BMS)—a pietistic organization from Switzerland with strong ties to southern Germany. By 1900 the BMS recorded over eleven mission stations throughout the Gold Coast with about seventeen thousand members. Profits from the BMTC were intended to finance the activities of the mission society, and BMTC stores were to provide missionaries with a regular supply of goods from Europe. From its inception, the BMTC was used by the BMS as an “instrument in transmitting their ethic and practices of work to their converts.”³² Through the teaching of “fair trading practices,” missionaries believed that qualities like self-discipline, hard work, and thriftiness could be cultivated. During the First World War, the British government regarded the company as “enemy property” and confiscated the BMTC due to the company’s high number of German personnel; the government deported the BMTC’s European staff. After a long legal battle, however, the company was awarded ₤250,000 and was allowed to reenter the Gold Coast in 1928 under its new name—the Union Trading Company.³³ While the UTC legally decoupled itself from the BMS after the war, the firm still expected its staff members to uphold and regularly practice Christian values through their work. The correlation between Christianity and commerce was central to the UTC’s operations in the Gold Coast and, as others have shown, integral to the way in which consumer capitalism developed in other African colonies.³⁴

PLACES OF BUSINESS AND PROFILES

Before examining places of business and the people who embodied them, let us first consider how channels of commodity distribution in the Gold Coast were structured.³⁵ Here I focus mainly on the merchandise side of business or the activities involved in the purchase and resale of manufactured goods rather than the produce side or the activities involved in cocoa buying and export. All imported goods—everything from farm equipment and toiletries to leather boots and automobiles—arrived via steamship at one of several ports spread along the coast. After its completion in 1928, the deepwater port at Takoradi would facilitate most of this traffic. Merchandise was received on-site by a firm’s agent, and a small army of African port workers divided it up and loaded it into trucks that transported it to district branches run by district agents or managers (the two titles were often used interchangeably). Each district branch acted as the main wholesale store for a region. Branches were typically located in highly populated coastal cities or in towns situated near busy transportation links. For the UAC these originally included branches in the cities of Aboso, Accra, Bekwai, Cape Coast, Koforidua, Konongo, Kumasi, Nkawkaw, Nsawam, Obuasi, Saltpond, Sekondi, Suhum, and Tarkwa.³⁶ At each district branch goods were further divided and were sent either to company-owned retail stores or sold to company credit customers. District branches responsible for overseeing larger regions, like the one at Kumasi, also had to supply various sub-branches. Both company credit customers and retail storekeepers then sold to three constituencies: independent storekeepers, petty traders, and individual consumers (meaning anyone who bought an item for personal consumption rather than to resell it). The petty traders and independent storekeepers, in turn, sold their goods to the same constituency of “end-use” consumers.³⁷

While branches located in coastal towns typically experienced a steady flow of customers, the pace of business at inland branches was dominated by the cocoa-growing season. Because the main cocoa harvest marketed from mid-October to mid-February, sales of goods peaked between October and December; the number of staff members thus fluctuated depending on a branch’s location and the time of year. In a detailed account of daily tasks and staff relations in a “typical cocoa town,” a European agent employed by John Holt & Company listed a total of nine permanent or salaried staff, as well as a number of other nonsalaried workers. Salaried staff positions included a bookkeeper, a main shop clerk, a wholesale shopkeeper, a cashier, a debt note clerk, an assistant debt note clerk, a statistics clerk, a truck driver, and a typist. The agent also included two salaried laborers who assisted staff with various tasks and errands and unloaded and unpacked crates of merchandise when they arrived. These laborers were also responsible for checking for breakage and theft and rounding up additional workers when big shipments came in. Nonsalaried staff included other people like the wholesale keeper’s apprentice (who was often a relative) and the truck driver’s partner. Based on other reports, salaried staff could also include a day and night watchman and a few salesmen attached to the branch; these sales positions were often filled temporarily by existing African clerks, during the slow selling months, or by others, like young men from Greece, recruited specifically for this purpose. The main tasks of salesmen included attracting new credit customers, converting those who worked for competitors, and promoting the use and sale of new products.

