Indigenous Credit Institutions in West Africa, c.1750-c.1960

Abstract

Even by ‘Third World’ standards, West Africa may appear as one of the most extreme cases of the domination of local credit markets by outside suppliers, during the colonial period and even before. Much has been written about European sources of credit in the import-export trade of the region, from the ‘trust system’ of the precolonial coast to the advances given on cash crops in colonial times. By contrast, two celebrated monographs by economic anthropologists of the substantivist school claimed that credit had been rare and non-existent, respectively, before colonial rule in the particular ‘indigenous’ economies they studied. A basic task of this essay will be to show that the progressive accumulation of information on African sources of credit both before and during the colonial period has rendered such a view dubious for the cases in question, and thoroughly misleading as a basis for generalisations about the region.