Brokers in the tea trade between China and West Africa

Introduction

This contribution explores brokerage in the transnational tea trade between China and Mali in West Africa. Chinese green tea arrived for the first time in northern Mali in the early 19th century. It was produced in family gardens in the mountainous regions of southern China, from where it was carried to wholesale markets and then transported to the coastal ports where wholesale-merchants, the hongs, sold it on to European traders. British traders of the East India Company were most active in the tea trade between China and Britain. They brought large quantities of tea to London, where the product was sold in auctions to wholesalers. Among these wholesalers were Jewish merchants who shipped some of the green tea to Essaouira in Morocco. There, other merchants packed tea on donkeys or camels and transported it further south, where camel caravans took the tea across the Sahara to Timbuktu and other Sahel towns in present-day northern Mali (for more details, see Röschenthaler, forthcoming).

Caravan trade across the Sahara gradually declined during French colonial occupation (1883–1960) and after independence in 1960, the Malian government created a monopoly on imports and exports and on the distribution of goods of basic necessity and luxuries such as tea. It also adopted a socialist policy and began to import green tea directly from China to Mali without the detour via Britain and Morocco. In Morocco the independent government followed a similar policy and in China, too, a state-owned society controlled the production and trade of tea during large parts of the 20th century. This situation changed in the 1990s after the liberalisation of the markets. In both Mali and Morocco, the state-owned societies were dissolved and private traders allowed to import from abroad. From the 2000s onwards, private Malian traders travelled to China to import green tea themselves (Röschenthaler, forthcoming).

Brokers are at work in the intersections where the tea changes hands. There are several types of brokers at work whose activities differ in eminence, scope and diversification in addition to their task of mediation. These brokers have in common that they mediate between tea sellers and buyers, work on their own account and make a living from the commission they receive for their work. They use immaterial assets such as language skills, persuasion, knowledge, business contacts and social networks. Some of these brokers carry out brokerage only, others assume overlapping roles and become entrepreneurs, wholesalers and landlords in addition to their brokerage work; still others organise ritualised events such as the auctions through which they transfer the product to potential buyers. All these brokers have facilitated and spurred the tea trade between China and Mali, and bridged geographical, social, linguistic and cultural spaces. They connect buyers to sellers and have contributed to the immense social importance that this hot beverage has assumed along the tea trail. However, during certain time periods not much space was left for tea brokers, in particular when governments monopolised the export, import and distribution of tea.

Scholarship discussed brokerage from the 1950s onwards in three fields (see also the introduction to this special issue): the field of development, connecting local people to the state or international NGOs (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2003; Faist, 2014; Wolf, 1956); the field of sociological constellations, drawing on Simmel’s (1950a, 1950b) seminal studies of deviant figures (Granovetter, 1973; Lindquist, 2015; Stovel and Shaw, 2012) and that of trade, beginning with the classical studies on landlord-brokers in West Africa (Cohen, 1971; Hill, 1966; Lovejoy, 1980; Perinbam, 1973), in China (Mann, 1984) and world-wide (Curtin, 1984). A few studies discuss auctions (in Africa, Houtkamp and van der Laan, 1993; Talbot 2012; in Europe and North America, Smith, 1990). More recently, brokerage studies broadened, examining, for instance, the brokerage of migration (Alpes, 2013), knowledge (Murphy, 1981), business (Southall, 1978) and cultural brokerage in the recent Sino-African transnational trade (Cissé, 2015; Haugen, 2018; Marfaing and Thiel, 2015; Mathews, 2016). So far, no studies exist on brokerage in the Sino-African tea trade nor on the striking similarities of brokerage in the organisation of long-distance trade in the 20th century and in the 2010s (see also Röschenthaler, 2020).

Some of the earlier scholarship understood brokers as a hindrance to development and business under the assumption that they followed traditional patterns of behaviour and that brokers would disappear with urbanisation, industrialisation and the nation state (for criticism, see Mann, 1984; Miller, 2012; Murphy, 1981). Murphy (1981) in his study on Kpelle knowledge brokers in Liberia criticised that the work of brokers was not essential in a structural sense but that they rather actively created their role. My findings corroborate that brokers as intermediaries between business worlds rather spurred development in trade and have not at all disappeared with urbanisation and the nation state. They show that policies can delimit brokerage in trade and illustrate that there is not one typical type of broker along the tea trail between China and Mali, but several broker roles, with specific local terms and semantic fields in each cultural setting. Only those who organise auctions would call themselves ‘brokers’. As a European term (see introduction to this special issue), ‘broker’ in this article serves as an analytical tool to grasp the broad variety of mediating activities that are each designated with local terms in a specific setting. The inconsistent scholarly usage of roles such as broker, agent, wholesaler, merchant and intermediary often complicates the understanding of brokerage roles.