All district branches, and thus all district agents, were under the administration of a general manager in the firm’s main office, typically located in Accra.³⁸ The general manager was responsible for overseeing operations throughout the entire colony and directly answered to a firms’ board of directors, who were based at its headquarters abroad. A district agent was charged with overseeing all wholesale activities, managing the company-owned retail stores, stocktaking, and debt collection. In almost all cases district agent and other supervisory positions were held by European men; it was not until the 1930s that these managerial types of jobs were opened to a selected few Africans, and even then transition was slow and varied from firm to firm.³⁹ Both Europeans and Africans filled staff or clerk positions, but this depended on a branch’s location. The UAC used clerk as an umbrella term that could include a bookkeeper, a cashier, a typist, and anyone in charge of debit notes and credit accounts. Monthly salaries were varied based on a pay grade or a company’s compensation system based on a worker’s experience, performance evaluations, and length of service. Company-owned retail stores also followed a hierarchy based on race. One European storekeeper and a few African assistants usually ran the stores in larger towns, while firms entrusted African storekeepers to oversee entire stores in smaller towns, though—unlike European staff members—most African staff members, including clerks, had to be secured by a bond. The UTC, for instance, issued contracts that required Africans holding positions “where there was a possibility of theft and fraud” to pay a cash deposit as a form of security or insurance. Even though they did not receive salaries, company credit customers were also required to provide a deposit before being issued a company passbook, a paper book used to record transactions on a deposit account. The terms of these agreements varied considerably, and as I will show in chapter 2, both company storekeepers and credit customers actively evaded oversight by European agents.

The primary sites of contact between European staff and African staff and customers were district branches (wholesale stores) and company-owned retail stores. Upon entering a typical early twentieth-century wholesale or retail store, contemporary observers would immediately be struck by the organization, the variety of goods on display, and the heavy wooden counter that separated the customer from the storekeeper and his assistants (fig. 1.2). With few exceptions, most goods were kept behind the counter and sold for set prices that could not be negotiated. Almost any and every type of commodity could be bought in these stores. Felt hats, metal pots and buckets, biscuits, oil lamps, a variety of liquor and tinned provisions, cloth, canvas shoes and leather boots, trunks, and umbrellas were stacked high on shelves behind the storekeeper. Bicycles, buckets, and lanterns hung from hooks attached to beams or railings that crisscrossed the ceiling. More expensive items including watches, sewing machines, drugs, perfumes, and silk heads-carves were displayed in locked glass cases. How a storekeeper displayed an item was often more important than the item itself; glass protected an item from dust and dirt, but also added to the overall prestige of a commodity and the store that sold it.⁴⁰ In his urgent request for a “huge vitrine,” for instance, a UTC agent at Akuse reported to the head office that items like “shirts, pajamas and trousers are only bought when they are properly displayed”—that is, behind glass.⁴¹ Except for a cash register or the storekeeper’s credit account book, store counters were to be kept bare. To create even more of a barrier between buyer and seller, some firms installed tall metal gates that sat on top of sales counters. These partitions were used to prevent theft, but also to create a certain type of commercial order that made distinctions between the role of the storekeeper and that of the customer.

FIGURE 1.2. Interior of provision store, Accra, May 1907. Reproduced with kind permission of Unilever from the original at the Unilever Archives, UAC/1/11/9/10/17.

Most district branches, and some larger retail stores, were also places of residence: the first floor consisted of the warehouse, store, and offices, and the second floor was typically reserved for living quarters. While the district agent and senior staff could occupy a private corner of the building or live off-site in a bungalow (usually in the European part of town), junior staff shared accommodations. More than just places of business, district branches were often where European staff slept, ate, and socialized, though all the domestic labor, including cooking, cleaning, and grounds keeping, was done by African staff. In some cases a sole European staff member was assigned to an “outstation”—a sub-branch or store located outside the major towns and cities; miles away from the coast, he often lived alone.

