As Bain was investing in rather than buying out Shea Moisture, the relationship between the two was different, but nonetheless, given Shea Moisture’s emphasis on empowering marginalized communities, they seem to be unlikely bedfellows. Bain hardly comes across as a partner “already invested in community” that is “meaningfully engaging in social missions” in the way Richelieu Dennis described.
In late 2015 Shea Moisture’s black core consumers were worried that they would be sidelined following the involvement of Bain. Although Dennis assured them they would remain top priority, by mid-2017 we know what their commercials looked like. Dennis responded to these controversies by claiming that, without expanding, Shea Moisture would not be able to “do the things that people love about Shea Moisture”; the “community projects” and the “millions of dollars we invest in Ghana” would not be sustainable. By the end of 2017 Shea Moisture was coming under fire again. Unilever would acquire Sundial brands, which would operate as a stand-alone unit with Dennis continuing on as CEO. Hair bloggers, influencers, and other black women were disappointed once more. Didn’t Unilever sell skin-lightening products in the “developing” world?
THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN AND THE THREE C’S OF COLONIALISM: COMMERCE, CHRISTIANITY, AND CIVILIZATION
Shea Moisture says that “through its Community Commerce purpose-driven business model, the company creates opportunities for sustainable social and economic empowerment throughout its supply chain, as well as communities in the United States and Africa.” It claims its “focus [is] on entrepreneurship, women’s empowerment, education and wellness” and that
10% of Shea Moisture Community Commerce sales go to women-led businesses, to support communities that supply ingredients for our products, or to support the Sofi Tucker Foundation
This helps them to earn a better living and support their families, making a better life possible within their communities24
Shea Moisture is hardly the only company or institution to make such claims. As a narrative, “female empowerment” is big business. The emphasis on commerce to liberate Africa has long-standing antecedents. The colonial concept of the white man’s burden was based on the promotion of the three C’s: commerce, Christianity, and civilization. When it comes to commerce, the extent to which this continues to frame relationships between Africa and the West is a solemn reminder that that history is far from past. What we have today is the continuation of a system that began with colonialism, starting with the imposition of wage labor, the subsequent erosion of community, lineage, and kinship; and the creation of markets that Africans were disadvantaged in. The same forces that produced poverty in the first place are then presented as offering the solution, often encouraging collaboration with exploitative multinationals.
As the anthropologist Jason Hickel explains, “The logic of ‘female empowerment’ promoted by multinationals and international financial institutions is so seductive because it sits very comfortably in the context of the Western liberal values of individualism and the very ‘personal’ brand of what ‘freedom’ means.” Hickel suggests that the other reason “female empowerment” enjoys such popularity is because the “story is apolitical enough to be safe for corporations and international banks to promote without undermining their own interests, and compelling enough for them to use as a PR campaign that effectively disguises the extractive relationships they have with the global South.”25
Promoting donations to schools and assistance to small groups of women as solutions to poverty obscures the role that development institutions and multinationals play in the perpetuation of poverty and the underdevelopment of Africa. Prominent economists, such as professor of economics William Easterly, have highlighted the direct relationship between IMF structural adjustment loans and economic collapse in the developing world. International institutions tie aid to development assistance, ensuring that public funding is cut and that national industries go unfunded and undeveloped—not unlike the process through which companies become bankrupt following leveraged buyouts.
One consequence of this is a supply of underpaid labor and resources from these countries, particularly from the labor of those who are most vulnerable: women and children. It’s a strategy that guarantees markets for Western products, as the local products—which remain underfunded—cannot compete with often heavily subsidized American or European versions.
Hickel argues that shifting the responsibility for escaping poverty to the power of female entrepreneurs obscures the role that multinationals and financial institutions have played in producing poverty.
These approaches seek to empower women to participate in the market and thus lift themselves out of poverty, but they ignore the fact that this kind of self-help is impossible on a large scale without the market regulations and state subsidies that favour small enterprises, and without welfare arrangements to support people when they fail. Yet both these arrangements are being rolled back, through structural adjustment, by the same organisations that promote micro-credit.26
In spite of the destruction they cause, it’s a double win for the companies, which then get to sell the story of female empowerment that makes for fantastic PR.
Multinational corporations are well aware that Africa, and the global South more generally, promise huge and as yet untapped markets of consumers. Since colonization, access to these markets has been the objective of Western interests in Africa. The pursuit of markets was indeed one of the significant factors in the abolition of the slave trade. This detail tends to be left out when Britain eulogizes its role in abolition.
It was only when I was much older that I understood that Olaudah Equiano, my childhood hero, saw trade as a primary rationale for abolition:
As the inhuman traffic of slavery is now taken into the consideration of the British legislature, I doubt not, if a system of commerce was established in Africa, the demand for manufactures would most rapidly augment, as the native inhabitants would insensibly adopt the British fashions, manners, customs, &c. In proportion to the civilization, so will be the consumption of British manufactures . . .
Europe contains one hundred and twenty millions of inhabitants. Query. — How many millions doth Africa contain? Supposing the Africans, collectively and individually, to expend 5£ a head in raiment and furniture yearly when civilized, &c. an immensity beyond the reach of imagination . . .
Cotton and indigo grow spontaneously in most parts of Africa; a consideration this of no small consequence to the manufacturing towns of Great Britain. It opens a most immense, glorious, and happy prospect—the clothing, &c. of a continent ten thousand miles in circumference, and immensely rich in productions of every denomination in return for manufactures.27
Colonialism put in place an infrastructure of extraction that has only become more entrenched. Multinationals like Unilever target low-income and rural consumers. Shea Moisture states that “Sundial’s approach complements the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP).”28 One of their aims is to improve the livelihoods of low-income farmers. But development experts like Bill Vorley insist that “big brands like Unilever aren’t the answer to helping Africa’s farmers.” Rather than selling straight to multinationals, many smallholders would be much better off participating in their local informal economies, where their products can often fetch far higher prices than global commodity prices. International organizations pressure governments not to invest in their own economies. The subsequent absence of provision for schooling and healthcare means many of these households are also desperate for cash. It can be of much greater value to sell to traders for cash than to get caught up in the bureaucracy of “contracts, membership of producer groups, delayed payments and strict compliance with standards for quality,” yet, under pressure from donors and multinationals, officials in these countries often subject those who trade in the informal market to “harassment and downright hostility” as they perceive this work as “tax avoiding and anti-progress.”29