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