The traditional petty trader in Ghana is a woman who sits with her wares in the market or by the roadside, or walks through the streets of the city with her wares on her head. Whatever her retail mode of sale, she is rarely threatening in her attitude toward potential customers 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 introduced the phenomenon of the chained dog.
Why thousands of young people and school students have decided to sell dog chains is a subject to be analyzed by psychologists. Economic motives are also hard to find. On the demand side, relatively few people in Ghana kept dogs as pets and even fewer cared for the animals the way Western dog owners do. No doubt, as the economy slumped, more and more wealthy people began to keep watchdogs, 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 Ghana’s 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 under the tropical sun, its chrome cladding gleamed and drew all eyes.
As for the marketing strategy, it was totally rational. Unemployed youth equate wealth with car ownership, so people who had guard dogs also drove cars. The dog chain guys targeted their niche market by meeting 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 nuisance if they left the window down and stifling heat if they raised a glass barrier to fend off their assailant.
Needless to say, most drivers weren’t looking for a dog leash, so the strike rate from vendors must have been low. You’ll never know how many timid people were bullied into buying dog chains they didn’t need. 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 for a car owner. Regardless of what they were selling, they had established a phenomenon that was universally designated by the local media as a dog chain boy.
From time to time in the 1990s, discussion of the dog chain boys was highlighted by local media outlets. At one point the focus was on traffic congestion and how the police should stop the boys on the dog chains from clogging the carriageway. At another point, the extreme youth of some of the boys caused journalists to 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 traders.