Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  The gradual fading away of the figure of the African as discriminating consumer resulted from several converging developments. Missionaries were impatient: the millennium was nigh. In evangelical dreams, commercial societies would spring up overnight. But the Niger and other inland regions proved more treacherous than explorers had reckoned. Above all, the free-labour colonies in West Africa turned out to be troubled experiments. This, together with the Indian rebellion of 1857, spread doubts about whether non-white subjects could be refashioned in their masters’ image. A harder, scientific racism began to colour the imperial mindset.

  This more aggressive stance was partly a reaction to the difficulties European traders and missionaries encountered on the ground. Commerce and consumption did in fact continue their forward march in the second half of the nineteenth century. In West Africa, many indigenous traders followed the evangelical script. They turned from slaves to palm oil, and built houses and filled them with furniture, pictures and wall clocks. A Mr Lawson, a mixed-race merchant in Togo, smoked cigars, served imported tongue, and prided himself on his European dress and furniture.20 The frontier of consumption was being pushed further and further inland. John Tobin, one of the big British importers of palm oil, told a parliamentary committee in 1865 that ‘white men’ used to ‘fancy that anything was good enough for black men’, but now the people in the Niger Delta ‘are as well able to distinguish between genuine articles and fictions as any person in this country’.21 In East Africa, caravans spread the cash-commodity nexus to the foothills of Kilimanjaro. Peasants insisted on being paid in cash. Each tribe, one explorer noted, ‘must have its own particular cotton, and its own chosen tint, colour, size among beads . . . Worse still, the fashions are just as changeable’ as in England.22

  For Europeans, native middlemen posed a threat to their control of trade and access to crops in the hinterland. At the same time, the dual advance of traders and new objects of desire corroded local power structures. By the 1880s, after decades of doubt and caution, European governments were finally ready to seize control. The details of the scramble for Africa lie beyond the scope of this book. Superior arms, technology and logistics gave Europeans an overwhelming advantage. Ultimately, however, the defeat of African societies was a sign not of their backwardness but of their dynamism. What made them simultaneously vulnerable and attractive to European empires was that they were trading and consuming more, not less. Things spurred conquest.

  Patronage and clientage remained important, but the corrosive effect of the world of things on African kingdoms was visible everywhere. Prior to the 1880s, direct European control was limited to a few coastal forts, but the indirect effects of empire spilled over into the hinterland. In the palm-oil belt of the Niger, the ex-slave Ja Ja established himself as a powerful rival both to British merchants and old slave-trading elites. Ja Ja controlled the palm trade in Opobo and set up a blockade in 1871 to stop European encroachments. To pay for defence and administration, Sierra Leone and other colonies had to levy more and more taxes on trade and markets. To escape these duties, local traders abandoned Freetown and moved upstream. With them, they took shirts, boots, mirrors and other articles, bartered in exchange for palm and cola nuts. Goods and commodity production propelled each other forward, deeper and deeper inland, triggering a crisis for anciens régimes. In Sierra Leone, chiefs started to complain that Creoles were moving into Susu and Limba territories and buying up crops before they were harvested. Creole merchants opened inland depots and struck deals directly with farmers, bypassing the old elites who had controlled trade in the days of slavery. The material culture of this moving commercial frontier was plain to see. The houses of Creole traders were filled with Western furniture. Some chiefs tried to contain the incursion within Creole quarters, with limited success. In the Mende territory, one chief’s belongings included a mirror, a dressing table and a four-poster bed. A wave of Western goods was sweeping across West Africa. In Freetown, a Dress Reform Society tried to resist it, in vain. Women rejected the suggested loose robes. Instead, Muslim men started to wear trousers under their gowns, while their wives copied the tight-laced dresses of the Christian elite.23