One of the major differences between this group of European men who filled agent and staff positions and managed the operations of district branches and stores, versus those who came before them, was the amount of time spent in the Gold Coast. In striking contrast to the past generations of European men who stayed for long periods of time—some who even settled permanently in coastal towns, married African women, and raised children—this newer group worked on short, renewable, two-year contracts.⁴² It was commonly held that two years was the minimum time required for “a man to get used to his job.” ⁴³ Indeed, some men did stay on twenty to thirty uninterrupted years, without periodic leaves to Europe, and they built long careers, but by the early twentieth century these Old Coasters, as they were known, would grow to be the exception. Besides senior management, who presumably served multiple contracts working their way up to such positions, most European staff were unmarried men in their early twenties. UAC directors preferred men around the age of twenty-two and while they allowed youth “who appeared to have a matured physique and mentality at an earlier age,” they refused to hire men over the age of twenty-six.⁴⁴ Initially, firms did not generally allow staff to bring their wives or families from Europe, but with special permission, European wives of staff often worked alongside their husbands. Some even gained “manageress” titles and kept stores in their husbands’ absence or independently. This, was not common practice however, as most men sent to the Gold Coast were young and single.

By the time this new generation of men entered the commercial scene, images of Africa as wild, dangerous, and primitive were well established. The first internationally circulated commercial guide, the Red Book of West Africa (1920), echoed nineteenth-century pseudoscientific racist tropes that upheld ideals of white supremacy and were used to justify European imperial expansion. Belief in the “white man’s burden,” the idea that it was the moral duty of white men to civilize and rule black and brown people, was also upheld in European commercial circles. Since the nineteenth century, European thinkers and economists positioned the consumption of goods as a key attribute of a “civilized” society. Lack of this desire in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, they argued, was a sign of these societies as primitive and backward.⁴⁵ Employees of predecessor firms, like F. & A. Swanzy, for instance, were celebrated in Europe as “white pioneers” who “laid the foundations of civilization” through commerce. According to the Red Book, it was commercial men—not explorers, travelers, or missionaries—who had tamed “one of the most appalling territories in the world,” described in detail as the “headquarters of the slave trade, where death in innumerable ways menaced the white man, and fierce tribes exemplified the lowest forms of savagery and horror indescribable.” ⁴⁶ Such images not only bolstered imperial expansion but positioned the existence of European enterprise and its control over African markets as self-evident. This was the discourse imparted to European commercial men arriving in Africa to work for large firms, and many of these men adopted imperial rhetoric to describe and make sense of their experiences.⁴⁷ But as we shall see, profit making in the Gold Coast merchandise business required other types of myths and stories.

CONSTRUCTING A COMMERCIAL BATTLEFIELD

In his impressive 832-page history of merchant capital in West Africa, historian D. K. Fieldhouse characterizes the West African economy, prior to 1939, as a “commercial jungle.” Because it was geared to the international commodity market, which was highly speculative, Fieldhouse argues that “its domestic market fluctuated far more erratically than that of industrialized countries.” ⁴⁸ The initial absence of trade barriers also led to market crowding and intense competition among British, French, German, Swiss, and occasionally US companies. His description of West Africa as a wild and dangerous place, economically speaking, further captures the era of acquisitions and company mergers after the First World War. According to Fieldhouse, economic conditions in West Africa resembled Thomas Hobbes’s definition of the state of nature: “the life of most firms proved to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” ⁴⁹ It is unclear if Fieldhouse’s analysis of the West African market as a “jungle” comes from his own perceptions or was gleaned from his research in corporate archives, mainly those of the UAC; regardless, the imperialist connotations of his language are striking.

Among European directors, agents, and staff of foreign firms, the Gold Coast market was relentlessly represented as a place of uncertainty, opposition, and conflict. At their extreme, the firms’ records and correspondence compared doing business in Africa to going to war, not unlike the African Mail editorial that opened this chapter. Especially during times of heightened competition, firms’ employees likened the African market to a battlefield, a place to attack and conquer; directors and general managers equated their European staff with troops in combat.⁵⁰ War rhetoric was used to encourage district agents to fight like soldiers on the firm’s behalf and thus inspire a sense of duty and allegiance to the firm.⁵¹ Less clear is where this war imagery situated Africans; sometimes they seem to be considered subjects—far from equal, but hopefully loyal—in a larger fight between competing firms, and at other times they are implied as potential enemies or as prizes to be “won.”⁵²

