Dissertation Defense: Tracy Mensah
Candidate: Tracy Mensah
Major: History
Advisor: Meredith McKittrick, Ph.D.
Title: “Shopping for All Pocket”: A Business of History of Indians in Ghana, 1890–1980
Bhai Boolchand was the first Sindhi to arrive on the Gold Coast in 1890. Between 1919 and 1930, there was a proliferation of Sindhi retail and wholesale firms throughout the colony, making Sindhi businessmen a marginal but important part of the Gold Coast’s economic arrangement. They occupied an intermediary position between Africans and Europeans in commercial transactions which extended to social aspects of life. Before independence in 1957, their retail and wholesale shops were quite distinct from the numerous European trading houses. These shops provided imported household goods, fabrics, and exotic materials to both African and European customers residing in the colony. More often than not, Sindhi shops were located next to European stores, and they advertised their wares as affordable to every person irrespective of their socioeconomic status, unlike their European counterparts; they were shops for all pocket.
This dissertation centers the retail, wholesale, and industrial undertakings of Sindhi businessmen in the Gold Coast/Ghana throughout the twentieth century. It draws on multiple engagements with historical and ethnographic methods in the form of archival materials, oral interviews, content and image analysis of newspapers and photographs respectively, and ethnographic to argue that Sindhis (Indians) were crucial to the making and remaking of Ghana’s economic landscape as hawkers, retailers, and eventually small-scale manufacturers through active negotiations with colonial and postcolonial administrations as well as African consumers at different times. The combination of these factors and their self-identification as Ghanaian-Sindhis explains their longstanding presence in the country, long after their European competitors left. In the second half of the twentieth century, the economic development of Sindhis in Ghana was further aided by a diasporic network that forged global economic ties with East Asia in places like Japan.