Market Encounters. Bianca Murillo
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private papers and memoirs. While each of these sources introduces its own set of problems and challenges, together they enable the book’s larger goal of putting disparate sources into conversation in order to offer a more holistic understanding of consumer politics. Nowhere is this disparate feeling, and both the problems and challenges that accompany it, more evident than with my two most important types of sources: corporate archives and oral histories.
Economic and business historians regularly rely on corporate sources to reconstruct economic pasts; I believe that corporate archives have untapped potential for reconstructing social and cultural history.80 Such history, particularly for this time and place, usually relies on the records kept by governments and religious missions—and as a result, these histories tend to focus on how people’s lives intersected with such institutions as schools, courts, and hospitals. Yet these sources often lack a sense of how Africans engaged with private industry and business; therefore, the resulting histories too often ignore African relationships with the market beyond top-down legislation. In contrast, my use of staff correspondence, managers’ circulars, and district reports provide crucial details about the role that Africans—not to mention Europeans, Indians, and Lebanese—played in the rocky terrain of West African commerce.
The contents of these corporate sources are surprisingly rich. Firms like the UAC and UTC had much to gain or lose with regard to their West African businesses, and they kept impressive records on all aspects of Ghana’s import-export trade that span both the colonial and postcolonial periods. Furthermore, some European managers wrote extensively about the lives of individual African employees on issues that extended beyond what would be considered a typical business, including family and inheritance, religion and the supernatural, and entertainment and leisure activities. One European manager even took it upon himself to produce a type of amateur ethnography on his African coworkers—unbeknownst to them.81 Other groups were included in these reports as well; the business of Indian and Syrian merchants (whose numbers had increasingly grown after the First World War) and the recruitment of Greeks as salesmen served as additional topics of inquiry.82
There is one aspect of these corporate archives that is, not surprisingly, lacking. Aside from a few responses to managers’ inquiries and the UAC’s in-house staff magazines—the Gold Coast UAC News and the Unicorn—I found very little material authored by Africans. Because most company records were written by and for European employees, I was constantly aware of the power of the corporate archive to both document and also silence African experiences. As a result, I approached the corporate archive not as a depository of facts but as a space to investigate the negotiation of power.83 A critical reading of corporate sources demanded both the unpacking of contradictions and inconsistencies in firms’ policy versus practice and an interpretation of what these moments of dissonance revealed about the development of consumer markets in Ghana more broadly. I read hundreds of districts reports, nearly all of them dry and obligatory, but when I viewed them not merely as catalogs of dutifully noted events but as active sites of contestation, I turned my focus from what was reported to how it was written. Such an analysis also demanded situating corporate sources within a broader context. To do so I drew on a number of African-authored newspapers and magazines (especially editorials), letters from readers, opinion and advice columns, and business publications like Business Weekly and the Ghana Trade Journal.
The accumulation of all this material, written both by and for Africans, is abundant and rich, but it was not sufficient. Thus, at the heart of this work are oral interviews I conducted with a wide range of men and women throughout Ghana, including former managers, wholesale and retail storekeepers, and credit customers and consumers.84 Talking with these people proved invaluable to understanding shifts in consumer practices and generated new questions about the boundaries and limitations of consumer capitalism.85 I use oral history not as a tool to “identify or extract overlying falsities to get an underlying truth” but as a method to comprehend how “Africans saw their lives, their worlds, their histories” and how they “felt about—or understood and represented” their experiences.86 Simply put, I did not use oral sources to supplement or fill in missing gaps from the corporate record. Instead I attempted to create a dialogue between corporate and oral sources to uncover the intricacies of colonial capitalism. Uncovering the ways in which such an economic system structured a variety of institutional and intimate relationships, as well as affective experiences, was central to this process.
Most interviews took place inside private homes, as well as in public spaces like stores and offices, and were informal and conversational. The average age of interviewees was sixty-eight, with the youngest being fifty-five and the eldest around ninety-five. I first located interviewees through the public relations office at Unilever Ghana in Tema. I was aware that this was not a representative sample, and assumed that Unilever would link me to those who held high-level positions and would speak favorably of their experiences. While in some instances this was the case, in others I found that interviewees spoke rather freely about blatant racism and poor treatment. Through these interactions I also learned that many interviewees had been employed in various positions throughout the course of their working lives. For instance, those who had started as storekeepers or clerks in the 1940s and 1950s had become managers by the end of their careers, and this allowed them to speak from multiple perspectives on a wide range of topics and various aspects of the business. Most of these interviewees, however, were predominantly men who had received some sort of postsecondary education in Ghana or abroad.
To gain access to a larger, more diverse group of interviewees, I cast my net wider. I shared my research with practically everyone I met, including neighbors, friends, colleagues, and strangers, asking if people knew of men or women who had worked as storekeepers, credit customers, or employees of foreign firms. This method proved extremely successful—particularly in smaller towns, where I was usually connected with someone who either agreed to be interviewed or put me in contact with others. Another technique was locating interviewees through the tried-and-true snowball sampling method: after each interview, I asked interviewees if they would introduce me to others in their social network. Both of these strategies expanded the scope of the project to include not only employees of the UTC and the GNTC but also a range of people who worked with firms but were not formally employed by them.87 These methods also led me to a number of women, including one of Accra’s most infamous credit customers. Finally, I gained a deeper understanding of how people conducted business in spite of the various restrictions that limited their autonomy and under conditions that at moments made it risky to sell even a tin of milk.
Although historians have used interviews with former African staff to reconstruct corporate histories, few have investigated how local employees navigated the various colonial and postcolonial social worlds of which they were a part.88 While I did ask structured questions about firms’ practices (selling, storekeeping, advertising, relating to customers) to begin and guide conversations, I also asked more open-ended questions about interviewees’ backgrounds, education, families, and day-to-day lives. These questions varied from interview to interview based on individuals’ willingness to share and their interest in a given topic. With those who were particularly enthusiastic, I conducted follow-up interviews. I also shared materials from the corporate archive with interviewees; copies of the Unicorn, old advertising campaigns, and photographs of stores and shoppers sparked vivid memories and led us to new topics and unintended conversations about changing tastes and desires, cautionary tales about certain products, and the pleasures and dangers of consuming.
The result is a history of African consumer politics, but also—and notably—an exploration of the social relations, practices, beliefs, and sentiments responsible for that history. While Market Encounters is organized chronologically, the structure is not linear. Instead, it reads as a series of case studies; sometimes these overlap, sometimes they stand alone. Each chapter emerges from a specific historical moment and space to capture the varied interactions and encounters that animated Ghana’s commercial landscape. District wholesale offices, shops and market stalls, urban department stores, international trade fairs, and military barracks provide the backdrops for these histories. Anxious European managers, energetic storekeepers, glamorous saleswomen, frustrated consumers, and opportunistic soldiers serve as some of the book’s central