This article is based on extensive field research in the Malian tea market, on tea traders and importers in Mali since 2005 and on African traders in China since 2014 as well as shorter research trips to Morocco and other African countries where Chinese green tea is consumed. In Mali, I interviewed the 14 most influential tea importers and numerous smaller importers, wholesalers, retailers and brokers. In China, I visited tea plantations and factories, accompanied brokers to markets and the Canton trade fair, which is a meeting point of Chinese tea brokers and Malian importers (Röschenthaler, forthcoming).

I examine the different categories of brokers that I encountered in the tea trade and their work in their respective cultural (and historical) settings. I begin with individuals who engage in brokerage only and outline their different strategies. I look at brokers who have assumed entrepreneurial activities and overlapping tasks such as the landlord-brokers and wholesale-brokers. I discuss the auctioneers and their ritualised tea sales. I continue with characterizing the work of these brokers who step in at important trade intersections and form alternating chains of trading and brokerage. Finally, I discuss the relationship of the tea brokers with other types of economic intermediaries. My elaborations define where in the trade network brokers step in, deliberately preferring flexibility to regulated secure arrangements, which is more risky but also offers more opportunities to prosper, depending on the resources they can control, their place in the hierarchy of brokers and the social standing in their space of action.

The work of brokers in the tea trade, their knowledge, skills and vulnerability

This section examines the work of the young men and women who mainly do brokerage. They are at the beginning of their career in the tea business, trying to accumulate specialised knowledge and enlarge their business networks; they usually do not yet have political connections and much pecuniary capital to work with. They work alone, independently and on their own account. They are spatially-mobile and their office is their mobile phone.

Their work is tedious, involves a lot of walking up and down the streets, talking to people, and is socially under-appreciated. They are the most vulnerable individuals among all the brokers in the tea trade. They consider their work a first step in their career, aspiring to gain enough capital to become landlord-brokers, wholesalers or eventually importers themselves. They persistently look out for their own little advantage, save part of the profits, accumulate social capital and obtain knowledge about the market that wholesalers or importers might not have. Competition with other such brokers is high and they have to be smart to remain in their job. With time, these brokers reach different levels of knowledge, networks and means, and this leads to a hierarchisation of the various brokers of a sector in a trading town. These brokers often dramatise their roles and capacities, especially when circumstances are complicated and the outcome of their work uncertain. Their commission can be fixed percentages, but often the brokers rather encourage their customers to propose the amount, speculating on their generosity.

Such brokers were described in the historical tea trade in China where they mediated between the tea producers in the villages and the wholesale merchants in the market towns (Gardella, 1994). Other brokers, called compradores, worked in the Chinese port cities where they translated for the European traders and organised their business with the hongs, the wholesale merchants. Brokers also represented wholesalers for whom they bought tea at the London auctions. I have encountered such brokers in the present-day tea trade in China and in Bamako (the capital of Mali), too. Called simsar, such brokers have also been reported in Morocco, mediating between different importers and wholesalers (Waterbury, 1972) and in the trading towns in the Sahel where they connected the traders of different ethnic belonging (Cohen, 1971: 266–267; and in Ilorin, O’Hear, 1986). I will now briefly look at two examples of such brokerage in the present-day tea trade. One concerns brokers who translate between Malian importers and the tea factories in China, while the other introduces brokers, called coxeurs in Bamako, who mediate between tea importers and wholesalers.

Malian and Chinese tea brokers in China

When the first Malian tea merchants ventured to Asia after the opening of the Malian market for private trade in the 1990s, they had first to find out where to procure supplies. They went to Hong Kong, as China was not yet open to foreign traders. There, they met other Africans who were students or trade agents, who offered to help them find tea sellers, translate and explain how to carry out trade and ship their cargo to Africa against the payment of a commission (Bertoncello and Bredeloup, 2009). When China opened its economy to foreign traders in the early 2000s, these African male and female brokers followed the traders to China, established themselves there and facilitated their trading activities (Cissé, 2015; Marfaing and Thiel, 2015). They travelled the streets of the Xiaobei and Sanyuanli neighbourhoods in Guangzhou, frequented by Africans, with product samples to show to potential customers whom they accompanied to markets and whose purchases and orders they mediated (Cissé, 2015; Haugen, 2018; Marfaing and Thiel, 2015; Mathews, 2016).

