22
Chapter Ten
A Lagos Merchant and his Money: I. B. Williams, 1846-1925[1]
A. G. Hopkins
Introduction
The careers of the West Coast creoles were among the first topics to attract attention when the study of African history began its rapid expansion in the 1960s.[2] In those days, there was considerable uncertainty about what kinds of African history could be written, how far back the past could be traced, and the extent to which the vast interior of the continent could be brought into the story. In these circumstances, the first generation of historians of Africa had good reason to hug the coastline, like the Old Coasters themselves, and to select topics that may seem obvious today, when the frontiers of research have moved far inland and subjects that were unheard of forty years ago have been colonized by highly-trained legions of talented new researchers.
Yet the enterprise of the past helped to produce the inspiration of today.[3] Pioneering research on the history of trade and politics on the West Coast[4] opened the way for more detailed studies of urban elites, notably in Freetown and Lagos.[5] The questions asked then were not always those that would be asked now: ome contributions to the literature treated the creoles as agents transforming “traditional” societies in accordance with the precepts of modernization theory; others were concerned to emphasise the historical achievements of elites at a time when it was important to show that Africans could “run their own affairs.” Nevertheless, this research helped to shift the focus from Europeans in Africa to Africans in their own continent, asked fresh questions of colonial records, identified new sources, including private papers, and demonstrated the value of oral testimony.
By the 1970s, research had moved inland to colonize the hinterlands of the West Coast ports and had pushed down the social scale to encompass history “from below.” The very small number of scholars who continued to study creole elites produced penetrating, detailed work that was thought to be unattainable a decade or so earlier.[6] Nevertheless, the subject lost visibility and, seemingly, importance as attention moved to other groups and new themes. Changing priorities left behind a subject that was both incompletely researched and open to new ideas. What we know about the West Coast creoles is a fraction of what we might still learn, and new evidence, if acquired, would now be placed in a context that reflected more recent interests, such as multiculturalism and the Atlantic diaspora, rather than the lost world of modernization theory.[7] As for the continuing importance of the subject, it is hard to imagine any satisfactory account of the colonial era that does not assign a central role to indigenous elites, whether collaborative or not. As Marx and Engels famously observed: “the bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part”[8] —a thought that commentators on the right would also willingly endorse.
The chapter that follows seeks to place one man in the context of his times, which spanned the period before and after the partition of Africa. I. B. Williams is known only to a handful of specialists, and even then by name rather than in detail. One purpose of the present exercise is to assemble a biography or, more precisely, a business biography, thus adding to the still limited stock of available knowledge on the Saro of Lagos. A further, more demanding aim is to assess how far Williams’s business career represented the fortunes of African merchants in general at a time when foreign powers, and foreign companies, were advancing from the coast to the interior and radically changing the opportunities open to African societies.
Early Life
Unfortunately for researchers, there are rather a lot of families in Freetown and Lagos
with the family name of Williams. Some are related; some are not. It is sufficient at this point to note that Isaac Benjamin Williams was unrelated to any of the other well known families in Lagos with the same surname. He was, or rather he became, the most prominent member of his own Williams family, though his younger brother, Jacob Sylvanus Williams (1849–1933), acquired greater public visibility, first as the Anglican pastor of St. Jude’s Church in Lagos, then as one of the founders of the African Church in 1901, and later as Superintendent of its Bethel Church.[9]
Isaac Benjamin Williams was born in Aberdeen, Sierra Leone, on 28 August 1846.[10] His father (Robert), an Egba from Yorubaland, had followed a familiar route for those who landed in Freetown from other parts of the West Coast during the first half of the nineteenth century. He had been sold as a slave, exported from Lagos, intercepted by a British naval patrol, and delivered to Freetown, where he was freed, baptized, given an elementary education by Methodist missionaries and also an English surname, which in this (typical) case was that of his teacher. In 1851, the family moved to Wilberforce, Sierra Leone, but Isaac’s father died shortly afterwards, leaving his widow, Nancy, three sons and a daughter. In this difficult situation Isaac was placed temporarily in the care of an aunt, who looked after him while he attended King’s School in Freetown. A year or so later, Isaac’s mother married one John Scott, about whom almost nothing is now known. Evidently, however, this was a moment for reviewing the family’s future because in January 1857 part of the family—Isaac, his younger brother Jacob, his mother and his stepfather—landed in Lagos, joining others who had been tempted to return following the establishment of a British Consulate in 1851 and increasingly successful efforts to stamp out the slave trade.
