Notes on Traditional Market Authority and Market Periodicity in West Africa

Abstract

These notes on traditional market authority and market periodicity in West Africa are intended to draw attention to the neglect of a fascinating historico-anthropological field. Given the lack of any satisfactory typology of West African markets, generalizations about all types of market must be avoided—and certain erroneous assumptions relating to the traditional relationship of chief and market are called in question. Nor should it be assumed that Christaller's ‘central-place theory’ has any application in such regions as Yorubaland and Iboland, where rural periodic markets cannot be classified hierarchically as, for instance, they can be in rural China. Although daily (or continuous) markets which, both traditionally and today, occur only in the very largest centres of population, are typologically distinct from rural periodic markets, this is rather because of their high proportion of full-time vendors than because they are necessarily apices of an hierarchical market system. Everywhere in West Africa there is a standard ‘market-week’ such that all the periodic markets in the locality are based on the same cycle. Although this has been well-known for centuries, few writers in English have been interested in mapping these weeks, or examining the relationship between them. After summarizing existing geographical material, which clearly establishes an association between 4- and 8-day market weeks (which are extraordinarily widespread in the forest zone), as well as some connexion between the 3- and 6-day market weeks, it is concluded that there are effectively only four common market weeks, viz. 3- (or 6-) day, 4- (or 8-) day, 5-day and 7-day. The 7-day market week prevails throughout Hausaland and many other Islamized savanna districts. The fact that it has existed for centuries throughout the Akan areas of southern Ghana and Ashanti (though hardly anywhere else in the forest zone) has not attracted the attention it deserves—the same applying to other questions, here posed though not answered, such as why the 4-day market week cuts right across some ethnic boundaries and not others. The article concludes with brief notes on the two traditional types of market taxation in West Africa, tolls and stall-rents, emphasis being laid on the traditional lack of market taxation in Eastern Nigeria.

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