  The impact of consumer goods was doubly explosive because they also functioned as credit. Traders left textiles and other goods with native merchants for six to twelve months, waiting for the next palm-oil harvest to pay for it. This ‘trust system’ had worked well in the past. But the arrival of new merchants and the drop in the price of oil during the great depression in the 1870s–’80s put the system under strain. Some traders ran up ‘double debt’ with newcomers, pushing established players to seize goods in retaliation. If West Africa suffered from a problem, it was not too little but too much competition. Trade expanded by force. British trading vessels increasingly brought gunboats in their wake. Trading posts became flashpoints of conflict. At Onitsha in central Nigeria in 1879, for example, natives attacked the trading post and pillaged British goods. HMS Pioneer was sent up the Niger in reprisal. It confiscated £50,000 worth of British goods. After three days of bombardment, the crew descended on the inner town and burnt it to the ground. The lower town was levelled. British traders and missionaries expressed their thanks to the local Consul.24

  The shift from trade in humans to trade in goods was disastrous for many rulers. For states built on slavery, commerce was a Trojan horse. In the Ashanti kingdom (Ghana), slaves and taxes were the sinews of power. The more slaves, the higher an individual’s rank. The Ashanti practised mercantilism on a grand scale. The government controlled trade and levied hefty tributes on merchants; the tribute tax took around half a person’s income and interest was at a stiff 33 per cent. Tribute was paid in gold, cloth and slaves. But the growth of the rubber and cocoa trade challenged this order.25 A new class of middlemen emerged, the asikafo, who wanted to trade free from government interference. Here was, more or less, an African version of Adam Smith’s virtuous transition from feudal to commercial society, from a dominion over people to a dominion of things – with one important qualification. It was not an internal struggle: looming on the sidelines was the British empire. For ‘new men’ like John and Albert Owusu Ansa, Western goods were part and parcel of their identity. They sought British protection against the interference by the Ashanti state.

  Commerce and things ate away at the foundations of tribal authority. Ashanti became a British protectorate in 1896. The next few years saw the great Edwardian boom, when the trade in palm oil and cocoa expanded in leaps and bounds. And, as it did, Ashantis shifted from harvesting the kola nut and small-scale gold mining to the more profitable cultivation of cocoa. By 1910 Ghana had become the world’s biggest exporter of cocoa. Overall, this probably paid off, raising the standard of living for the Ashanti population. But, as the cash-commodity nexus tightened, it also triggered new conflicts over land and power. Slaves and land were fast losing their value as guarantors of status and power. Chiefs were ‘destooled’, or toppled, more and more quickly. Shrewd chiefs undertook a portfolio review and began to build up possessions as a kind of private pension plan for life after destoolment. In 1910, the Ashanti Council of Chiefs finally agreed that two thirds of all property accrued by a chief during his rule would revert to the individual on his removal or abdication. Property now resided primarily in the person, not the office. It was another triumph for the dominion of things.

  European steamships, guns and goods were manifestations of a new material order. Local leaders picked up on this quickly. On the southern slopes of Kilimanjaro, Mandari, the ruler of the municipality of Moshi, described power as a geopolitical hierarchy of things. At the top, immediately below God, were the English. They controlled most ‘good things’: valuable manufactures, guns and medicine; Mandari named his son Meli after the British ‘mail boat’. A rung below was the Hindoo merchant: Indian textiles had kept their edge in East Africa. Only then, and in spite of their presence on the coast, came the Germans: they simply did not have the goods. To Mandari and
local elites, where things came from mattered more and more. They were impatient with traders who tried to unload their second best or came with goods from nearby Zanzibar. Only authentic articles from Europe would do.26

  The end of domestic slavery intensified this process because it created a more crowded marketplace for goods. Slavery had constrained choice. Male slaves were forbidden from wearing a kofia to cover their head, women from wearing a veil. Being a slave trumped being a Muslim. Clothes were visible markers of who was free and who was not. In East Africa, free Arabs wore colourful block-printed Kanga cloths, whereas African slaves had to make do with off-white ‘merikani’ sheets from America. Already before the end of slavery, slave women breached such sartorial rules and used local indigo to give their merikanis a splash of colour. Freedom unleashed a scramble for new wardrobes. The first thing a slave did was to buy a shirt or an embroidered kofia. The Zanzibar archipelago was a thriving fashion scene (see Plate 13). A Swahili saying went in 1900: ‘Proceed cautiously in Pemba. If you come wearing a loincloth, you leave wearing a turban. If you come wearing a turban, you leave wearing a loincloth.’27