Once in Lagos, the family settled in the Saro quarter in Olowogbowo, and Isaac resumed his education by attending Olowogbowo Day School until October 1859, when, aged thirteen, he was apprenticed to a local carpenter, J. L. Baptiste, who had premises on the Marina.[11] The early years of Isaac’s career remain sketchy and are unlikely now to be amplified. However, it is clear that he started his own business as a carpenter in the late 1860s and did well enough to buy property in Martin’s Street, which he converted into a workshop. He also began part-time trading in 1875, buying small quantities of imported manufactures and selling them to visiting traders from the hinterland. He did well enough to purchase additional properties in the 1870s in Broad Street and Lower Martin’s Street. In retrospect, it is apparent that buying property in the area of Broad Street and the Marina was as close as anyone in Lagos could get to striking oil. At the time, however, the purchase of swampy land in a small port with an uncertain future may well have seemed both risky and costly—whatever the price. Purchases of this kind had been made possible by the creation of freehold tenure within the new colony of Lagos, which was converted from the consulate in 1861.[12] These were crucial developments for those who had an eye to see them and the means of acting on the perception. Freehold tenure created negotiable security, which could be used to finance other activities, while the establishment of the colony provided a political guarantee that the new institutional arrangements would be underwritten by the British government.[13]
Merchant Prince
By 1880 Isaac’s trading venture had expanded to the point where he decided to give up carpentry and become a full-time businessman. In the 1880s he was said to have carried on “a very large business” and to have joined the ranks of the “merchant princes” of Lagos, as the commentators of the day termed them. In 1886 he moved a short distance from his Martin’s Street workshop to Broad Street, where he had an imposing house, named Raymond House, built on the corner with Martin’s Street. Raymond House, where Isaac stayed for the rest of his life, was constructed in the fashionable Brazilian style at a cost of about £1,600; the interior was equipped with the latest Victorian furniture, including a piano, and sets of crockery inscribed with his initials.[14] From the mid-1880s he kept a horse and carriage and employed several servants, as well as a cook. In 1891 he ordered a small boat for use on the lagoon, stipulating that “it must be splendid.”[15] Like other members of the Saro elite, he dressed in the style of an English gentleman and had suits made from “the very best cloth” shipped from England.[16] A later survey of the Lagos elite classified him as being among the “dandies” of the 1900s.[17] He took private lessons to improve his English, and subscribed to The Times Weekly, Illustrated London News, The Liverpool Courier, and the Review of Reviews, (with Sylvia’s Home Journal for his wife) to ensure that he was in touch with events in what was then the pace-setting metropolis.