Battlefield and market comparisons further constructed the Gold Coast itself as a place of danger, fear, and disease. Descriptions of physical exhaustion and poor health are constant in correspondence between district branches and headquarters. In a 1923 letter, an agent at Saltpond went as far as to describe the Gold Coast as the “land of death” and European employees as its “victims.”⁵³ While malaria, yellow fever, and other illnesses did affect a number of staff in the years before the regular use of quinine (around 1906), the idea that doing business in West Africa was dangerous, and could literally kill, was constructed and reinforced through letters from younger staff long after.⁵⁴ For instance, the UTC published death tolls among its staff in official company histories meant for European readership.⁵⁵ The image of Africa as the “White Man’s Grave,” which referred to the high mortality rates of early white missionaries and colonists, was evoked frequently to explain poor business conditions and to request a leave back to Europe.⁵⁶ As other scholars have demonstrated, narratives that dramatized the physical vulnerability of Europeans in the colonies were not limited to Africa. A similar phenomenon in nostalgic narratives about the British-ruled Raj also constructed India as a place of death.⁵⁷ While it is difficult to measure the extent to which fears about life in the tropics affected firms’ staff physically and mentally, the fact that employees wrote about such concerns with regularity in their letters home suggests they either believed sincerely in such dangers or had a stake in continuing this vision of the land around them.⁵⁸

If West Africa was figured as a place of potential death and the market as a place of combat, how did these representations influence day-to-day business relations? Within European business circles there was widespread suspicion of Africans in general, and these attitudes manifested themselves in firms’ policies. Strict credit terms, for example, were premised on the idea that Africans were inherently dishonest; in its 1909 instruction manual the BMTC advised its agents that credit to Africans was to be given sparingly, citing “the Negro’s unreliable character and his natural bent for the untruth and fraud.” According to the manual, agents were to exercise caution in all business dealings with Africans; “bad characteristics” including carelessness, deceit, incompetence, and immorality were named as prime examples.⁵⁹ Not much had changed in these attitudes thirty years later. In a 1936 report to one of the UAC’s managing directors, D. D. Pitcher advised agents to more carefully control and manage the issuing of credit. The accumulation of large debts was due in part to lack of self-restraint and ease of temptation. Rather than account for poor economic conditions or call into question the firms rigid credit terms, Pitcher blamed the accumulation of large debts on “the African” who “so invariably cannot resist.” ⁶⁰ These accusations, produced three decades apart, reveal the persistence of such beliefs among firms—particularly in crafting guidelines for their European staff.

This general mistrust of Africans was echoed by branch agents, especially in letters to their superiors concerning the hiring and supervising of African staff. In response to queries about his inability to find an African storekeeper, one UTC agent from Akuse complained that identifying good Africans in his district required time and patience because most were “not honest.” ⁶¹ He therefore explained the need to scrupulously evaluate the character, outlook, background, and family of potential candidates. By deploying familiar tropes about Africans as fundamentally suspect, the Akuse agent was able to avoid accountability, if only temporarily, for what may have been his own ineptitude in recruiting and retaining local staff. The agent’s fear of being terminated was a legitimate concern; other firms, like GBO, considered similar instances as grounds for dismissal. For example, in a series of letters concerning a European agent at Tarkwa, his superiors concluded that the agent’s failure to “bring African storekeepers into line” called for his replacement by “a much stronger type of man.” ⁶² The cumulative effect of all of these laments, instructions, and insinuations was to pathologize the behavior of Africans. As with endless other instances of colonial thinking, these Europeans rarely seemed to acknowledge that they were making vast generalizations about an entire country’s people, often on the basis of a few brief encounters.⁶³

Such attitudes further shaped the practice of shopkeeping. Product display and surveillance policies were of particular concern. While the UTC reminded its European storekeepers in a 1939 instruction manual to “never forget that the black trader, the modest worker or the small bushman in front of the counter are all his customers bringing in earnings/income,” the firm also emphasized the need to maintain “strict control” of the staff and of African customers inside a store. The manual is worth quoting at length:

The European shopkeeper is not allowed to leave the shop without calling another European as a replacement . . . ​blind corners in the shop have to be eliminated because black employees or customers could get into mischief. We need to pay attention that there are no goods piled up that would impede the view over the store. The supervision of the black staff is [also] very important. This strict control is necessary because of these people’s tendency towards unjust good. . . . ​It is important never to turn against the counter and to always watch closely so that no goods disappear whilst helping customers.⁶⁴

