Consulting Elderly Kumasi Market Women about Modernization

GHANA STUDIES / Volumes 12–13 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 97 CONSULTING ELDERLY KUMASI MARKET WOMEN ABOUT MODERNIZATION GRACIA CLARK Introduction: Trading Lives The African women traders featured in this paper count as ordinary women within their local community, but their vantage point on postcolonial transformations in its society and economy is quite extraordinary. As elderly to middle aged citizens of Kumasi, they have been living and trading in the second largest city in Ghana, also the historic capital of the Asante nation. The oldest were already working there before 1957, when Ghana became the first Sub-Saharan African nation to gain independence from British colonial rule. While Ghana’s national economy expanded and contracted, these women struggled continuously to keep their trading enterprises afloat and to raise their children to be healthy and prosperous. Some of them succeeded better than others, but each has gained a unique perspective on the processes of economic and cultural change. Over the decades, mature traders located at central nodes of the marketplace system, like those in Kumasi Central Market, have accumulated significant expertise in the assessment and prediction of change. In order to continue making a living for their families, traders like these must constantly monitor supply and demand conditions in locations ranging from remote rural villages and urban neighborhoods to shopping centers around the world. By living through their lives, they have seen how producers and consumers responded to a wide range of conditions, including external and internal shocks, dramatic shifts in the policy environment, and interludes of stability and expansion. The roller coaster of global economic and political change, complicated by unpredictable volatility in national commercial policies, has forced traders to confront and analyze these historical dynamics with a close attention born of desperation. 98 Ghana Studies • volumes 12–13 • 2011 Background Marketplace systems have been a prominent feature of West African economies for many centuries. When Portuguese navigators first reached present-day Ghana in the late fifteenth century, they encountered already well-established regional trading networks along the Gulf of Guinea coast. The Portuguese trading fort named Elmina, near present-day Cape Coast, Ghana, was soon joined by competing Dutch and English forts nearby. European coastal traders bought gold and slaves from African intermediaries, who helped fund the early stages of capitalism (Hopkins 1973; van Dantzig 1980). West African resources had already been reaching Europe indirectly along trade routes known to the ancient Carthaginians before classical Greece and Rome. This trans-Saharan caravan trade, stretching up through North Africa, stimulated the growth of successive empires in the Sahel (the grassland or savannah zone along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert), which were documented by Arab chroniclers during Europe’s dark ages. Besides gold and slaves, caravan trade between West African peoples carried salt, kola nuts, cloth, and other local products between producing and consuming regions hundreds of miles apart (Hopkins 1973). Asante, eventually an imperial power, is a cultural and political unit among many related Akan groups that dominate southern Ghana and continue into neighboring Côte d’Ivoire. The Asante nation was founded in the 1680s in a deeply forested territory known for gold and kola (Hopkins 1973; McCaskie 2000; Wilks 1975). The Asantehene and Asantehemma (male and female chiefs who led the Asante confederacy) controlled trade along major routes that ran north from the Atlantic forts to towns in the savannah connected with the caravan trade. The long history of trade here and its central importance to Asante economics and politics make trading a respected occupation for both men and women. Their matrilineal Asante culture gives mothers key financial responsibilities and embraces market trading as one of the most appropriate and typical ways to fulfill them (Abu 1983; Fortes 1970; Rattray 1923). Clark • Consulting Elderly Kumasi Market Women about Modernization 99 A Modern Market Kumasi Central Market is undoubtedly one of West Africa’s largest single marketplaces, hosting an estimated 20,000 traders daily—the majority of them Asante women (Clark 1994; King 1999). Its central location within Ghana makes it a major transfer point for imports landed in Ghana’s centuries-old...