Isaac Williams’s status as one of the big men of the day received public recognition in 1887, when he married Jane Beckley, following the death of his first wife, Mary, in 1885.[18] Jane herself was well connected, being the daughter of another prominent Saro merchant, T. E. Beckley, and the granddaughter of Thomas Joe, who was also a sizeable trader in the 1860s and 70s. The marriage, at Tinubu Church in central Lagos, was attended by the Lagos elite headed by Governor Moloney, who proposed the toast to the bride and groom.[19] Isaac’s high standing was confirmed in 1898, when he was chosen to be a member of the colony’s Legislative Council.[20]
By good fortune and careful husbandry, some of Isaac Williams’s records have survived. There are two letter-books containing copies of more than 1,000 outgoing letters: one deals with his business with the Manchester firm of John Walkden & Co. between 1882 and 1919; the other records some of his business transactions with other parties between 1889 and 1919. There is also an account book with John Walkden, covering the period 1881–1919, and a “memo book” containing copies of other business letters sent between 1914 and 1916.[21] This is a considerable collection, and one of only a handful of Saro businesses whose records have survived from the nineteenth century. The papers have limitations: the outgoing letters are mostly routine, repetitive orders; there are almost no incoming letters; the surviving ledgers record purchases only; there is no sales ledger; balance sheets, assuming they were compiled, have disappeared. Nevertheless, the records add detail and precision to what would otherwise have to be a brief and highly generalized account; moreover, they are the only source to reveal what Isaac did after he ceased trading in 1889.
The merchant princes of Lagos made their money out of the “legitimate” commerce that replaced the slave trade in the second half of the nineteenth century. [22] Legitimate commerce expanded, though irregularly, during this period, and it did so principally because regular steamship services, which began in the 1850s, created a market for bulk produce by cutting transport costs between Europe and West Africa (and in due course with the rest of the world too). The steamship created opportunities for new traders, including African traders, who could place orders for produce or goods with greater frequency and buy cargo space for a finite time, and so overcome the barrier to entry set previously by the need to own a sailing ship or at least a sizeable share in it. However, new entrants also had to be able to communicate with firms in Britain, establish their credit-worthiness and in general conduct themselves in a manner that created confidence in their business acumen and reliability. These requirements favored Saro merchants, who modeled themselves on Western ways, were for the most part Christians, could communicate in English, and held freehold property that could be used for security.
These circumstances enabled Saro merchants to achieve a prominent place in the overseas trade of Lagos in the second half of the nineteenth century. The most tempting opportunities were in the produce trade, principally the export of palm oil, and it was here that some of the greatest fortunes were made by men such as J. P. L. Davies, Z. A. Williams, and R. B. Blaize.[23] The produce trade, however, was also the riskiest branch of the import-export business because prices could vary wildly and did so until the advent of the submarine cable, which communicated prices with greater speed. Fortunes made in this way were easily lost, and the consequences could be devastating, as both J. P. L. Davies and Z. A. Williams found out. Isaac Williams never touched the produce trade, and he never sold alcohol. He concentrated, instead, on a miscellany of imported goods, which included cotton balls, hardware, corrugated iron and zinc sheets, flatware, nails, rat traps, mirrors, earthenware, yarn, thread, clay pipes, needles, hooks, matches, soap, umbrellas, candles, paper, boots, buttons, cotton goods, and packaged foodstuffs such as biscuits, rice, tea, sardines and sugar. The scope pointed toward the department store; the scale was that of a sizeable corner shop.
Isaac Williams began ordering goods from John Walkden’s catalogue in 1877, when he was still a part-time trader. Walkden had begun a mail-order business—then a novel means of trade—in 1868. In 1887 the firm claimed to be agents for 100 firms of “native traders” and to have shipped goods the value of £100,000 to the west coast in that year.[24] Williams’s correspondence with Walkden reveals a pattern of orders and an accompanying set of regular payments that were timed to fit with the steamship service, which left Liverpool for Lagos twice a month. It is evident that Williams had a keen business eye: his orders were precise, reflecting a mixture of quality considerations and consumer demand, and he was quick to point to superior products and lower prices when he found them among his competitors. In 1882, for example, he reported that he was “very much grieved at the cotton balls I mentioned last. You generally send the best quality to Mr. Z. A. Williams. But you have sent me inferior quality and not a few.”[25] The nagging continued. In 1888 Williams began a three-and-a-half-page letter saying, “I have many complaints to make,” and concluded, after a host of details: “Really, Mr. Walkden, I can assure you that I can get this cheaper elsewhere.”[26]