  Colonial rule gave this spiral an additional twist. Colonial administrations controlled jobs, money and status. Spending on Western goods simultaneously indicated one’s proximity to colonial rulers and one’s distance from native groups at the bottom of society. In French Cameroon after the First World War, the Duala elite spent a small fortune on European clothes. They drank imported wine, finished their meals with Western-style desserts and drove automobiles and motorbikes. It was men, with their greater public presence, who were in the vanguard of conspicuous consumption. A Duala man easily spent 1,000 francs a year on his European wardrobe, three times as much as his wife.28

  It is still sometimes said that Europeans entered the scramble for Africa because they wanted to capture new customers to offset the great depression. The opposite is closer to the truth. Europeans had little interest in African consumers. Colonial subjects were meant to be coolies for mines and plantation labour, not shoppers. Imperialists happily suspended the laws of the market when it suited them. Africans were pushed into the labour force by land theft and the Maxim gun, not pulled by the prospect of a living wage. The conceit of the ‘lazy African’ was a justification for paying low wages or no wages. This was, arguably, short-sighted. A high-wage economy makes for better customers. European nations might have reaped big benefits had they been more liberal and invested in their subjects.

  African middlemen were a thorn in the side of imperial administrators and businessmen. Richard Butler, the consul at Fernando Pó (an island in the Gulf of Guinea now named Bioko), wanted to tax native shopkeepers out of existence. A vice-president of the Anthropological Society in London, he saw Africans as farmers, not traders. In its French colonies, the Third Republic sought to model its colonial subjects on the French peasantry. Britain’s United African Company, run by George Goldie, tried to monopolize trade up and down the Niger with the help of gunboats and local treaties. Frederick Lugard, the High Commissioner for the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, introduced caravan tolls in Nigeria in 1904 to squeeze out local traders and turn weavers of durable, local cloth into cotton growers for Lancashire.29

  African consumers were abandoned by their missionary friends, too. As early as the 1840s, Wesleyans were complaining that trade made Africans shifty and materialistic. By the end of the century, all missionary groups saw commerce and consumption as sinful, not the training ground for a Christian life. The desire for goods and money was now blamed for the small number of converts. Missionaries had talked about inculcating new material wants and habits but were rarely interested in putting their money where their mouth was. The Moravian Mission started to pay wages only in 1904. Children worked for eight hours and were lucky to receive a few pennies; after all, they were paid in kind in ‘civilization’ and Kultur, missionaries pointed out. At mission stations, shops were reserved for Europeans. Missionaries despaired of their flock. Natives had become more industrious but they were now obsessed with things, a pietist missionary in Togo noted in 1894. They treated his photo album like a mail-order catalogue, comparing dress styles again and again and asking him to order them the finest collars and ties for Christmas. They wanted good clothes and food – too much so. In the early days of Christianity in the Roman Empire, he balefully pointed out, new believers had dressed simply; they did not show off like Africans.30 In East Africa, the local bishop despaired of the way in which coastal towns lured away souls and destroyed ‘clean living’: Zanzibar was ‘Piccadilly, Sodom, and a public bar.’31 That missionary leaders were at all surprised by this exodus is telling. At missions, a superior teacher was paid a fraction of what a clerk earned in town, barely enough to feed the family and buy a couple of shirts (see Plate 14).

  Missionaries broadly split into three camps. All demoted the African consumer. Friedrich Fabri of the Rheinisch Mission and J. K. Vietor of the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft were examples of the new chauvinist generation emerging in the 1880s. Africans had to be disciplined into becoming productive, tax-paying subjects of the German empire. They still paid lip service to Africans’ potential as customers. The problem with Africans in this view was that they were either living in a state of subsistence or were middlemen who spent their money on mahogany-panelled wardrobes and other luxuries which bypassed the fatherland. Africans needed to be made to buy simple German goods. Their main role, however, was as an agrarian proletariat that would produce raw materials for German industry.32

