African Market Women

Gracia C. Clark

Description

The lives and experiences of women traders in Kumasi

In these lively life stories, women market traders from Ghana comment on changing social and economic times and on reasons for their prosperity or decline in fortunes. Gracia Clark shows that market women are intimately connected with economic policy on a global scale. Many work at the intersection of sophisticated networks of transnational commerce and migration. They have dramatic memories of independence and the growth of their new nation, including political rivalries, price controls, and violent raids on the market. The experiences of these women give substance to their reflections on globalization, capital accumulation, colonialism, technological change, environmental degradation, teenage pregnancy, marriage, children, changing gender roles, and spirituality. Clark's commentary illuminates the complex historical and cultural setting of these deeply revealing lives.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Trading Lives
1. Abenaa Adiiya
Portrait: An Adventurer on the Road
Story: Patience and Pleading
2. Maame Kesewaa
Portrait: A Quiet Saver
Story: Someone Has Set Herself a Goal
3. Madame Ataa
Portrait: A Good Citizen
Story: A Man Would Marry You Properly
4. Amma Pokuaa
Portrait: A Market Daughter
Story: All of Them Depend upon Me
5. Auntie Afriyie
Portrait: A Shrewd Dealer
Story: If You Have Wisdom, You Can Do Many Jobs
6. Sister Buronya
Portrait: An International Observer
Story: If I Had Money, I Would Go
7. Maame Nkrumah
Portrait: A Grateful Sister
Story: She Has Cared For Me and My Children
Conclusion: Little by Little

Appendix
Glossary
Notes
References
Index

Sujets

• African Studies
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Women
• África
• General officer
• Gender
• Woman
• History of Africa
• Anthropology
• The Women
• General
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 08 mars 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253027443
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

