One of the social and cultural features of daily West African life that keeps drawing us back here is the market. (Markets are much less visible in South Africa or East Africa, and less important to the domestic economy, I think—at least in the mostly urban areas where we lived.) In every major city there are several large markets, usually open every day, with a dazzling array of colorful cloth, vegetables, cooking ware, hardware, and everything else a vendor thinks someone might buy. In smaller cities, in towns, and in villages that serve as regional trade centers the markets are more likely to be on a weekly or twice-weekly rotation—or a four-day or five-day cycle, disregarding the Western week. Buying and selling is only one of their functions, of course: they are also occasions to see friends and family, catch up with the news, and show off new clothes. The markets we know are mostly urban, with sellers in their booths day after day (and in some cases living in the booths, or in informal shacks in market compound, at night). Most buyers just stop in to make a few purchases. The social function is more important in rural markets, where both buyers and sellers may have traveled for a day to the market town.
We had read about the Wednesday and Saturday Agomanya market in Krobo Odumase, at the center of the area where the Krobo people still make fused-glass beads in the traditional way. The Bradt guide singles it out as a favorite of readers, not just for beads but for everything else. Realizing that last Saturday was one of very few entirely open days on our calendar, Susan and I made an excursion there accompanied by one of the Calvin students.
Did I just arrive in Ghana yesterday? Have I never driven anywhere here? I looked at the regional map and guessed that it would be a 45 minute drive. In my dreams! There was heavy Saturday morning traffic in Madina, and then roads were destroyed and turned into rutted wilderness tracks at several points. A big funeral was going on in nearly every one of the dozen small towns we passed through—the streets were lined with men and women wearing black or brown funeral cloth. One of the funerals had spilled over from the family compound to fill the main highway through the Akuapem region, so police officers were there to divert us onto a dirt track that snaked along behind houses for a couple of kilometers. All in all the drive there took two hours (it was a bit less on the return trip). Even worse, the market was not exactly where the guidebook said it would be, and I was beginning to worry that we’d made the trip in vain.
“No worry,” as many taxi back windows say. There was no signboard and no visible market shed. The market stalls were not visible from the tarred road but began down a couple of narrow dirt lanes. But the crush of taxis and trotros, and the steady line of people carrying their purchases home on their heads pointed the way. And the guidebook is right: it’s one of the liveliest markets we’ve seen in Ghana, and also one of the most enjoyable. Nobody pressures you to buy or pursues you if you look at something and ask the price but then decline to buy.
Why ask the price, you may wonder: aren’t they posted? In your dreams! Seldom in any market in Ghana have I seen prices posted for anything. OK, now and then you will see a hand-lettered piece of cardboard by the tomatoes or avocados separating the “GHC2” from the “GHC5” stacks. A few vendors of ready-made clothing pin pricetags on some items (but then often quote another price when asked). Still, no matter how many hundreds of items a vendor has put on display, whether bolts of cloth or bead jewelry or kitchen appliances or vegetables or fruit or athletic shoes or automobile parts or stuffed animals or school exercise books (all of these were on offer yesterday), if you pick something up a price will be quoted instantly.
But then we come to a perplexing hermeneutical question: what does this number mean? One must never assume—with naïve Western ears—that it means, “If you wish to buy this you must pay me that many cedis.” A better translation—would this be called “dynamic equivalence” in Bible translation—would be, “Let us begin discussing this item and see where our discussion may take us, but here is a number to start our discussion on a sound footing that acknowledges our respective situations and resources.” I’ve noted earlier in our Kenya blog postings that a price in a craft market is a function with at least three variables, to which I now add a fourth: (1) what the seller paid (if she didn’t make it herself) and (2) what others in the same market or town are charging (I left this out earlier), and then the seller’s expert estimate of the (3) wealth and (4) gullibility of the prospective buyer. Most sellers, especially in craft markets, have figured out that there’s not much to lose by assuming very high levels of (3) and (4). (In selling vegetables and fruits, (3) and (4) are mostly ignored.)
(Small interjection: writing this up brings vividly to mind an transaction we conducted from the window of our car a few months ago in Addis Ababa—buying water and phone top-up cards from small market booths near our lodgings in Addis, with the help of our driver, who summoned a young man to fetch what we needed from the booths and carry it to us. That’s a common practice anywhere in Africa that you find market booths at roadsides. These are items with standard prices. But it was our first day there, and only later did we realize that the enterprising teenager had added a 100 percent markup for the arduous task of carrying our items and our payment five or six paces between car and booth. And the driver evidently thought that a fair enough arrangement.)
Susan is a master of the art of bargaining, with few equals. I have vivid memories of her conversations with sellers in the Maasai Market in Nairobi. She’d ask about some popular tourist souvenir—a pair of carved salad spoons, say—similar to ones we had bought recently for, say, 30 Kenya shillings (about half a dollar).
“These I can give you for a very special price,” she would be told: only 150 shillings.
“You think I am a UN worker,” she would reply, “but I am only the wife of a professor, and my husband’s salary is very small. I am an mzungu but not a rich mzungu. I will give you 20 shillings.”
“Aiee! Madame, if I sell to you for 20 shillings I cannot buy rice for my children tonight and my wife will be very angry because I am giving my goods away for nothing. But I see that you value high quality, so I will sell to you today for only 80.” And so on, till they got to 30 or 35.
That’s the way it goes in the “National Cultural Centre” here in Accra, a grand name for a sprawling complex of little craft and fabric shops where you can find some of the best traditional carvings and drums, and some of the most aggressive market vendors, in Ghana. The asking prices for tourists are usually sky-high, and bargaining is a long process. If you end up walking away, you will be pursued relentlessly wherever you go in the market, and out to your bus or car, the price dropping another notch each time you make what you think is your absolutely final decision not to buy. It’s annoying, yes. But it’s also part of a complex social interaction that seems to be valued even when it doesn’t result in a sale. Susan and I remember times during our previous visits when market vendors would say, “I have given you my price. What is your price? Do not go away—talk to me!”