Mohamed (name changed) from Mali is one of the brokers who accompanies customers to markets and factories. He learned Chinese during his studies at a Chinese university. In his free time, he helps his uncle who invited him to come to Guangzhou to help him with translating for his, mostly African, customers. The uncle has become a landlord-broker, has an office in Guangzhou and a warehouse for storing his customers’ goods. Mohamed knows the tea factories in the countryside. When he has a customer, who wants to buy tea, he picks him or her up from the airport, helps them book a hotel room, makes an appointment with the tea factory and books the train ticket. When they arrive, a Chinese broker, often a young woman, picks them up by car at the station, invites them for a meal and brings them to the factory, which is often hidden in the countryside. The Chinese broker might also offer to book them a hotel room, if necessary, as the amount of her commission that she receives from the factory will depend on a successful mediation; hence she will do what she can to persuade her customers to place their order with her. ¹

Most of the Chinese brokers speak English and French sufficiently well to be able to communicate with the importers. Their task is not easy because most importers visit many factories to check out the quality of tea and choose the business partnership that suits them most. ² Once Mohamed’s customer has the contact to the factory from the Chinese broker, he will no longer need him on his next trip to China. The Chinese broker will volunteer to organise his next journey. When the negotiation is successful, the first container of tea will be ordered. Normally, this goes smoothly because both the Chinese broker and the factory owner are interested in building a longer-term relationships with the Malian importer. Once an order is placed and a first instalment paid, the tea factory ships the tea to the West African port, where it is loaded on to trucks and brought to the warehouse of the Malian importer. The Chinese broker receives her commission from the factory and Mohamed receives his from his African customer. Often, he also receives a commission from the factory for bringing them a customer. Once, the customer becomes a reliable partner, the Chinese broker will travel to Mali on her own account, visit her business partner, consolidate their partnership and try to find more customers. Problems between the broker and her customer might occur when the quality of the tea varies, or when the Chinese broker attempts to sell tea on her own in Mali. Taken together, the work of these brokers is very competitive and involves high engagement with an unsure outcome.

The coxeurs or brokers in Mali

Coxeurs are young men who mediate between two parties and receive a commission for their work. ³ In the tea trade, coxeurs connect importers and wholesalers. Keita (name changed) is such a coxeur. He knows when the tea containers arrive on the lorry in the warehouses of Bamako’s importers. Keita then contacts the importers and asks for the price. Subsequently, he walks to the shops of the different wholesalers and inquires whether they need some of this tea. If they do, he informs the importer who sends the tea to the wholesaler and receives the money for the tea either by bank transfer or through the broker. Once the wholesaler places an order through Keita, he receives his commission from the wholesaler, and sometimes also from the importer. The importers and wholesalers would not necessarily need a coxeur because they know each other, have their phone and bank account numbers, but they prefer to work with a coxeur as they feel it is more comfortable to tell him their price.

As the African and Chinese brokers in China, the coxeurs have created their own job, make a living from this work and do not work favouring either the importer or the wholesaler. To do their work well, coxeurs need to have knowledge of the market, rhetorical skills and strategic thinking. Coxeurs might manipulate the prices in their own way, for example, taking larger quantities of a certain tea brand from an importer for a good price and divide the quantities up for different wholesalers and make some extra profit, in addition to the commission. They might also try to offer a certain tea for a better price to a wholesaler than another coxeur. Such strategies are their little secrets, which they perfect with time and experience, until they might become wholesalers themselves. To speed up the realisation of this dream, some even might manipulate the quality of tea and mix copied tea brands with those they received from their legal owners. Trying to prevent them from doing this, importers would also pay the coxeurs a generous commission. Thus, coxeurs can be ‘ambiguous figures’ (Faist, 2014: 42). They have to try hard generating trust and looking out for opportunities to become a businessperson themselves. Indeed, some coxeurs are quite influential as they have all kinds of connections and a large business network.

It is important to mention that coxeurs mediate between importers and wholesalers and not between wholesalers and retailers. Retailers directly go to the wholesale shops to purchase the quantities of tea they want to sell. There are also no brokers between retailers and small kiosks or street vendors because the profit margin would be too small to feed yet another intermediary. Only the sums that change hands between wholesalers and importers are large enough to feed a broker.

