Ghana Life: Dog Chain Boys
The traditional petty trader in Ghana is a woman who sits beside her wares in the market or on the roadside, or walks the streets of the city with her wares on her head. Whatever her mode of retailing, she is rarely threatening in her attitude towards potential clients and accepts repeated slights with a smile. The emergence of a gender shift in this commercial scene was unexpected but perhaps inevitable. Rising poverty and joblessness drove thousands of unemployed youth onto the streets in the 1980s and 1990s and ushered in the phenomenon of the chained dog.
Why thousands of young people and schoolchildren have decided to sell chains for dogs is a subject to be analyzed by psychologists. The economic reasons are also difficult to find. On the demand side, relatively few people in Ghana kept dogs as pets and even fewer cared for animals in the way Western dog owners do. To be sure, as the economy declined, an increasing number of wealthier people began to own guard dogs, and perhaps this trend persuaded the pioneers of the dog-chain movement that a lucrative market was emerging.
On the supply side, this was an era when the Ghanaian economy was flooded with cheap goods from China. Importers would have had no difficulty bringing in large quantities of this small but highly visible mass-produced item. Held up in the tropical sun, its chrome trim gleamed and drew all eyes.
As for the marketing strategy, it was totally rational. Unemployed youth identify wealth with car ownership, so people who owned guard dogs also drove cars. The dog chain guys targeted their niche market by gathering at road junctions: traffic lights and roundabouts, where drivers were forced to stop. There they would swarm, each descending on a hapless victim, caught between threatening annoyance if they left the window down and sweltering heat if they raised a glass barrier to fend off their assailant.
Needless to say, most drivers weren’t looking for a dog chain, so the strike rate from vendors must have been low. How many timid people were bullied into buying dog chains they didn’t need will never be known. Over time, the children diversified their activities to encompass a wide range of colorful trinkets. Perhaps some even ditched the dog chain altogether in favor of some other novelty that they considered a must-have item for a car owner. Regardless of what they sold, a phenomenon had been established that was universally designated by the local media as a dog chain boy.
From time to time in the 1990s, the local media highlighted discussion of the dog chain guys. At one point, the focus was on traffic congestion and how the police should stop the dog-chain boys from clogging up the road. At another point, the extreme youth of some of the boys made journalists wonder why the boys were not in school. Questions remain, but the phenomenon is now firmly established. In an era where gender differentiation is diminishing by the day, boys have joined their sisters and mothers on the streets as petty shopkeepers.