On Saturday at the Agomenya market, we threaded our way through narrow lanes amid crowds of people coming and going, many of the women carrying their purchases on their heads. No tourists, nobody except us just looking around in amazement, just shoppers. (Exception: just before we returned to our car we saw two elderly white ladies looking at cloth.) Along the first lane, just wide enough for vehicles to squeeze through between the people, were electrical appliances, sporting goods, shoes, kitchenware, and one shop with a fantastic assortment of stuffed animals and plastic infant toys. We could see that the market stalls stretched a long way on each side. We soon caught sight of a row of booths full of beads—every color and size and shape, spread out on the rough wood table and hanging from nails in the framing overhead. Most were locally made from fused glass, with bright colors and rough surfaces. Each vendor showed us which beads were “new” and which were “old,” a category that includes beads restrung from old necklaces and beads created by melting and remolding broken or damaged beads. There were also long strings of tiny imported glass beads—strings of “waist beads” that a woman wears through her entire life, from a week after birth when she is outdoored til she is prepared for burial.
Our interaction with the vendor at the first booth was one of the oddest and funniest we’ve ever experienced. Susan looked over beads that would be useful for her pottery, while I just looked for the most intense colors and most interesting patterns. I held up a string of large, dusty blue circular beads and asked how much. “Five cedis.” Another similar string was next to it: can you give me a better price if I buy both? “I can give you two for two hundred.” Two hundred thousand? Yes, two hundred thousand.
A word of explanation: it soon became evident Saturday that Kroboland has not really come to terms with the 2007 revaluation, when a new Ghana cedi was introduced with a value of 10,000 old cedis. Vendors kept switching back and forth between 10 and “100,” meaning 100,000. These groundnuts cost 20,000, meaning 20 pesewas. The bread rolls cost one cedi, or two for 18, meaning 18,000, meaning 1.80 new cedis. We soon found that it was easier to pretend the revaluation had never happened and to talk only in thousands of old cedis.
But that was only part of the oddness: the vendor had just told me two necklaces cost four times as much as one. “Didn’t you say this was fifty?” I asked, translating back to old cedis. The man looked puzzled and repeated that I could have two for two hundred. When he realized we still weren’t communicating very well he turned to a young man sitting beside him, who told him—this is my guess—that “five” in English means 5, not 15. (Or perhaps he told him that it means 50,000, not 150,000.) Then as we went on talking about these beads and some others that Susan had selected, he kept throwing out numbers in English, some of which made sense and some of which were far too high or too low, then turning to the young man to explain to him what he had just told us.
All this was very friendly, and we were providing amusement not just for the two or three other people in this booth but for the neighboring vendors as well. It was also very time-consuming. At last we worked out a price that the vendor never actually accepted verbally, but he began putting all our purchases in a plastic sack and cheerfully accepted what we gave him: the first price he quoted, 50,000, times three for three strings of beads. (And the way that you pay 150,000 is to hand the seller a 10 and a 5.) So in effect we had managed after lengthy negotiation to being the price back down to his initial (but evidently unintended) asking price.
And then, even though we had pushed him pretty hard, he was so pleased with our purchases that he “dashed” us a long string of narrow conical beads—giving it not to Susan but to Hannah. (It isn’t anything she would weark, so she gave it later to Susan, who sees pottery possibilities.)
We wandered on happily through other sections of the market—vegetables and fruits, second-hand clothing, shoes, plasticware, hardware, plumbing and electrical supplies—til we found a both with beautiful tie-and-dye (that’s the Ghanaian phrase) and wax print cloth. Susan and Hannah bought a few yards each. We had seen no other cloth sellers, and the choices and prices were good. The young woman tending the booth was evidently not authorized to negotiate prices, so she called her older sister, the booth owner, who readily knocked off a few cedis. (Like other younger people we met in the market, they tended to be more confortable talking about new cedis.) We asked where to find the bead sellers, wondering if the few booths we had seen were all of them, and she dispatched a young man standing nearby to lead us to a new section of the market, where there were about 20 bead vendors along two rows of stalls.
Susan cannot be held responsible for her behavior when she gets around Ghanaian handmade beads—and I’m no better. But we showed some restraint: we bought beads from only about half the vendors there. The prices were far below what they are at Cedi Beads, where we will take the students on Saturday for a tour and demonstration. At shops and markets in Accra the prices would be two or three times higher. These vendors were selling only beads strung roughly on raffia, though, not finished jewelry. No doubt most of the jewelry vendors we see around Accra buy their beads at markets like this and then arrange them in necklaces, bracelets, and earrings.
As we were tearing ourselves away from all the beautiful beads, the first vendor we had purchased from came over (his section of the market was not very far away), just to say hello and wish us well as we purchased from his competitors.
Wandering back in the general direction of the road, we came upon an entire shed, with two rows of market stalls, full of cloth sellers. The variety was dazzling and the prices very good. We ended up with two pieces of print cloth for shirts for me and a couple of interesting prints that we will either use as tablecloths or give as gifts. Relentless as she is when the asking price is high, Susan either paid the first price here or asked for a small reduction, maybe 5 percent. In this context, where nearly all the buyers are local and the atmosphere is very friendly and low-key, we were usually quoted prices right from the outset that were at the point we would have ended up after several rounds of discussion in more urban and tourist-oriented markets.
Somehow shopping at Target just doesn’t compare.