Landlord-brokers and wholesale-brokers: Intermediaries’ overlapping roles

After working as mobile brokers for some time, with growing experience, social networks and capital, the brokers described in the previous section would try to become entrepreneurs, formalise their business, become wholesalers, invest in property where they can lodge and feed customers and store their trade goods. ⁴ They would provide credit for customers, explain the market to them and negotiate business opportunities. Anthropologists and African historians have called such individuals landlord-brokers (Cohen, 1971; Curtin, 1984; Hill, 1966; Lovejoy, 1980; Perinbam, 1973) who are very similar to ‘patrons’ (Boissevain, 1974: 147–169). These broker-entrepreneurs continue to perform brokerage tasks but no longer walk up and down the streets themselves. As property owners and business-people, they are recognised by the local authorities, have a professional licence, or, more recently, a registered company with offices and employees. They also organise the shipping and customs formalities for their customers’ trade goods.

This means, in addition to the brokerage tasks they fulfil, these brokers offer other services that they can only provide with a certain standing as entrepreneurs and investors. Here the tasks of the broker and other brokerage-related activities overlap. These brokers are far less vulnerable to accusations and mistrust from society and politics than the brokers who do not yet have this backing. However, in times of economic crisis, when they are foreigners, they might be attacked and driven away as well (see also Faist, 2014: 49). In the tea trade, I have found such broker-entrepreneurs in three places: in the historical trade in China, along the historical trans-Sahara trade route and among Africans in present-day China.

Tea auctions as a staged performance

Auctions are one of the classical economic fields of brokerage. As mentioned earlier, the London auctions were an important link in the historical tea trade between China and Mali, where Moroccan Jewish wholesale merchants, tujaar as-sultaan or ‘merchants of the sultan’, who had the monopoly of trade with Europe (Schroeter, 1988: 21–22), bought the tea that was later transported with caravans across the Sahara to Mali. Different from China, Morocco and Mali, in Britain and the Netherlands, importers sold tea to wholesalers in auctions. Auctions are ritualised and dramatic performances during which merchants, or brokers as their representatives, sell goods or services by offering them for bid, taking bids and then selling the item to the winning bidder (Smith, 1990: 108). The auctions are organised by brokers.

European importers considered auctions a very effective way of organizing the sale of large quantities of tea. London became famous for its tea auctions, although the first tea auctions were organised in Amsterdam in 1667. There, auctions started with the highest price, which was then lowered until the seller’s reserve price was met. In London, auctions were organised from 1679 onwards by professional brokers, and here, the highest bidder won the deal. Later, auctions were also organised in Hamburg, following the British model (Houtkamp and Van der Laan, 1993; for different types of brokerage at auctions, see Smith, 1990).

The famous London tea auctions in Mincing Lane were a regular event and made London the centre of international tea trade. All tea that arrived in Britain had to be purchased through auctions. The price that tea made in the London auctions was an indicator for tea prices elsewhere (Houtkamp and Van der Laan, 1993: 7). The auctions were held twice a year on the premises of the British East India Company (EIC). When the ships of the EIC arrived in London, independent professional tea brokers came, inspected the quality of the tea, took samples, checked the tea prices and produced a product catalogue, which was handed, together with the samples, to potential buyers who had to be licenced wholesalers (Ellis et al., 2015: 116–124). Then the so-called candle auctions began. Price started at zero profit level for the EIC. A candle was lit and when it was burnt down, the last bidder had to purchase the trade goods. In these auctions, the price of the tea was not predictable, only the length of time one auction sale took (Houtkamp and Van der Laan, 1993; Ukers, 1935, vol. 2: 43–44, 127).

Tea auctions continued in London throughout the 20th century. The auction house was closed in 1998, as auctions only work well with a sufficient number of participants (Talbot, 2012: 722). Offers had declined in London because auctions were gradually relegated to the tea producing countries: India, Sri Lanka, Kenya and Malawi. From the 1970s onwards, these countries – mostly former British colonies – began to organise their own tea auctions, following the British model with slight variations but at the expense of the London auction (Houtkamp and Van der Laan, 1993: 5, 22–24). Mostly tea from China was sold again in London until 1998. The initiative for tea auctions in East Africa came from the larger foreign private enterprises. The local smallholders were less interested in having auctions. Holding the auctions in the producer countries had several advantages. For example, the auction was closer to the place of production, producers could check the product again, there were no foreign exchange costs, the bargaining strength of local producers was better and the speed of payment to producers higher. The prices that Kenya’s Mombasa auction brought were not as high as those in London, but they did not yet include the cost of sea-transport (Houtkamp and Van der Laan, 1993: 77–93).

