The Global System (Or How a Merrill Lynch Golf Jacket Ends Up Being Worn By a Farmer in Ghana)

A story  in the New York Times from late September continues to irk me and bring out my inner Yosemite Sam.  I finally have the fieldwork metaphor try and explain why this piece is so damaging to how we think about Africa as a place and its position in the world.  

Following the Westgate Mall attacks in Nairobi, East Africa correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman stated that Nairobi presents an excellent context for watching the expansion of Africa’s middle class.  He elaborates:

“…new office blocks are rising above the tin-shack slums, new bistros are popping up all over the place and taxi drivers are getting on Facebook. It’s essentially Africa joining the world.”

This is a very problematic way of reporting on Africa.  First of all, we should not be surprised that Kenyans performing drudgerous work know how to use the internet and are inclined to participate in social media.  As a blogger for the site Africa is a Country recently snarked in reaction to a different Times piece (one bellowing the wonders of how artists in Kenya use the internet as a means to create and share), “If a Kenyan DJ uploads a mixtape to soundcloud and the New York Times isn’t around to hear it, does it make a sound?” 

My overarching issue with this reporting is that an emerging middle class in Africa and Africa “joining the world “are two very different things.  There is something going on in Ghana with class, though I’ve yet to come across a convincing definition of a new Ghanaian middle class.  I rather suspect that more people are inching into the wealthy category and more people are falling behind, creating an average that looks middle class.  

This is the size of the new houses that are going up in wealthy neighborhoods in Accra

This is what new apartment complexes look like in wealthy neighborhoods in Accra

This is where advertisements for new up-scale apartment buildings are put up--on existing middle class apartment buildings that show no signs of expansion. 

But more importantly, Africa has always been, and every person on this continent retains active membership in the world. 

Maybe Mr. Gettleman never had a world history class that talked about the trans-Sahara trade that was the economic feature of West African societies prior to European contact. That seems pretty worldly to me. Maybe he forgot about the slave trade.  The forced movement of people from one continent to other continents also seems pretty indicative of worldly transactions.  And then there’s colonialism, and the current era of development that many label as neo-colonialism. There is a lot of external presence inside Africa, and Africa has a lot of presence outside of itself. 

This narrative is so nefarious is because it negates to acknowledge just how globally interconnected this continent has been for a long, long time before Facebook became a thing, let alone a metric for measuring a common man’s place in the wider world.  By equating economic and technological strides with integration into the world, it can be assumed that Africans who are not able to access such resources (or who have no interest in accessing such resources) are, by default, not part of the world.

The farmers who I work with don’t have Facebook accounts.  But they’re sure as hell integrated into a global system that harnesses them into positions of minimal power.  As producers and consumers, they are at the mercy of a global market system that undervalues the goods they produce.  One farmer in my site of study is always wearing an oversized warm up jacket with the Merrill Lynch bull emblem, an item of clothing he inevitably got through the prolific used clothing markets in Ghana.   The fact that this jacket has traversed from the shoulders of a wealth manager prone to golf to the shoulders of a farmer prone to plowing his own fields because he can’t afford to hire the service of a tractor.…………that, to me, pretty much explains how farmers in Northern Ghana are members of the world even though they don’t eat at bistros or log onto Facebook.  

Hoes used by farmers in the Upper West for plowing and weeding

When I asked this farmer of the Merrill Lynch warm up jacket if he thought the price he was paid for his cashew harvest was fair, his response was, essentially, that beggars can’t be choosers.  He got paid $7 for a cashew harvest that will probably go on to gather $14 from the middle man who has the means to get the nuts to the processor.  The processor will go on to charge more, the distributor will charge more and the supermarket will charge more.  And Merrill Lynch will go on to work to ensure that those at the top,  who win the most, can keep on winning the most.  Then they will kindly donate old golfing jackets that can serve as work gear for farmers in Ghana.  That’s our global system that ensures that all people are part of the world, just not equitably integrated into it.