AFRICAN MARKET WOMEN
African Market Women
Seven Life Stories from Ghana

GRACIA CLARK
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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2010 by Gracia Clark
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clark, Gracia.
African market women : seven life stories from Ghana / Gracia Clark.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35417-4 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-22154-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Women, Ashanti-Ghana-Kumasi-Social conditions. 2. Women, Ashanti-Ghana-Kumasi-Economic conditions. 3. Women, Akan-Ghana-Kumasi-Social conditions. 4. Women, Akan-Ghana-Kumasi-Economic conditions. 5. Women merchants-Ghana-Kumasi. 6. Market towns-Ghana-Kumasi. 7. Kumasi (Ghana)-Social conditions. 8. Kumasi (Ghana)-Economic conditions. 9. Kumasi (Ghana)-Politics and government. I. Title.
DT507.C53 2009
305.48 8963385-dc22
2009025620
1 2 3 4 5 15 14 13 12 11 10
To Kumasi Central Market
Edwa Kese paa ne no!
Nananom, y da mo ase oo!
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Trading Lives
1. ABENAA ADIIYA
Portrait: An Adventurer on the Road
Story: Patience and Pleading
2. MAAME KESEWAA
Portrait: A Quiet Saver
Story: Someone Has Set Herself a Goal
3. MADAME ATAA
Portrait: A Good Citizen
Story: A Man Would Marry You Properly
4. AMMA POKUAA
Portrait: A Market Daughter
Story: All of Them Depend upon Me
5. AUNTIE AFRIYIE
Portrait: A Shrewd Dealer
Story: If You Have Wisdom, You Can Do Many Jobs
6. SISTER BURONYA
Portrait: An International Observer
Story: If I Had Money, I Would Go
7. MAAME NKRUMAH
Portrait: A Grateful Sister
Story: She Has Cared for Me and My Children
Conclusion: Little by Little
Appendix
Glossary
Notes
References
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks go out to hundreds of traders who have shared their lives with me over the years. In my own life, I thank Carmen Paz, my lifelong companion, who kept my life whole. My father, Kenneth Courtright Clark, taught me to delight in people, and my mother, Eleanor McKenna Clark, taught me to respect toughness.
These narratives were first recorded thanks to funding from a U.S. Fulbright Africa Regional Research Fellowship and a Social Science Research Commission grant. The Indiana University Office of the Vice President for Research funded subsequent summer followup research, and an IU sabbatical leave was critical for completing the first manuscript. The support and patience of a series of department chairs helped me survive the writing.
My partners in transcribing and translating all of the tapes were Mr. A. K. Yeboah (a retired Twi teacher at Prempeh College, Kumasi), Mr. Edward Asiedu (the choir director at Bantama Presbyterian Church), and Mrs. Mary Appiah (of the Kumasi Presbyterian Women s Fellowship). Mrs. Appiah also contributed greatly to the interview process with her contacts and life experience in Kumasi Central Market. Ms. Boadiccea Prempeh of the CEDEP Women s Forum (Kumasi) also provided valuable encouragement and advice.
My esteemed colleagues Beverly Stoeltje and Jean Allman were always ready with helpful comments, and they closely read parts of an earlier version. The late Susan Geiger also provided a rigorous and positive role model for life history work with African women. Rudith King (KNUST, Kumasi), the next-generation scholar of Kumasi Central Market, motivates me to continue my work. At Indiana University Press, editor Dee Mortensen and copyeditor Shoshanna Green were the ideal collaborators: enthusiastic, critical, and respectful.
AFRICAN MARKET WOMEN
INTRODUCTION
Trading Lives
The dramatic ups and downs of Ghana s economy over the last fifty years of the twentieth century have given the seven women traders who tell their stories here an indelible experience of the processes of global economic change. With an extraordinary vantage point as traders in one of West Africa s largest marketplaces, these ordinary women have become economic experts the hard way. They have had to assess the dangers and opportunities facing them on a daily and yearly basis in order to stay in business and provide for their families. Unlike Wall Street investment experts, who gamble with other people s money, they have had to bet with their own meager capital and credit. Some have read those processes well and prospered, while others have endured bankruptcy and despair. These stories reveal what they think has brought good and bad times to themselves and their community.
Since 1978, I have followed this dizzying roller coaster ride as closely as possible from the sidelines. A series of ethnographic projects relating to Kumasi Central Market brought me to share their living and working environment for periods ranging from two months to two years. The privilege of working with them has brought companionship and built my career as an anthropologist in academic and development work. As a white, college-educated foreigner I could never be like their other friends, but some of our relationships did build mutual affection and mutual responsibility.
My focus has shifted over those thirty years. I began by concentrating on their regional marketplace system, the networks that linked them to rural producers, their credit practices, and their commodity-based associations. I explored their strategies for combining family and work responsibilities and the effects of government price controls and several acute shortages-of food, gasoline, and foreign exchange. Meanwhile, Ghana s faithful implementation of neoliberal structural adjustment programs (SAPs) made it a much-publicized positive example for the World Bank, and then an instructive illustration of those programs shortcomings (World Bank and United Nations Development Programme 1989; Clark and Manuh 1991).
As a group, these Kumasi Central Market women lived through a period that saw one socioeconomic transformation after another. The oldest among them heard stories of the precolonial trade networks that linked Kumasi to Europe and North Africa, and themselves experienced the adjustments to British colonial occupation in 1896. The next decades brought rapid urbanization, railways, road transport, and the shortages of two world wars. The youngest among the group grew up around the time Ghana gained its independence in 1957, proud to be the first African colony to shake off foreign rule.
Fierce rivalries between political parties exploded during the elections of the late 1950s and early 1960s, bringing violence right into Kumasi Central Market. A series of regime changes then shifted national economic policy between African socialism and free market capitalism, after which the country had more than a decade of military rule until electoral democracy was firmly reestablished after 1992. The rapid reversals in official regulations affecting markets (notably price controls and foreign exchange restrictions) repeatedly challenged traders to adapt their strategies to new conditions. Chronic inflation often doubled prices each year, lending drama and meaning to the long price lists that punctuate several of the stories told here. The same cloth that cost three hundred cedis in the 1970s would cost thirty thousand in the 1990s. Even after public policy stabilized in 1985, fluctuations in world price levels for cocoa and petroleum continued to rock the economic environment.
The pivotal mediating role played by Kumasi Central Market means that its supply, patronage, and price levels can serve as a gauge of economic conditions across a wide region. Most of the consumer goods destined for the 800,000 residents of Kumasi, Ghana s second largest city, pass through it. The forested Ashanti Region surrounding Kumasi enjoys generous endowments of gold, cocoa, and timber-still Ghana s three major exports. Kumasi Central Market also redistributes goods between ecological zones in a much broader catchment area, reaching from coastal ports through tropical forest to the dry savannah region (see map 1 ). Its traders cross national boundaries, to and from cities and rural farming areas in neighboring Burkina Faso, Togo, and C te d Ivoire.

Map 1

Map 2

Map 3
Within the city of Kumasi, the Central Market sits just between the northernmost terminus of Ghana s railway line and the central crossroads of the national highways (see map 2 ). Across the road is the Kejetia lorry park, which sends passenger buses and freight trucks to every corner of Ghana and beyond. Ringing the lines of retail stalls are a set of wholesale yards for locally produced foodstuffs that coordinate large volumes of supplies for institutional buyers and smaller t