Written by: Rebecca Stangnes, Martine Valle, Enoch Gurah and Joseph Appau Mensah
The background for this article is a field work that the Norwegian and Ghanaian students have completed during the summer course ‘Intercultural perspective on Atlantic history and Heritage’ in Winneba, Ghana. The field we chose to study was to look at old trading stations in Winneba. During our field work we found an old trading post from the early 20th century. This article will look further into this trading post. What kind of activities went on in these buildings? Thereafter we will look at its connection with the Atlantic. Can we say that this trading post has an Atlantic connection?
The buildings and activities
The information in this article is based on an interview with the owner of the property today, Mr. Richard Ekem. He gave us a tour of the site including the manager’s home, the warehouse, a mechanical shop and the house used as a teaching centre and as a store. We cannot be certain that the information he gave us is completely correct, but this is the case with oral history in general. Mr. Ekem bought the site from the Union Trading Company (UTC) that owned it. We can therefore to some extent believe his information. The UTC was a Swiss owned trading company that operated on the Gold Coast. According to Mr. Ekem both Swiss and German traders were involved with the trading at the site in Winneba. The company was closely related to the Christian missionary society called the Basel Mission (Buser, 2010).
What we need to remember is that a lot of the information in this article is drawn from an interview. This is oral history, and we must be careful and aware of this fact. Since we had limited time, and we were not able to find other written sources, we must be critical to the information given by the owner of the property. Being able to see the site was of course helpful. We could see wooden floors in some of the buildings. This is not normal in Ghanaian houses, this can confirm Mr. Ekem’s information. In an online archive, the USC Digital library on the Basel Mission, we found a few pictures of trading posts in Winneba. We were able to match the pictures with two of the buildings that is currently in the location. The first picture was from 1914 and shows the view from the manager’s house towards the warehouse and the teaching building (Basel Mission Archive). The second picture is from 1929 showing the front of the building (Basel Mission Archive). Today this is the red house by the main road. We can be pretty certain that this is the same house, because we can clearly see the structure of the wooden beams in the first floor, and on the windows. The third picture we believe shows the manager’s house from 1925 (Basel Mission Archive). From the Basel Mission Archive we observed that the same roofing, windows and the building structure matches today’s structure. Mr. Ekem told us that the house had a wooden balcony when he took over, and the picture coincides this.
Teaching centre and store
Closest to today’s main street is a one-storey building that once was owned by the UTC. It was used as a teaching centre and contained a store. According to Mr. Ekem, the teaching centre was used to train students. The students learned how to repair cars that were imported into Ghana. Mr. Ekem told us that when he took over the place there were some cars still in the warehouse. The cars they fixed and maintained were the American Pontiac and Ford. In the same building there was a store where imported goods such as textiles, liquor, roofing sheet, silver buckets and other goods were sold. On the first floor there were rooms for housing. Today the space is used for student housing.
Residence house
According to Mr. Ekem, the company had a resident house for the European owners. The building was one-storey, with bedrooms, wooden floor, water system and roofed with clay roof tiles from Marseilles, France. He told us that the water system was the first in Winneba and it could have supplied the entire town at that time. We saw parts of the system under the building. Around the house there were traces after a garden with old tall trees, and a tennis court, all for recreation.
Other buildings
The other buildings on the location are a warehouse and a maintenance block. Behind the store and the teaching centre is the warehouse. According to Mr. Ekem the warehouse was used to store cocoa that was to be exported by the UTC company over the Atlantic. There was also a store room for the imported cars, according to Mr. Ekem. We don’t know when the importation and the workshop for the cars first started at the site. We believe that this activity did not start up until after the second world war. Close to the warehouse was a workshop for cars that needed to be fixed or maintained. The imported cars in the area was brought there to be fixed.
The resident house and the teaching and store building by the road still had visible elements from the original buildings. Such as in the second floor where the wooden floors are preserved. The ground floor of the building had a concrete floor. From Mr. Ekem we were told that the ground floor was also wooden when he first arrived. Most of the doors are original, you can see the hinges on the houses are similar to the European hinges. They had been imported when it was built. The roofing tiles used were also clay tiles imported from Marseilles in France. According to Mr. Ekem, this was the original tiles, and had not been touched since he bought the property. The building was made with wooden beams and some kind of clay. It shows some similarities to European building architecture. The residence had big windows for ventilation, and the warehouse had smaller windows and big doors. The location of the building is good, you have a view over the sea and the town.
Atlantic connections
The buildings have been used for different purposes that connect them to an Atlantic trading system. There are several examples that show this connection. Firstly, the warehouse was used to store cocoa before it was transported to the shores. The cocoa was from inland Ghana. The cocoa was brought to the coast and transported from the shore by small local boats to the bigger ships, they could have been American or European ships, and then they got shipped across the Atlantic to different markets. Today Ghana is the second largest country in producing cocoa, and exports almost everything they produce (Leraand, 2014). We do not know exactly when this specific trade took place. Mr. Ekem bought the property from UTC in the 1970s, and he said that the property had not been in use for some time. The trade must have stopped some years before Mr. Ekem bought the property, because when he bought it the trading post was not in use. The pictures from the Basel Mission archive are dated 1914 – so we know that trading existed at that time, which was during the British colonial rule over the Gold Coast. Secondly, according to Mr. Ekem, the company imported American cars, like Pontiac and Ford. Some cars were still in the workshop when he took over. In the workshop they had the mechanical store to fix the imported cars. This shows a strong implication of the Atlantic trade and the importance of this trade.
Conclusion
This short article has looked at a trading post in Winneba, located today on Windy-Bay Avenue. The trading post consisted of several buildings used for trade. There was a resident for the manager of the site. The warehouse was used to store cocoa. There was also a mechanic shop on the site where American imported cars were fixed. The red house by the main street was used for training locals to fix the imported American cars.
The photos in the Basel Mission archive provide us an important source to understand the building and to get some information confirmed. This trading post is a good example of the different kind of Atlantic connections that existed during the colonial period. The UTC was a Swiss company that traded both cocoa and worked on American produced cars. This shows some of the complexity and diversity of the Atlantic trading system in the 20th century.
Literature
Buser, Hans. (2010). In Ghana at independence: Stories of a Swiss Salesman. Slovenia: Basel Afrika Bibliographien.
Leerand, Dag. “Ghana”, in Store Norske Leksikon. From https://snl.no/Ghana.
USC Libraries. Picture: “Winneba: panorama, October 1914”. International Mission
Photography Archive, ca. 1860- ca. 1960. impa_Volume143/impa-abmpix-27094.tiff.
USC Libraries. Picture: “Trading company premises in Winneba, March 1929”. International Mission Photography Archive, ca. 1860- ca. 1960. impa_Volume145/impa-abmpix-26895.tiff.
USC Libraries. Picture: “Basel Mission trading post in Winneba. 1925”. International Mission Photography Archive, ca. 1860- ca. 1960. impa_Volume96/impa-abmpix-16448.tiff.