Market Encounters. Bianca Murillo
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did not catch up with the demand for goods. Additionally, the world market price of cocoa (the country’s primary source of foreign exchange) plummeted; the years 1964–66 were especially bad. Commodity shortages swept through the country, and irregular issuing of import licenses and the funneling of state funds for personal use by select CPP members and high-ranking government ministers further reduced the number of goods available on the market.
By the mid-1960s, it was not uncommon to see hundreds of people lining up for long hours outside retail stores. Shoppers regularly lined the street in front of Ghana House, the GNTC’s Accra department store, well before opening hours in hopes of buying the most basic items. While the GNTC claimed that lines were necessary to weed out reselling and ensure that each person received his or her fair share of milk, rice, and sugar, customers developed a whole range of sly tactics to evade government control. As an official commission of inquiry into trade malpractices reported, these lines “should not fool anyone into thinking that the distributor firms are issuing goods to consumers.” Instances of customers rejoining the line two or three times after each sale, and of customers hiring four or five other people to stand in on their behalf, were common.49 Thus, the imposition of lines as a method for firms to ensure fair distribution by identifying and selling to the “real” consumer was largely unsuccessful.
While the CPP government claimed that tighter control over distribution through the GNTC was a method of protecting consumers from unfair trading practices, such strategies frustrated customers even more. It became a common practice for stores to stagger their business hours to coincide with the off-duty hours of workers and to regulate the release of goods at specific times. Debates about identifying the genuine consumer persisted and were manifested in the state-controlled media, pitting consumers and retailers against one another. Above all, the consumer was depicted as a victim of self-serving traders who ransacked store shelves, hiked up prices, and hoarded essential commodities for profit. Inflation and shortages were framed as a by-product of greedy retailers who monopolized goods rather than the result of state mismanagement. Efforts to distinguish the genuine consumer from a person who intended to purchase goods for resale were reminiscent of attempts undertaken by European firms during the colonial period. Echoing reports like the 1943 Conway Commission, the GNTC accused market women in particular of undermining Ghana’s economic stability. Stories of crowds of women stampeding GNTC stores, abusing staff, and intimidating “respectable” shoppers were featured in the national news.50 Described in a newspaper article as “human vultures,” market women’s practices were positioned as the antithesis of modern economic development. Indeed, these criticisms also revealed a larger ongoing social concern—specifically, the threat posed by women’s financial autonomy.
General discontent with the economy provided part of the momentum for the 1966 military and police coup that overthrew President Nkrumah. As commodity shortages persisted in the 1970s, Ghana’s second military government—the National Redemption Council, under Ignatius Kutu Acheampong—empowered the army and police to ensure fair distribution and price controls by force. Soldiers patrolled retail centers and commercial main streets, and violence was inflicted on retailers as well as consumers thought to be selling and buying beyond permissible daily usage, or what the government called “normal requirements.” During what is now remembered by older Ghanaians as “Acheampong’s time,” stores and marketplaces throughout Ghana became sites of fear and intimidation. The military arrested hundreds of people accused of kalabule, a term that came to define a number of unlawful selling and consumption practices including hoarding, profiteering, smuggling, and selling on the black market. Soldiers also seized goods from private homes in military exercises like Operation Bring Out. In some regions, like Brong-Ahafo, military barracks became retail sites as soldiers took control of selling confiscated items to people they deemed “real” consumers. The category consumer thus continued to bedevil, even amid the supposed idealism of postrevolution rule; now one was deemed an authentic consumer through military discretion, a judgment backed by the threat of physical punishment, jail time, and exorbitant fines for those who failed to fit the image.
I begin with this brief genealogy of the consumer to encourage a rethinking of consumer studies from an African-centered perspective. The focus on consumer choice, demand, and desire, which has been the usual terrain of studying consumer culture, has limitations when applied to Ghana’s history.51 First, the organization and regulation of distribution channels were often as important to accessing commodities and shaping the consumer’s experience as was the amount of money in that consumer’s pocket. I therefore argue that histories of commodity distribution, typically the domain of economists and development policy planners, are not separate from consumer culture and have an economic and social history that demand examination. Second, to study consumerism in Ghana also requires that we take seriously an economic past characterized by boom and bust cycles and a general lack of stability. Such an economic reality created dramatic shifts from periods in which people enjoyed relative abundance to periods in which people suffered debilitating scarcity. So stark were some years that people remember month-long shortages that were interrupted only by an occasional flooding of a commodity that lasted for mere hours and then disappeared once more. The popular saying “plenty money, no goods” that was frequently evoked to describe the market (particularly from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s) further illuminates the need to account for these conditions. Here, my intentions are aligned with the work of consumer historian Sherene Seikaly, who has argued that “managing scarcity” in British-ruled Palestine was crucial to a longer process of “creating needs and desires.”52 This is not to say that people did not make sophisticated shopping choices when goods were available. Rather, the impetus is to have us move from interrogating the consumer as an identity (both individual and collective) to exploring the historical processes that brought that identity to fruition.
While this book seeks to locate the consumer as part of larger developments in Ghana’s economic past, it is by no means an origins story. We will not find here a tale about the “birth of the consumer” in Ghana. In this sense, my research diverges from early consumer histories that traced the emergence of consumer culture during industrial revolutions in Britain and the United States or focused on a specific historical event like the American Revolution or World War II.53 As we have seen, the British colonial economy produced a system in which the identity of the consumer, as a subject of corporate policy and state regulation, was never clear. I interpret this elusiveness as an opportunity for a critical engagement into the operation of power rather than as an obstacle or gap in the historical record. As Jean and John Comaroff, following Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall, remind us, “At any particular moment, in any marked event, a meaning or a social arrangement may appear free floating, underdetermined, ambiguous. But it is often the very attempt to harness that indeterminacy, the seemingly unfixed signifier, that animates both the exercise of power and the resistance to which it may give rise. Such arguments and struggles though are seldom equal.”54 Specifically, this vagueness allows us to examine how the consumer was implicated in various projects that went beyond what might typically be defined as market or economic exchange.
As we shall see, for much of the twentieth century in Ghana consumer was used as both an aspirational category and a value term. Both private and, later, state-owned firms deployed the notion of the consumer in flexible ways to serve their interests and legitimize their authority. Ordinary Ghanaians similarly evoked the category to advocate for greater control over the political and economic life of their country, as well as for more accountability from leadership. Consequently, different versions of the consumer surfaced at specific historical moments. However, these versions were never universal, consistent, or equally acknowledged. By questioning the assumed identity of the consumer we can gain a deeper understanding of what was at stake for different people who participated in the market, and what knowledge, justification, and cultural values framed their encounters.
REWRITING AFRICAN CONSUMER CULTURE AND RETHINKING ECONOMIC HISTORY
While the formation and organization of colonial capitalism made the African consumer an ambiguous figure, perceptions of the continent—popular and academic alike—also color what we know about African consumer history. Typically we think of consumerism in Africa as either a recent phenomenon or a result of Western cultural hegemony. Media images of Asante chiefs