“The Devil We Know†: Gold Coast Consumers, Local Employees, and the United Africa Company, 1940–1960

On January 31, 1957, about five weeks before the Gold Coast gained political independence from Britain, the country's first Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah inaugurated the opening of Kingsway, Accra, the country's largest department store. Owned and operated by the United Africa Company (UAC), a subsidiary of the Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever, Kingsway Stores were well known throughout British West Africa as a chain of urban retail outlets. Although Kingsway Stores originally targeted the needs of European colonials and their families, they increasingly attracted elite and emerging middle-class African shoppers. Equipped with an elevator, a modern car park, and three floors of retail space, the new state-of-the-art Kingsway building would be the first of its kind in all of West Africa. Invited to give the inaugural speech at the store's grand opening, Nkrumah stated: “It is idle to pretend that the people of the Gold Coast . . . [have] always been on the friendliest terms with such a mighty financial power as Unilever. But . . . my government like myself and the people of the Gold Coast, does prefer the devil it knows to the devil it does not know.â€