This economy was marked by a general lack of liquidity. Women traders’ customers generally ran out of cash before the month was half over. Budgeting was extremely rare for single men, limited for families. Expenditures were erratic, even when individuals succeeded in stabilizing some part of their income by earning wages. In this situation continuous commerce would be impossible without a high level of credit. Credit is thus the most prominent feature of buyer‑seller relations; and you do not bargain if each side has a long‑term arrangement to protect. This is particularly true for the purchase of daily comestibles, less so for occasional deals involving consumer durables like items of furniture. The haggling (sliding price mechanism) that westerners imagine is endemic to foreign bazaars was absent from large sections of Nima’s market economy.
Prices normally varied by volume for a fixed price. A woman would buy her goods from a wholesaler, often daily, take out a third of the total quantity to give away as sweeteners to preferred customers, and divide the rest into equal piles sufficient to give her a profit if sold for a standard sum. The customers always bought, say, a shilling of yams; what they got for it varied. The interdependence of both parties was based on the seller’s need for a steady clientele since shortages and gluts of supply- were unpredictable; whereas buyers of course needed to eat when they had no cash. Bargaining depends on each party being able to walk away from the deal. This structure of credit and client particularism restricts the scope for such behavior. Game theorists talk about used cars and lemons. The rational negotiation of risk is less appropriate when most purchases go into a register.
The problem of default was omnipresent. The women were usually illiterate and relied on fantastic memories to keep a register of customers’ debts. If challenged they could always list each purchase over several weeks, convincing the client by sheer power of mental arithmetic. This reliance on memory placed an upper limit—perhaps eight to ten—on the number of debtors each trader could support. Capital shortage was another factor, of course. As partial defense against default, traders of a given commodity would stick together where possible and share information on their clients’ trustworthiness. They could also ostracize persistent offenders and avoid being played off against each other. Interest rates in Nima were high, 25 to 50 per cent per month, and outstanding debts at the end of the month would often be increased at the same rate. The high price of money reflected not just the risk of default, but rather its extreme scarcity and the inefficiency of commercial institutions.
I noticed that something like chains of debt were common. Each migrant made and received loans (including traders’ credit). If a man came into a windfall—a stolen wallet or a back‑dated pay rise—he would lend the money to someone else, but not use it to pay off existing debts. When dunned by a creditor, he could pass the pressure onto his own debtor. In traditional bridewealth transactions, in‑laws typically chase an infinitely regressive chain of debt in order to retrieve an outstanding cow.
Another metaphor might be the ripples caused by a stone dropped into a pool. Beer drinking—a traditional millet beer from the north—is the main activity of Frafra men at weekends. Women brewers generally produced a volume valued at five to six times their initial costs. But they gave away a third, and most of the rest was sold on credit; so that they often lacked the cash to start off another three‑day brewing cycle. Every now and then a major millet trader would arrive from the North to collect debts owed by brewers based mainly on sales for credit. These impressive ladies would sit in the courtyard of their principal customer, for all to see. The brewers would put the squeeze on their clients, the clients would turn to their debtors, and so on—a stone in the pond.
The sanctions available to traders when dealing with defaulters were weak. One woman was reduced to entering a client’s room at 4 a.m. to steal his only pair of trousers, which she then waved triumphantly in the courtyard while shouting out his crimes: ‘You think Alhassan is a big man because he walks around in trousers and white shirt, but he won’t pay a poor woman for the bread and cola he eats!’ Shaming of this sort is a poor substitute for legal sanctions. But, as we know, small debt settlement is hard to secure anywhere. Although Nima was beyond the law and a violent place to live in, traders rarely if ever resorted to force when settling debts.
Usury and criminal enterprise were often a different matter; but even in the area of casual sex, pimps were rare and most women relied on informal moral sanctions to extract money from their lovers, so that prostitution for immediate cash payment was uncommon. What Durkheim (1893) called the ‘non‑contractual element of the contract’, the social conditions for rational negotiation, assumed a dominant role in Nima’s commerce. Markets were normally far from competitive, and price‑setting mechanisms were governed by relatively long-term credit/debt considerations that helped to stabilize turnover and to regulate the erratic fluctuations that buffeted parties on both sides. Frafra migrants were well aware that much of this commercial activity depended on the establishment of trust between free agents whose scope for default was obvious.
Much of Nima’s economy belonged to the sphere of circulation—rent, interest, trading, theft—which make few labor demands. But half of the entrepreneurs I studied employed five or more workers and four-fifths at least two. The key problem was how to make paid and unpaid workers hand over takings to the boss. Trust enters into this issue, but it was much more prominent in circulation, where economic organization is shaped by credit/debt relations and occasional partnership of equals rather than by the stable hierarchy needed for regular business.
Transport is one type of enterprise involving hierarchical organization of labor. The richest Frafra entrepreneurs all owned commercial vehicles, but the risks of failure were high. If you buy a car or truck, there are three things you can do with it: drive it yourself, hire a driver, or sell to a driver on a hire purchase basis (‘work and pay’). No-one who spends his days behind a wheel can make a legitimate profit. Most naive operators opt for hiring a driver for fixed wages, since the prospective return is greater. They usually fail: a wage worker has no incentive to maintain the vehicle or to be honest with the takings. One alternative is to make the driver pay the owner a fixed sum daily; but again he has no stake in the vehicle and there is nothing to stop him making common cause with a crooked fitter to supply inflated repair bills or to certify that the vehicle was off the road for several days owing to mechanical breakdown.
