Corporate legitimacy and advertising: British companies and the rhetoric of development in West Africa, 1950-1970

Business History Review

Volumn 81, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 59-86

  Decker, Stephanie ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL MANAGEMENT SCHOOL   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34347261708     PISSN: 00076805     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0007680500036254     Document Type: Review

References (96)

1. Aiken Watson, Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Disturbances in the Gold Coast (London, 1948);
2. Dennis Austin, Politics in Ghana, 1946-1960 (London, 1964), 69-77;
3. Florence Mabel Bourret, Ghana: The Road to Independence, 1919-1957 (London, 1960), 168-74;
4. Richard Rathbone, "Introduction," in Ghana. Part 1:1941-1952, ed. Richard Rathbone (London, 1992), xliii-xlvii;
5. Sarah Stockwell, The Business of Decolonization (Oxford, 2000), 70-90.
6. Similar disillusion gripped Nigeria, but major riots did not occur. See Toyin Falola, Development Planning and Decolonization in Nigeria (Gainesville, 1996), 91.
7. E. W. Pearce to Mr. Rawlings, 31 Mar. 1947, papers of John Holt & Co. (Liverpool) Ltd., mss Afr. 5825,421A (iii), Rhodes House, Oxford.
8. This argument has been made by Stockwell, The Business of Decolonization,
9. and Robert Tignor, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire: State and Business in Decolonizing Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya, 1945-1963 (Princeton, 1998).
10. Toyin Falola argues that late colonial development planning profoundly shaped Nigerian conceptions up to 1980. Falola, Development Planning, xi, 68-70, 91.
11. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (New York, 1996), 3-4, 451-72.
12. The importance of development efforts has also been noted by imperial historians such as John Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1982);
13. Peter Cain and Antony G. Hopkins, British Imperialism. II; Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914-1990 (London, 1993).
14. Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, "Introduction," in International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, eds. Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (Berkeley, 1997), 12, 30.
15. The demise of colonialism has been connected closely with the inability of the former Great Powers to maintain their empires in the face of two openly anti-imperialist superpowers. John Darwin, "Decolonization and the End of Empire," in The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 5: Historiography, eds. R. W. Winks and Alaine Low (Oxford, 1999), 548-52.
16. Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, 1960).
17. The success of Rostow's work lay in its close fit with cold-war economic policies, and his challenging of the Marxist stage theory of development. See Goran Ohlin, "Reflections on the Rostow Doctrine," Economic Development and Cultural Change 9 (1961): 654.
18. Stephanie Decker, "Building Up Goodwill? British Business, Development and Economic Nationalism in Ghana and Nigeria" (Ph.D. diss., University of Liverpool, 2006), 89-129.
19. Tony Killick, Development Economics in Action: A Study of Economic Policies in Ghana (London, 1978), 11-32, 53-4.
20. For example, see Watson, Report, para. 241.
21. Developing a Middle Class in Nigeria," 20 and 30 Oct. 1961, Barclays Group Archive (hereafter BGA), 80/3468.
22. Unilever Directors' Committee, 358. Nigeria, 11 May 1962, Unilever Historical Archives UNI/BD/DC.
23. The idea that business has to justify its presence in society has been suggested in various different contexts. See Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Business (Berkeley, 1998), 7-47;
24. Stefan Schwarzkopf, "They Do It with Mirrors; Advertising and British Cold War Consumer Politics," Contemporary British History 19 (2005): 137-43;
25. Timothy O'Brien, "The Revolutionary Mission: American Enterprise in Cuba," American Historical Review 98 (1993): 765-67, 781-84.
26. Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (London, 1968);
27. Walter Bernecker and Thomas Fischer, "Rise and Decline of Latin American Dependency Theories," Itinerario 22 (1998): 25-45;
28. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London, 1972);
29. Samir Amin, Neo-colonialism in West Africa (Harmondsworth, 1973).
30. Nevertheless, it is too simple to say that this trend ended with the 19705, as many scholars continued to argue along those lines; see, for example, Toyin Falola, Britain and Nigeria: Exploitation or Development? (London, 1987).
31. Anandi Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising (Manchester, 2003).
32. Cooper and Packard, "Introduction," 4, 12, 18, 30.
33. The textual analysis of ads is based on an essay by Roland Barthes, "The Rhetoric of the Image," in Image, Music, Text (Glasgow, 1977), 33-47.
34. Varda Langholz Leymore, in her book Hidden Myth: Structure and Symbolism in Advertising (London, 1975), viii, x,
35. focuses on the interaction with value systems in society, while John Sinclair, Images Incorporated: Advertising as Industry and Ideology (London, 1987), 4-5, 29, emphasizes that ads are part of wider corporate strategies.
36. This underscores that British companies in Africa increasingly Africanized their "shop front" and their management, and between the mid-1960s and the 19805 most firms had almost fully Africanized their top management cadres.
