Economic culture and policies in the pre-colonial nineteenth century
Considering that the supply of cultivable land was rarely a constraint on the expansion of production, the extent of the social and economic commitment to the market in fifteenth- to nineteenth-century West Africa was remarkably high.
It went beyond absolute advantage, which was illustrated by the salt trade, from desert and coast sites to areas that could not produce it, to include comparative advantage and consumer taste, notably in cotton textiles. Over much of the region, ethnic-cum-religious diasporas, usually Muslim, organised trade across political and cultural boundaries. Judging from an 1881 dictionary, the Akan language, spoken in much of the forest zone of what is now Ghana, included words for a range of economic concepts, including dwetiri, ‘a capital or stock of money to begin trade with; a fund employed in business or any undertaking' (Hill, 1963, 215, quoting Christaller, 1881).Some scholars have emphasised a mercantilist tendency in late pre-colonial kingdoms. In the case of the Asante kingdom (centred in the northern part of the forest zone of what is now Ghana), Ivor Wilks went further, proposing parallels with the policies of the first president of independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. One was a sustained attempt during the nineteenth century (before British occupation in 1896) to avert the growth of a private merchant class autonomous from the state. Another was the attempts of Asante rulers in the 1880s and early 1890s, facing British imperialism, to promote economic development through state intervention. Uniting both parallels was a third: a willingness to allow a major role to foreign enterprise, whether African Muslims or Europeans, rather than promote the indigenous private sector (Wilks, 1989, 684—6, 720—3). A revisionist analysis disputes the view of the Asante state as repressing domestic private enterprise, except briefly under Asantehene Mensa Bonsu, whose heavy taxation provoked the revolution that overthrew him in 1883 (Austin, 1996). Meanwhile the Sokoto Caliphate, the largest state of nineteenth-century West Africa, generally encouraged private enterprise, which flourished in textile production and long-distance trade, assisted by generally low taxes on these sectors, especially in the central emirates (Lovejoy, 2006).
In Asante, the achievement of self-made wealth was lauded with official celebrations and honours: on condition that the newly rich shared his wealth with the state (Wilks, 1993). In 1894, Asante exiles, in British territory, proclaimed an ideology of self-made wealth in two tracts, attacking the tax and death duties of the ‘thief Kings' of Asante, and welcoming the prospect of unhindered laissez-faire following what they hoped would be the imposition of British control. They proclaimed ‘In this vast country, Gold alone is King. If any get that wealth he is King. We are all free aborigines of this country' (quoted in Wilks, 1993, 180—1).
The evidence about attitudes to wealth in the animist cultures of the forest societies hardly suggests respect for the poor. But that position did not always go unchallenged, at least within West Africa as a whole. A notable example comes from the mainly Muslim societies of the interior savanna. Early in the colonial period, c.1923, al-Hajj ‘Umar of Kano (commercial centre of the former Sokoto Caliphate), Salaga and Kete-Krachi (in northern Ghana) wrote a long, powerful poem in Hausa, Talauci (‘Poverty') (translated by I.A. Tahir, 1969: published in Goody, 1982: 194—203). With excruciating precision, ranging over sex, food and perceptions of wisdom and honesty, ‘Umar satirised the hypocrisy of elite and popular worship of wealth and contempt for poverty. Certain verses were even theologically provocative: ‘None but God loves the poor man./ He who created him in his dire condition' (Goody, 1982, 198).