The most secure method is to sell the vehicle to the driver on an instalment plan and make him responsible for maintenance, a method pioneered in Ghana by Lebanese traders. Some owners would risk hiring a driver for the first trouble‑free year of a new vehicle and then sell it second-hand on a work‑and‑pay basis. One Frafra entrepreneur, Anaba, after several false starts, evolved his own method of running a transport business. He would buy driving licenses for young men from his home area and encourage them to serve an apprenticeship on someone else’s taxi until he was convinced that they were a good risk. When he had enough cash in hand to buy a vehicle for £2000‑£3000, he would pick out one from his reserve pool—many of whom lived in his household of some 80 persons. He would then write up a contract, adding £1000 to the original purchase price, to be repaid at £10 a day, with a clause giving him the right to seize the taxi or minibus if the driver missed paym6ent for three successive days.
The driver would be responsible for maintenance, but if he is in difficulties, Anaba would pay for the repairs and add the cost to the total to be repaid. In the interest of regular turnover, he was keen that the vehicle should not lie idle for long. Most drivers took 12 to 18 months to buy their vehicle. This case is remarkable for being largely independent of the Muslim‑controlled informal transport system in Ghana. Fictive5 kinship, self-reinforcing agreements, and legally binding contracts played a more important part in his business than friendship and trust. He was not a trusting man, in contrast to Atia, a part-time photographer of schoolgirls featured in the original chapter; hence his preference for hire purchase agreements over direct employment for wages.
Family labor is an alternative to wage employment. Many small enterprises—a bar, flour mill, or market stall—are well suited to this. But it often turned out differently. Many catering and retail entrepreneurs were single women; and few men felt that they could enter into partnership with their wives, since conjugal roles were typically patriarchal and segregated. Children old enough to be much help were also few, and most were at school, acquiring the means of literate employment. The fact that descent organization did not travel to the south meant that kinship ties were much more fluid and the authority of household heads was often weak.
In contrast, the tight cohesion of Asian minority communities provided patriarchs with external support for domestic hierarchy. Frafra migrants were an undifferentiated brotherhood of mobile single men, linked to a few prominent married men by ties of patronage and fictive kinship. This pattern did not lend support to domestic hierarchy. Consequently, family labor was problematic. Some Christian entrepreneurs were a significant exception—discussed at greater length below—since marriage for them meant an equal partnership with a wife conceived of as a friend.
Employment of workers requires supervision, delegation, and control on a scale that many Frafra enterprises lacked. Usurers, speculators, thieves, and absentee landlords lacked the labor demands of regular businesses. For them, the main problems concerned extraction of cash from clients, bribing officials, and maintaining cooperation with a network of partners. In Nima, legal sanction for contracts was weak or non‑existent, so that most activities are outside the law, whether or not they self‑consciously infringed it. Rates of return were nominally high. Interest rates of 25 to 50 per cent per month seem exorbitant when compared with bank loans at rates under 10 per cent a year and the legal maximum of 30 per cent a year; but the deafult rate on informal loans ran as high as four out of five.
When reliable trust is scarce, this much enhances the value attached to trustworthy relationships. Tenants do not move easily; and market fluctuations trap all but the most expert speculators. Rational calculation of profit is virtually impossible in these circumstances. An atmosphere of windfall and catastrophe is not conducive to sustained accumulation. What takes the place of law as a means of sanction in economic relations? Whence do the forms of economic life draw their effectiveness?
Clearly force was far from centralized; but systematic use of violence to enforce payment was rare in Nima. Criminals used force in their relations with each other and against the police, but not in their dealings with the local public since they depen5ded of communal support for protection from the authorities. Reputation, name, honor, and the macho complex offered much more scope for creditors and rentiers hoping to shame their clients into payment. Successful entrepreneurs did use exact forms of contractual agreement; for example, a client might agree to sign a document for a loan of £150, when he had in fact received only £100. Pawnbrokers acquired real assets that reduced their risks. Above all, however, economic life depended on the formation of complementary or shared interests that made commercial agreements self‑ reinforcing in the short- and medium-terms.
Frienship played a significant part in this wheeler‑dealing rather than obligatory statuses. Marcel Mauss once wrote that “friendship is the delicate aroma of the city”. Trust was generated by shared experience, mutual knowledge and the affection that sustains comes from a relationship entered and abandoned by free choice. Whenever my landlord introduced me to one of his “good friends26, I knew that he was also a crook from another ethnic group, a member of a criminal fraternity stretching back decades with a shared background of gambling dens, police raids, jail, diamond smuggling, drug rings, and all the rest. These were the men he turned to when he needed to trust someone, not his family, neighbors or his fellow tribesmen.
Elsewhere in Nima friendship networks were solidified by religious brotherhoods, especially by Islamic control of the cattle trade and long‑distance transport. And in West Africa, but not for the Frafras, similar organization was provided by secret societies. Meyer Fortes (1969) argued that kinship carries an ‘axiom of amity’ and perhaps it does; but another Tallensi proverb says maalong gaat soog, familiarity is better than kinship—‘making sweet’ in pidgin English, the shared experience of kindness and generosity.