This is a work about the management and business strategies of Kalabari Incorporated of the Niger Delta area of Nigeria. The study presents an easy-to-read history of Kalabari business. I then use that history to both analyze and illuminate the business and management thinking of pre-twentieth-century Kalabari society. I have used the story of the Kalabari people to show the fundamental affinity between current strategic management thinking in the West and African business practice in the nineteenth century. The purpose of the book is to reconstruct the story of the Kalabari people as a strategy-management drama, explaining the decline of their trading empire as a failure of strategic thinking.

The study’s second concern is to show how this Nigerian firm organized a flourishing merchant business in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries along the west coast of Africa. The firm was involved in highly competitive trade with Europeans and Africans and developed very insightful business and corporate-level strategies. We shall learn how it outmaneuvered its rivals and how the failure to see through its rivals’ strategies put it out of business. Its demise as a powerful group of merchants is both a failure and a study of strategy. Not able to adapt its competitive and corporate strategies to a changing world and industry, its trading empire was crushed. It was, tragically, not able to change over to manufacturing when the era of merchant capitalism was ending and that of industrial capitalism was starting, and it could not adapt its trading instincts to supplying the needs of emerging industrial capitalists in Nigeria.

The history of Kalabari Inc. is also the history of the Kalabari people, especially in the nineteenth century. Later, we will learn how the firm matriculated into the ethnic union that is today called Kalabari.

Business policy theory takes the corporation as the frame of business strategy analysis. If the corporation, as understood in the West, does not exist, business strategy analysis is considered irrelevant. In this book, I have demonstrated that one can undertake business strategy analysis of an economy in which there was no “corporation” and in which the functions of market analysis, corporate decision-making, and search for and maintenance of competitive advantage were distributed through the whole structures of society.

Using historical records, developmental patterns, migration history, and shifts in the culture, I have pieced together the business strategies adopted by this group of resourceful, entrepreneurial Africans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I have written the economic-social history of the Kalabari people with a focus on their business strategies, and in doing so, I have sought to illuminate their general strategic thinking at the height of the transatlantic trade. Also, I have indicated the similarities between the strategic management practice of Kalabari Inc. and modern companies in the Western world. This emphasis and focus separate this work from earlier works done on the Kalabari people.

Often, historians and economists alike treat the Kalabari people in this period as mere commercial middlemen reacting to European impulses or demands. My contention is that the history of Kalabari between 1700 and 1900 is essentially the history of a giant corporation—at least by the African standards of that period. It is a little unusual to treat an ethnic group as a corporation. However, as my analysis will show, the life and organization of the Kalabari people in this period lent themselves to this kind of interpretation. Besides, I make the argument that before they became an ethnic group, they were first an economic entity. Early historians eager to prove to European audiences, that states, monarchies, and democracies did exist in Africa before colonialism were more interested in political history than in organizational management history. They were thus quick to interpret the history of the Kalabari people as starting and ending as the ethnic group. Subsequent historians have fallen into the same trap.

Corporations usually come out of society in the sense that a person or a group of persons form them. The company grows within the society and gives birth to other companies as subsidiaries. Society begets the company, so to speak. But the case of the Kalabari people was different. Theirs was a society that evolved out of a business organization. The cohesion of the business organization begot the society, not the other way round. I hope to show this raw form of evolution and how it influenced the structures of society in the following text.

I am not saying that the pre-Kalabari did not come from a society of people. They definitely came out of a nation. What I am saying is that what historians and anthropologists have long interpreted and analyzed as an ethnic group was indeed a giant corporation in the relevant period (at least in the very early part) of my study. It was a giant corporation that metamorphosed into an ethnic group.

The characterization of the early Kalabari as a company is not the same thing as saying economy drives the superstructures or the same thing as equating the economy of the Kalabari society to a corporation. Time and circumstances made it possible for a group of entrepreneurs to aggregate and pursue economic goals, for the employees and employers to marry and remarry, for sustainable corporate cultures to be created, and for outsiders to be adopted or slaves bought when necessary to meet labor shortages to further their economic self-interest. In this continuous production process, they built a society and created an ethnic group. Their company became the state. In the end, the company was destroyed by enormous meshing of roles and the necessary burden of keeping their eyes on the economic ball. (Or was it the loss of its trading franchise and lack of adaptability to trading “non-proprietary” goods? Or was it that it was not able to adapt to trading when it did not have a monopolistic competitive advantage?). But not before it has produced an enviable form of evolution of (family business) company organization, power, authority, and acceptance.

A careful analysis of the structure of the present Kalabari society, its dynamics, institutions, and institutional changes will show scars of this rare evolution and transformation. Take, for instance, the “House System,” which has attracted the attention of many a historian. It is regarded primarily as political divisions of society. The “Houses” are indeed effective, closely knit system of divisions, subsidiaries, trading systems, and factories of the giant corporations whose chairman and chief executive officer was the “King” (Amayanabo).

This book is about this corporation and how it made its competitive and corporate decisions and the consequences of such decisions. The corporation’s concept of strategy is not one great plan, made by a great mind, fitting resources and capabilities to opportunities. It is rather the flow of small, innumerable incremental decisions made by the entire staff to leverage the organization’s resources, to beat the competition, and to create sustainable competitive advantages. Taken cumulatively, these small decisions produce a pattern of response to changing markets, technologies, and business environment.

This work is not based on detailed data. There is no “scholarly” examination of cases. It is rather an impressionistic analysis, semi- academic and reportorial in language, designed to be a fitting foreword to a future academic study.

It is germane at this point to inform the reader of what not to expect from this book. Though this book attempts to make a case for the existence of Kalabari as a corporation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and “compares” management practice in Kalabari with management practice in today’s Western society, it does not demonstrate an isomorphic match between current management in the West and Kalabari management practice. It instead chose to focus narrowly and exclusively on industrial organization paradigm and strategic management. The dominant influences on corporate strategic decisions that it chooses to focus on are the characteristics of and the conditions present in the external environment. A more extensive, ambitious, and academic work concerned with comparison of management practice in two societies would certainly adopt the use of multiple perspectives.

Finally, I should not fail to state that this book is only part one of a planned three-volume work. Part one deals with the formation of the corporation and its growth and break-up into three companies in the nineteenth century. Part two deals with the assessment of the three companies and the further development of Kalabari entrepreneurism in the first seventy years of the twentieth century. The last part will examine the utter decline of Kalabari entrepreneurism and propose a business plan on how to reinvigorate the latent business skills of the Kalabari society. I have therefore not offered any recommendations or techniques for business managers, as is usually done in business-management books. It is better to wait for the complete study before attempting the slippery road of recommendations.

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Excerpt from THE MIND OF AFRICAN STRATEGISTS published by Paperworth Books Limited. Copyright © 2024 Nimi Wariboko.

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