Ghana Life: Dog Chain Boys

The traditional petty trader in Ghana is a woman who either sits beside her wares in the market or at the roadside, or walks the city's streets with her wares upon her head.

Whatever her mode of retailing, she is seldom threatening in her attitude to potential customers and takes repeated rebuffs with a smile.
The emergence of a gender change in this trading scene was unexpected but perhaps inevitable.

Increasing poverty and lack of jobs brought thousands of unemployed youths onto the streets in the 1980s and 1990s and introduced the phenomenon of the dog chain boy.
Why thousands of young men and schoolboys should all have decided to sell dog chains is a matter to be analysed by psychologists. Economic motives are also difficult to find. On the demand side, relatively few people in Ghana kept dogs as pets and even fewer catered for the animals in the way that Western dog owners do. No doubt as the economy declined, increasing numbers of wealthier people started keeping guard dogs, and maybe this trend persuaded the pioneers of the dog chain movement that a lucrative market was emerging.
On the supply side, this was an era in which the Ghanaian economy was flooded with cheap goods from China.

Importers would have experienced no difficulty in bring in vast quantities of this small yet highly-visible mass produced article.
Held up in the tropical sunshine its chromium plating glistened, it attracted every eye.

As for marketing strategy, this was entirely rational.
Unemployed youth identify wealth with car ownership and so people who owned guard dogs also drove cars. The dog chain boys targeted their niche market by assembling at the road junctions: traffic lights and roundabouts, where drivers were forced to stop. There they would swarm, each descending upon a hapless victim, caught between a threatening hassle if they left their window down and stifling heat if they wound up a glass barrier to fend off their assailant.
Needless to say, most drivers were not on the lookout for a dog chain, so the strike rate of the vendors must have been low.

How many timid people were bullied into buying dog chains that they didn't need, will never be known.
In time, the boys diversified their activities to embrace a wide range of colourful trinkets. Maybe some even dropped the dog chain altogether in favour of some other novelty that they deemed a must-have item for a car owner. Whatever they sold, a phenomenon had become established that was universally designated by the local media as a dog chain boy.
From time-time in the 1990s the local media brought discussion of dog chain boys into prominence.

At one time the focus was on traffic congestion and how the police should prevent the dog chain boys from obstructing the carriageway. At another time the extreme youth of some of the boys set the journalists wondering why the boys were not in school.
The questions remain but the phenomenon is now firmly established. In an age in which gender differentiation is diminishing daily, boys have joined their sisters and mothers on the streets as petty traders.