Even though firms later noted that most theft was by customers, not employees, and occurred at the sales counter, it was not uncommon for European agents and storekeepers to search African employees’ pockets at the end of each day. In some instances, African staff were required to walk by supervisors with “reversed pockets” after every shift before heading home. African clerks and shop assistants were also forbidden from handling a customer’s money and from handing over the items purchased. Such guidelines suggested that tills or cash registers were to be operated by Europeans only. African staff that acted otherwise were subject to fines or dismissal. Thus, the organization of company-owned stores was premised on the understanding that African staff and shoppers were inherently suspect, and the daily work of transactions with shoppers and relations with staff was saturated in racial mistrust. With such constant reminders that European staff must proceed with caution, shopkeeping entailed more than just selling goods; firms also constructed it as a defensive position.

Relations with African women, both professional and personal, were also a topic of official policy, and the most vivid demonstration of firms’ attempts to enforce racial separation between their white staff and local communities. As a former UTC employee hired in the 1960s, Arthur Wettstein explains that the distance between African and European employees was actively promoted by the UTC’s “policy of prudence.” He remembers, “It was not without purpose that prior to departure from the Head Office in Basel a voluminous document on do’s and don’ts was handed to every candidate, which among other prominent rules contained a prohibition of intense contact with African women on threat of dismissal.” ⁶⁵ Such efforts to restrict intimate relations between Europeans and Africans, particularly African women, confirms that company employees were not adhering to the rules.⁶⁶ As former SAT manager Hans Rudolf Roth recalled, many of his coworkers in Kumasi had African girlfriends, including his supervisor who lived in town with his Swiss wife. While the “intense contact” rule did not prevent sexual relationships, it did deter many European employees from legally marrying their African girlfriends and from fulfilling obligations to children from these relationships.⁶⁷ Efforts to enforce rules on staffs’ private and sexual lives reveal the measures firms undertook to police racial boundaries in the name of commerce. Such top-down policies suggest that company leaders believed interracial unions—even when their relationships were publicly recognized and legitimated through marriage—could threaten a staff members’ loyalty, could tarnish a firm’s reputation, and were bad for business overall.

Another important aspect of company policy, and another effort to maintain divisions, was the expectation that European employees were there to set an example for Africans. For instance, Wettstein remembers, “We often heard that ‘we are a Christian enterprise’ and were obviously expected to act accordingly in private and business life.” ⁶⁸ Based on notions that African men and women lacked the capacity to conduct business without European guidance, the UTC claimed that, without its leadership, business would “end in chaos.” ⁶⁹ Modeling proper behavior could mean everything from upholding company policies to demonstrating cleanliness and proper sartorial practices.⁷⁰ A 1931 circular to all UTC district agents justified the importance of these tasks as necessary to “encourage further reflection, and initiative and that also teaches independence.”⁷¹ For the UTC, upholding Christian values, hard work, self-discipline, and frugality through moral education defined commercial relations with Africans long after its formal ties with the BMS were severed. As Stephan Miescher has shown, Basel missionaries expected converts to live according to the Gemeindeordnung, a set of rules that intervened in every aspect of daily life including gender relations, living arrangements, and time management and “made conscious efforts to reshape African personhood.”⁷² Although less overtly religious, the UAC also considered itself a model for proper selling, through a responsibility for upholding retail standards and teaching Africans the correct way to do business. Corporate policy continued to position commerce as a civilizing force and the market as a space that held transformative power. It is no accident that African men and women would grow increasingly suspicious of its operation and effects.

