Market Encounters. Bianca Murillo
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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.
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