37. Antony G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (Harlow, 1973), 273-80.
38. Decker, "Building Up Goodwill?" 89-99, 109-16.
39. For Ghana, see Miatta Fahnbulleh, "The Elusive Quest for Industrialisation in Africa: A Comparative Study of Ghana and Kenya, 0.1950-2000" (Ph.D. diss., London School of Economics, 2005).
40. This was referred to as redeployment, and was endorsed early on by colonial governments; see Watson, Report, para 241;
41. United Africa Company, "Redeployment," Statistical and Economic Review 28 (London, 1963), 1-38;
42. Peter Kilby, Industrialisation in an Open Economy: Nigeria, 1945-66 (Cambridge, 1969), 53-80;
43. Hopkins, An Economic History, 276-79;
44. Stockwell, The Business of Decolonization, 152-57;
45. D. K. Fieldhouse, Merchant Capital and Economic Decolonization: The United Africa Company, 1929-1987 (Oxford, 1994), 679-715.
46. For a short account of the foundation of the banks, see Richard Fry, Bankers in West Africa: The History of the British Bank of West Africa (London, 1976), 23-29, 91-93, 101-2.
47. Measured by the total number of branches in relation to population figures. See Walter Newlyn, "The Colonial Empire," in Banking in the Commonwealth, ed. Richard Sayers (Oxford, 1952), 450.
48. The bankers' notion of creditworthiness nevertheless had racist undertones, as bankers assumed that Africans were stealing and lying (especially from Europeans) whenever possible. Whether this (mutual) distrust between Africans and Europeans really resulted in higher levels of fraud is unclear. Moreover, property rights in Africa could not always be passed on to Europeans. Especially with regard to land rights, the situation was complicated. Colonial governments made African-owned land in many parts of the colonies inalienable to foreigners, in order to prevent settlements and plantations. While this policy benefited independent African farmers, it made it difficult for local owners to ortgage their land or property to a foreign bank, since the bank could not take up the title. Hence, Africans had difficulty providing security for loans. On the nature of property rights, see Gareth Austin, Land, Labour and Capital in Ghana: From Slavery to Free Labour in Asante, 1807-1956 (Rochester, N.Y., 2005), 443-45, 453-54.
49. Mobilizing savings and expanding financial institutions were presented as key features for take-off in W. W. Rostow, "The Take-off into Self-sustained Growth," Economic Journal 66 (1956): 29-30, 38-40, 46-47.
50. See also W. Arthur Lewis, "Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour," Manchester School (May 1954): 416.
51. "Big-push" development economics were embraced by Nkrumah's government; and acceptance of these ideas was widespread. See Killick, Development Economics in Action, 17-20.
52. 3, Animation Nation, especially in the first part on advertising, "The Art of Persuasion."
53. Barclays Bank DCO, Board Minutes, ledger vol. 9, 22 Mar. 1956, 38; 27 Sept. 1956, 129; EGA 38/511.
54. Hugh Norris, "A Little Family History, Part Three - My Own Story, Book Four: 1949-1984, "Overseas Banking," 70, BGA 1083/1.
55. Norris, "Overseas Banking," 70.
56. W. W. Milne, "General Report on Visit to West Africa," 9 June 1946, 6, BGA 38/906; Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (London, 1993), 242-43.
57. Douglas Holt, How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding (Boston, 2004), 6-10.
58. The particular importance of highlife music for anticolonial nationalism and postindependence nation building lay in the nontribal, yet specifically African, even pan-African, credentials of its heritage. See John Collins, "A Social History of Ghanaian Popular Entertainment since Independence," Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, n.s. 9 (2005): 19-24.
59. Brian Macdona, "Visit to Sierra Leone and Ghana, February-April 1958," verbatim notes from dictaphone, 27, BGA 38/382 (4) (hereafter Macdona, "Visit to Sierra Leone and Ghana").
60. Macdona, "Visit to Sierra Leone and Ghana," 72.
61. Ibid., 27.
62. Richard Fleming and E. V. Whitcombe, "Nigeria and the Cameroons," 23 July 1960, 19, BGA 80/3466.
63. Kaye Whiteman, "Obituary: David Williams," Independent, 23 Sept. 1993;
64. "David Williams," Times, 17 Sept. 1993.
65. This is presumably in the late 1970s and early 1980s. See David Pallister, "Media: A Rift between Continents-David Pallister on a Power Struggle between London Editor and Lagos Bosses," Guardian, 3 Sept. 1990.
66. Barclays, "Accra," West Africa, 9 Jan. 1960.
67. Barclays Bank Nigeria, "How Barclays Can Help to Protect Your Business Interest in Other Countries," Management in Nigeria (Nov. 1976): 33.
68. For an influential criticism of advertising, see John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (London, 1974, ist ed., 1958), 150-51;
69. and Schwarzkopf, "They Do It with Mirrors," 135-7.
70. See also Frank Trentmann, "Beyond Consumerism: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption," Journal of Contemporary History 39 (2004): 376-81.
71. Thomas Biersteker, Multinationals, the State, and the Control of the Nigerian Economy (Princeton, 1987).
72. See also Adeoye Akinsanya, Economic Independence and Indigenisation of Private Foreign Investments: The Experiences of Nigeria and Ghana (Columbia, S.C., 1982).