Houtkamp and Van der Laan (1993: 20–22) argued that tea was eminently an auction crop. Tea was one of the products that was auctioned most often, especially in the context of British and Dutch trade. The argument goes that the tea industry does not produce a uniform product; accepted grades vary, the season of the year and changing consumer preferences make a difference, too. Auctions can balance some of these instabilities and keep the price-building process transparent, although prices might be driven up by bidding. This has been particularly true in the Dutch and the British anglophone trading context where professional brokers were responsible for checking the quality of the tea sold and the price with which to start the auction. In African countries, the auction system is confined to three crops, namely, tea, coffee and tobacco and to eight African countries, almost all of which are anglophone. Other cash crops such as cocoa, cotton, groundnuts, rubber and palm kernels are cheaper to market because their quality does not differ as much as that of tea (and coffee and tobacco). Their quality standards are defined by measurable characteristics and generally accepted in international trade. Auction crops are said to be difficult to measure. Because of their subtle differences in quality, they must be sampled (Houtkamp and Van der Laan, 1993: 77–93; Smith, 1990: 164).

Other scholars, however, argue that the Chinese products are sufficiently standardised through blending to guarantee a steady quality each year (Gardella, 1994). In China, Mali and Morocco, tea auctions are not very common. Only more recently, a few tea auctions were held in Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Since independence, Morocco and Mali had bought tea directly from China, without any auctions being involved. They sold tea with brokers who mediated the transfer of the product, such as the coxeurs in Bamako and the hongs in China. It seems that auctions have been invented as a particular kind of ritualised game in the interest of influential producers and importers as the auctions could push up the prices in their favour. This corroborates that auctioneers also create their jobs themselves, as other brokers in the tea trade do, even though they might be encouraged by producers and importers.

Alternating brokerage chains, social hierarchies and the specificities of mediation in the tea trade

In the tea trade setting, and in the business world more generally, several conceptually-related figures interact: brokers, traders and trade agents or company representatives. What these figures have in common is that they mediate between different parties, who have difficulties finding each other, do not want to interact directly, or will not easily get together due to social, linguistic and geographical distance. Traders buy goods for resale in another place, while brokers act as intermediaries connecting buyers and sellers. Traders move material goods, brokers use their knowledge, skills and networks – what Boissevain (1974) called secondary resources. Agents also mediate and translate between different groups, but they represent one party, are employed by it and explicitly work for it and advertise its services (Stovel and Shaw, 2012), while brokers work on their own, receive a commission often from both parties, between whom they mediate. Looked at from a structural perspective, agents represent strong ties to one party, whereas brokers have weak ties to both parties they mediate (Granovetter, 1973). As my examples suggest, however, these distinctions might be analytically useful but cannot be drawn neatly in daily practice.

The broker, the trader and the agent also have in common that they make a living from their mediating activities and do not produce material or immaterial things themselves. This makes them deviant figures in contexts where the norm is the physical or intellectual productivity, that creates objects and values which become tangible and durable. Their non-productiveness contributes to them being regarded as outsiders who are either held in high esteem for their capacities to mediate and provide scarce immaterial resources, or they are met with suspicion, sometimes even with disdain, and considered parasites exploiting the toil of honest producers. As such, traders and brokers easily become scapegoats in times of crisis (Faist, 2014: 49) and chased from the host society (Simmel, 1950a: 402–408). This vulnerability is much more obvious for the independent brokers and small-scale traders and for the female actors working as brokers.

This is important because the brokers’ work is to a certain extent gendered. The coxeurs in Bamako are all men, whereas the African brokers in China are predominantly, but not exclusively men. Among the brokers working for the Chinese tea factories are as many women as there are men. The work of these brokers is most difficult, prone to suspicion and they are at the lower end of hierarchies in the business world. In the entire social and professional hierarchy, traders and brokers are considered as one of the least respected social groups in Mali (interviews with Bamako, 2016) as well as in China (Mann, 1984: 628). This began to change more recently as more and more people make a living from business. Brokers such as the coxeurs in Bamako and the Chinese brokers who work for the tea factories struggle to improve their opportunities, striving to collect experience and save means to become wholesalers, landlord-brokers, or possibly importers and exporters (who are predominantly men) themselves, or otherwise look for a different occupation.

