Abstract

"Commercial Bloodsuckers and Industrial Vampires"

Tracy Mensah, Western Carolina University (tmensah@email.wcu.edu)

Sindhis were crucial to the making and remaking of Ghana’s economic landscape as hawkers, retailers, and eventually small-scale manufacturers. They achieved this through active negotiations with colonial and postcolonial administrations as well as African consumers at different times. The combination of these developments 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.
This paper presents the transformation in economic roles of Sindhis in Ghana throughout the twentieth century. As retailers, they negotiated with the colonial government in the aftermath of consumer riots in 1948. After independence in 1957, Sindhis interacted with Kwame Nkrumah’s development rhetoric and emerged at the forefront of a fledgling local manufacturing industry. However, after the coup that overthrew Nkrumah’s government in 1966, Sindhis were caught up in a series of commissions of enquiries due to their perceived association with Nkrumah, making them scapegoats in the narrative on mismanagement of Ghana’s economy. The contributions of Sindhis to the Ghanaian economy and successes in the country’s development narrative notwithstanding, their domination in industry and manufacturing made them “commercial bloodsuckers establishing themselves also as industrial vampires” in postcolonial Ghana. This can be attributed to how their commercial interactions with Ghanaians was largely shaped by race (when it mattered) and the roles of both colonial and postcolonial administrations.