73. Geoffrey Jones, The Evolution of International Business: An Introduction (London, 1996), 293. Most expropriations occurred in Africa (52.1 percent), followed by Latin America (28.7 percent) and North Africa and the Middle East (25.9 percent) according to Kobrin for the time period 1960-79. British firms were also most likely to be expropriated in Africa (49 percent), but less likely than their peers to lose their investment in the Middle East (19 percent) or Latin America (8 percent). This might reflect different regional distribution. Internationally, the manufacturing sector was worst affected (26 percent), followed by petroleum (17.7 percent), mining and finance (12.1 percent), and agriculture (8.8 percent). Here, British experience diverged distinctly: extractive companies were most affected (30 percent), then finance (20 percent), followed by manufacturing (15 percent) and agriculture (13 percent). The United States' investment in Latin America probably explains why British companies were affected differently than the overall pattern suggests.
74. For the international figures, see Stephen J. Kobrin, "Expropriation as an Attempt to Control Foreign Firms in LDCs," International Studies Quarterly 28 (1984): 336;
75. for British companies, see Fiona Boyd, "Expropriation of Alien Property in International Law: A Study of Recent State Practice Concerning British Nationals" (M. Phil, diss., University of Nottingham, 1988), 37, 43.
76. Nigeria had been founded in the late 1940s by a colonial education officer, originally as a private initiative. Its success prompted the Nigerian colonial government to take over the magazine as a quarterly publication on the arts and culture in Nigeria. As a state-owned venture, it was presumably taken over by the independent Nigerian state, but information on the subsequent fate of the magazine is patchy. Colonial Office, Colonial Annual Reports: Nigeria, 1947 (London, 1949), 79-80.
77. Fieldhouse, Merchant Capital, 620, 718, 721, 762, 774;
78. Geoffrey Jones, Renewing Unilever (Oxford, 2005), 57, 79, 197.
79. Robert Tignor, "Decolonization and Business: The Case of Egypt," Journal of Modern History 59 (1987): 479-505;
80. Robert Tignor, "The Suez Crisis of 1956 and Egypt's Foreign Private-Sector," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 20 (1992): 274-97;
81. Caroline Piquet, "The Suez Company's Concession in Egypt, 1854-1956: Modern Infrastructure and Local Economic Development," Enterprise & Society 5 (2004): 107-27.
82. For Iran in the 1950s, see Geoffrey Jones, Banking and Oil: The History of the British Bank of the Middle East, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1987).
83. For Latin America, see Paul Sigmund, Multinationals in Latin America: The Politics of Nationalization (Madison, Wise., 1980).
84. In Ghana literacy rose from between 19 percent to 23 percent for males around 1950 to 43 percent for males and reached 17 percent for females in 1970. In Nigeria, English literacy was lower 0.1950, between 10 and 15 percent, but it also rose to 31 percent for men and came to 10 percent for women in 1970. (The percentages refer to people age fifteen and over.) Richard Jolly, Planning Education for African Development: Economic and Manpower Perspectives (Nairobi, 1969), 104, table IV-1;
85. Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge, 2002), 114, table 2.
86. Colonial Office, Report on the Gold Coast for the year 1954 (London, 1956), 104;
87. and Report on Nigeria for the year 1954 (London, 1958), 188. Although Nigeria's western region was rural, it was also affluent and densely inhabited due to cocoa farming,
88. Collins, "A Social History," 19. For an image from 1950, see Colonial Office, Colonial Reports: Gold Coast, 1950 (London, 1952), between pp. 54 and 55.
89. While there is no information on West Africa, in Zimbabwe these units showed ads before and after films. Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, N.C., 1996), 141.
90. Macdona, "Visit to Sierra Leone and Ghana," 27.
91. Assertive poses cannot be equated with a "decolonized" representation of Africans. Indigenous photography shows different poses from colonial imagery and corporate advertising. For an introduction to the debate, see Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the "Native" People and the Makings of European Identities (London, 1999), 13-14;
92. and the criticism by Erin Leigh Haney, "If These Walls Could Talk! Photographs, Photographers and Their Patrons in Accra and Cape Coast, Ghana, 18401940" (Ph.D. diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2004), 182-213.
93. Of course there had been criticism of foreign multinationals before the 1970$, most notably Chief Awolowo's motion for nationalization in the Nigeria parliament in 1961. His party had already become the focus of foreign business criticism during decolonization. See Tignor, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire, 239-41.
94. Charles Kennedy, "Relations between Transnational Corporations and Governments in Host Countries: A Look into the Future," Transnational Corporations i (1992): 67-91.
95. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, World Investment Report 2003-FDI Policies for Development: National and International Perspectives (New York, 2003), 164.
96. Vincent Maphai, head of BHP Billiton, South Africa, quoted in "Business in Africa: A Flicker of a Brighter Future," Economist, 7 Sept. 2006, 81.