  Other missionaries scoffed at the idea of Christianity serving imperialist policies. Imagine, one critic said, St Paul telling the Corinthians they needed to buy ‘their carpets at Aquila’.33 Far better to turn Africans into self-sufficient peasants. Africans, in this view, had to be protected from material temptations and imperialist plantations alike. This paternalistic approach placed Africans on an even lower stage of development, effectively asking them to leave the world of goods altogether. Africans were not ready for markets, wages and higher wants. The scars of slavery ran too deep. They first needed to cleanse themselves by learning the ‘dignity of honest toil’. The guiding watchword was St Benedict’s rule: ora et labora, prayer and work. The path to a true Christian life involved hoeing, and more hoeing, not getting and spending. Once they had reached a truly Christian state, they might earn some wages and become customers, perhaps, but this was in the very distant future. Their zeal for turning Africans into ascetic peasants reflected missionaries’ disillusionment with the effects of industrialization on workers in Europe. Africa was a second chance to put modernity right and save Christianity from the unholy spiral of satanic mills, cheap entertainment and family breakdown.34

  A final group went yet further and took refuge in the ‘spirit of tribal society’. God’s design was already visible in Africans’ tribal and familial order. For the Lutheran Bruno Gutmann, who lived with the Chagga in East Africa, this ‘original’ tribal state had to be protected at all cost against the incursion of material civilization. Kinship and the shared struggle for survival created a bond between men. ‘As soon as money comes in . . . which will buy things of purely material value, immediately we see the destruction of the vital interdependence of men, which is alone the source of their spiritual and moral nature – in a word, of their existence as human beings.’35 Imperialism, then, gave the seesaw of consumption another push: as the volume of goods went up, European imperialists and missionaries came down on consumption as inauthentic and alienating.

  The craze for fashion and goods has continued to be a frequent target of attack. Africans, in the words of the Nigerian-born journalist Chika Onyeani, writing in 2000, have perpetuated their colonial bondage, degenerating into a parasitic ‘consumer race’ instead of investing in human capital and development like other ‘productive races’.36 Consumer goods have been tainted by their entanglement with slavery and conquest, and some Western historians continue to characterize them as a �
�contagious’ disease that destroyed native cultures.37 Such readings do injustice to the longer history of exchange, the active role played by indigenous groups, and the liberating elements of consumption. Material desires were not a sudden import of empire but reached back to pre-colonial times. The contrast between ‘traditional’ tribal Africa, where homo economicus had not yet set foot, and a ‘modern’ Western world of goods, inequality and individualism was a convenient figment of the imperial imagination. We cannot simply stamp consumption as inauthentic or frivolous. For former slaves and migrants, things were a great emancipator. A shirt, a hat, a watch and a mirror were tickets to social inclusion and self-respect.

  Europeans at the time had only contempt for such sartorial display. A colonial official complained about the extravagant appearance of Swahili ‘clad in fezes with coloured shirts and bow ties, blue serge suits, wearing shoes and socks . . . a monocle, and smoking cigarettes in long, gold-tipped cigarette-holders. Such caricatures are not pleasing sights to see, and even worse perhaps are the gentlemen who have taken to soft hats and heavy boots.’38

  We can see the schizophrenic nature of empire in this early wave of globalization. The growing unease with African consumers was a shared experience of imperialism, felt in liberal Britain as well as in nationalist Germany and republican France. Free trade after the mid-nineteenth century accelerated the global circulation of goods, yet when these goods reached colonial subjects they rang imperial alarm bells. Free trade did away with trade barriers, but empire erected new racial hurdles in their place. In Britain, free trade stood for cheap goods for all. Everyone was a consumer, and every consumer was a citizen. In the colonies, however, these inclusive, democratic credentials were seriously compromised. Britain stood for free trade, but it was also an empire, and as such found it difficult to embrace the African consumer, because consumption challenged the very distance between races that empire was founded on. When Africans put on bowler hats or corseted dresses they came uncomfortably close to their imperial masters. A researcher in 1930s Northern Rhodesia observed that ‘many Europeans . . . are less courteous in their relations with well-dressed Africans than they are in their relations with those in rags, for they resent and fear the implied claim to a civilized status.’39