Market Encounters. Bianca Murillo
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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