Gracia Clark has been working with market traders in and around Kumasi on and off since the late 1970s. This book presents short life histories from seven women traders, chosen to illustrate the diversity of their lives and the complexity of their understanding of the economic system in which they play an important role. This role has not been easy. At various times in the active lives of these women there has been steep inflation and traders have been blamed for profiteering. This has led to riots, the mass destruction of markets and the confiscation of stocks. At other times some women have prospered until their trading capital was stolen or their family commitments eroded their abilities to continue trading.
Ghana's structural adjustment programme (SAP) has been hailed as a success by the World Bank. The women Clark has been working with recount life before, during and after the economic shocks which such a programme imposes. Several pages of photographs follow each woman's story. These serve well to convey something of the women and the appearance of African market places. Some of the women asked to be anonymized. In these cases the photographs are of generic market scenes, but where the women wanted their stories to appear with their names, and the recognition of authorship this implies, then we also learn what they look like.
Clark provides a general introduction setting the economic scene within which these lives were led. Each personal life story is preceded by a short introduction. A general conclusion argues strongly for the importance of the individual, and of idiosyncratic histories that economists miss in their insistence on representativeness. But of course selective principles have been applied here too. The women included earned their place partly for their narrative acuity. Clark also selected accounts to illustrate the diversity of lives that these women traders lead. The one thing we're not told is how many she selected from. How many other women's lives are in her research archives (which she offers to make available to other researchers)?
The introduction contains some excellent material about the problems of interviewing: non-directive interviewing might be lauded in methodological textbooks but in Ghana not being prepared to say what one is interested in risks seeming duplicitous (at the very least). The researcher needs to be open and honest about her interests. If this is not consistent with non-directiveness then so much the worse for methodological strictures. Unusually, we have clear and informative discussion about transcription and translation dilemmas, which help us understand the sorts of text we are reading. Clark is to be praised for the clarity of her prose.
Two smaller points arise. First, translated transcripts such as these require greater contextualization and explication than normal texts. Even if a publisher's house style uses endnotes, I think a strong case can and should be made for the use of footnotes with the transcribed material. It simply makes the task of reading easier (and all the more so if one is reading a non-hyperlinked e-text). Second, how much to explain, and indeed what to explain, are difficult and tendentious questions, as Clark knows only too well. Overall I think she has made good judgement calls and produced texts which will be comprehensible to a readership without (much) knowledge of West Africa. One small instance where I think explanation was needed but not provided is the following. A woman is discussing a daughter and her boyfriends: ‘The next one she took up with, he had four children with her. Of the four children he had with her, he has not named even one’ (p. 117). Here naming equates with recognizing (and, implicitly, supporting) a child. I think some undergraduate readers may not see the connection (that rights to name accrue to the recognized parents).
Overall, this is an excellent book: it will be useful in undergraduate teaching and makes an important contribution to our understanding of the richness and variety of women's lives in West Africa.