Not all Africans were considered equally dishonest or untrustworthy. Correspondence with headquarters back in Europe reveals an ongoing quest by agents for good and truthful staff—particularly shopkeepers. In the process, firms created ethnic hierarchies based on what groups proved easiest to manage. According to the UTC, the Kwawu were considered the most dependable.⁷³ Originally itinerant traders from a region about one hundred miles from the coast (on Asante’s eastern border), the Kwawu had by the 1920s settled in prosperous cocoa towns and also based themselves, often temporarily, in commercial cities along the coast.⁷⁴ In a 1927 general report the UTC agent at Saltpond described good storekeepers in the Fante districts, located along the coast, as “rare as gold!”⁷⁵ Three years later, another agent in Saltpond offered his own reasoning to explain the storekeeper shortage. He claimed that Fantes did not understand proper store management or the importance of cleanliness. “These people are very stubborn,” he argued, “which is not the case with the Kwahus or Asante.”⁷⁶ In an earlier, private letter an agent 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 Another problem was the system of commodity distribution. While firms tried to ensure that all district branches were given equal amounts of goods and sold to customers at comparable prices, this was not always the case. In other words, what happened once goods arrived at branches often depended on the personal relationships among agents, their African staff (including clerks, salesmen, and storekeepers), and credit customers. Storekeepers often reserved choice goods for favored customers, agents reduced set prices to attract more sales, and African staff supplied credit customers with goods beyond the value of their credit limits and then split the profits. A 1930 report on internal organization by the UTC’s general manager further confirmed that the autonomy of district offices was not only a UAC problem. “Everybody acts according to his own opinion and head,” he argued. “We need to have stronger organization.”⁸⁸

Poor coordination across a company’s various branches and internal competition within firms also made it difficult to implement and standardize policy. For instance, responding to instructions from the UTC’s general manager to terminate passbooks in the flour and sugar trade, the agent in Nkawkaw angrily wrote, “I have already stopped all the passbooks without exception . . . ​whatever is decided though needs to be carried out everywhere the same . . . we need a clear uniform system.”⁸⁹ Some agents may have also intentionally ignored the policy. After all, the elimination of passbooks—a system that had rested on maintaining good relations with African retailers and was facilitated by credit—was commercial self-sabotage. A refusal to follow orders suggests that on occasion agents considered loyalty to customers in their district (supplying them with necessary goods on credit) as more important than complying with company rules or creating a united front with their European colleagues. Further exposing the extent of such disorganization and the lack of systematic consistency, another UTC agent at Kumasi notified head offices of mutual price undercutting and competition among stores within the UTC and not just with outside competitors.⁹⁰ Similar offenses were recorded elsewhere by the UAC. After his 1929 inspection of more than thirty stores located in and around Kumasi, D. D. Pitcher reported, “In their anxiety to obtain maximum turnover, the Agents are inclined to allow internal competition to creep in.”⁹¹ Agents employed by the same firms, as well as those subject to the same agreed-upon selling prices, frequently sold at lower rates, willfully violating minimum price agreements to attract more sales.

The experiences of individual agents also contributed to a lack of consistency. District agents living near and working closely with African staff and customers did not always agree with the main office in Accra, the head office abroad, or even with each other on best policy. On the topic of the UTC’s inability to find “good African storekeepers,” some agents believed that factors like low pay and “miserable conditions” also came into play.⁹² One agent blamed constant turnover not on African unreliability but on the better wages offered by the other companies. UTC storekeepers often quit to work for other firms like GBO, Holt, and the UAC, all of which were known to pay higher wages.⁹³ Another agent revealed that “good Africans” preferred a clerk position over that of storekeeper, which was considered a risky job.⁹⁴ While agents may not have outwardly disputed the racial ideologies that categorized African storekeepers as suspicious, the fact that they provided alternative reasoning for the difficulty of identifying a stable African workforce challenged blanket assumptions that all Africans should not be trusted. It also shows how attitudes toward African staff differed among agents. Thus operations at district branches varied depending on the agent in charge and his ability to comply.

The unpublished memoir of long-term UTC employee Christian Spoerri, who began his career in 1915, further demonstrates these inconsistencies and the tensions between corporate policy and everyday practices: “None of us white people in the wholesale was more informed than Martin Sowah, our head wholesale clerk. He was an all-around product expert and I was learning a lot from him. At this point I have to emphasize that I was never embarrassed to learn from an African.”⁹⁵ It is unclear whether Spoerri ever expressed this attitude while officially employed by the UTC or whether he recognized his reliance on Sowah only in retrospect. In this instance, however, we see how Spoerri’s trust in Sowah’s expertise illustrates a possibility—namely, that the assumed power relationship between European agents and their African staff could be temporarily inverted. It is important to note that Spoerri’s superiors distinguished him from other agents, describing his “abrupt and strong” attitude in a private letter, a distinction that suggests that his views were atypical.⁹⁶ Spoerri’s statement that he was never embarrassed to learn from Africans suggests that other agents definitely were.