Local Culture and Global Politics

Looking into Bianca Murillo’s perspective of postcolonial Ghanaian consumerism, it is emphasized that this topic is heavily related to developing NLC sociopolitical ideals and economic vision. Murillo took readers inside the United Africa Company, the Kingsway Department Store in 1957, and Ideal Home Exhibition of 1967 in Accra. The context Murillo provides allows readers to define the meaning and jurisdiction of the terms ‘local’ and ‘global’ while instigating a discussion regarding the role average Ghanaians played in politics, as well as the innately political nature of consumerism.

When considering the expatriate shoppers who were harshly punished for shoplifting accusations and sentenced to imprisonment coupled with hard labor in 1957, the distinction between what is considered local and what is global exists in a simple, yet clear fashion (Kingsway Department Store, Murillo 368). There was a great effort to defend the social plight of Ghanaians in lieu of the presence of expatriates. Gloria Lamptey wrote the following in the Daily Graphic, “It is unfortunate that most of these housewives, particularly the white ones, tend to use their seemingly superior social standing to play all sorts of dirty tricks in the hope of evading challenge by naturally friendly and accommodating Ghanaians salesman and saleswoman” (Kingsway Department Store, Murillo 368). It is evident that an understanding of what is Ghanaian versus what is foreign were shaped by a national desire to re-define postcolonial Ghana as a global economic superpower in its own right. To Ghanaians, local meant contributing to and supporting to the existing urban infrastructure and businesses within their ethnic and territorial bounds. Global on the other hand were the people and entities that aimed to limit the economic and sociopolitical development that Ghanaians craved.

In terms of the ability of average Ghanaians to participate in their local politics and the politicization of consumerism, Murillo’s look into the growth of Ghanaian industry revealed the significance of a starkly gendered social schism. Although Nkrumah’s administration had previously paved the way for women to be elected to the National Assembly and removed discriminatory practices in both education and various employment sectors, the post-Nkrumah polity aimed to promote the NLC’s vision of a free market, consumer-based capitalist economy that inadvertently excluded women from achieving political significance and instead placed them at the forefront of domesticity. For instance, during the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1967 exhibitors presented tools for the household that would modernize homes, while inadvertently stressing gender roles. “The Ideal Home Exhibition was part of a larger post-Nkrumah self-fashioning project that emphasized the home and rigid gender roles as a means to enforce social order” (Ideal Homes, Murillo 561). The role of women post-Nkrumah was inevitably substantially diminished. From the Ideal Home Exhibition to the Cold War kitchen debates, translating an administration’s goals for economic development and modernization to the household and seeing the economy as primarily consumer-driven demonstrates how political the home became. The social sphere in Ghana was shaped by the NLC’s values. They emphasized the importance of discipline, denounced Nkrumah, enforced gendered roles, filtered political participation, and promoted capitalism even though those values did not parallel the views of the majority of their citizens who were thereby excluded.