In places where the trade goods change hands, in historical times and at present, a range of brokers work in close cooperation with traders but in competition with other brokers who offer the same services. Brokers also form hierarchies according to their status (see also Southall, 1978: 188; and the introduction to this special issue) that ranges from beginners who engage in much physical movement via more respected brokers to property owners and wholesale-merchants. Those small brokers who only do brokerage never trade themselves because this would ruin their reputation (Waterbury, 1972: 72–73). The same was said of auctioneers (Mui and Mui, 1963: 239). This obviously does not apply to the landlord- and wholesale brokers, the broker-entrepreneurs, who were often simultaneously brokers, traders, property and company owners. Conversely, where tea does not change hands, no brokers have been observed.

At the intersections where trade goods change hands, brokers connect producers with wholesalers and wholesalers with importers in alternating chains of trading and brokering. Both the historical and the present tea trails from China to West Africa are made up of such syntagmatic business connections that bridge large geographical spaces, different social groups and business practices. These brokerage-trading chains are complemented by the brokers’ transversal business networks and social contacts to producers and customers through which they are able to offer options to their customers.

Business brokers help others selling and buying, with the objective of making a living from this activity. They are only found at those intersections in the brokerage-trading chain where profit can be expected. This finding corroborates the active part of brokers in creating their role (Murphy, 1981: 667, 669) where circumstances look promising. Often brokers ask for their commission to be balanced not immediately and only partially. Such generalised reciprocity (Sahlins, 1969) can be considered a strategy to prolong the relationship between broker and their customers and bring up further opportunities to mediate and ask for a commission in the long run. Other strategies of brokers include highlighting their importance to customers what Murphy (1981: 669) called ‘impression management’, the speculation with prices and possibly also the inclusion of illicit tea brands from pirate importers into the cargo for wholesalers, which, when discovered, undermines their trustworthiness. Here, the broker can be facilitator and manipulator at the same time.

In some contexts, buyers and sellers prefer working with brokers, in others the same seller will rather not use their services. Malian importers, for example, preferentially work with brokers when they sell their shipping containers full of green tea in Bamako. But when they buy tea in China, they work with as few brokers as possible to get the best product at a good price. Looked at from the Chinese side, Chinese tea traders, too, are interested in selling tea as directly as possible to consumers and evading Malian traders and brokers. For the Chinese merchants, however, selling tea in Mali continues to be difficult because wholesalers, and especially consumers, prefer to buy tea from Malian merchants, as they assume that Chinese traders sell cheap quality tea (Röschenthaler, forthcoming). Moreover, the activities of Chinese tea sellers in Mali led to protests in the 2000s as they tried to sell wholesale and retail goods for the same price (see for similar incidents in Cameroon, Röschenthaler, 2016). Hence, importers and wholesalers might either actively try to circumvent brokers, if they can, to pay less for a product or actively look for their services.

Government policies, too, might delimit brokerage (see also Faist, 2014: 43). As noted above, brokerage activities have not vanished with the coming of nation states, urbanisation and industrialisation but disappeared temporarily when governmental policies delimited them, as was the case when the governments of China, Morocco and Mali monopolised trade during several decades in the 20th century and became themselves the only legal brokers. Private brokers emerged again as soon as these policies changed with the liberalisation of markets in the 1990s. In this new situation, brokers stepped in offering their services to importers and wholesalers, who in many cases preferred such an arrangement to working directly with each other.

Not only policies delimit brokerage but also social movements such as the fair-trade movement (Blowfield and Dolan, 2010). It advocates buying tea directly from producers – only observed in North-South trade – bypassing all other traders and brokers whom they accuse of making profit at the expense of producers labouring under unfair conditions. If tea was purchased directly from producers, neither the commission of intermediaries, the bidding in auctions or brokers’ price speculations could push product prices up again and the product chain would become considerably shorter.

Malian importers explicitly argued that their inclusive system of different levels of traders and brokers was fair. They did not think about the Chinese producers but argued that it allowed the different traders and brokers in Mali to make a living without raising the tea price. A 25 g-package of Chinese green tea is sold for 100 francs CFA (about 0.15 Euro) in Bamako, irrespective of the tea’s quality (Röschenthaler, forthcoming). This means that in the short run importers make less profit with expensive tea and more profit with cheap tea. But in the long run, high-quality tea sold faster and, in the end, provided more profit because more tea could be sold. These opportunities encourage again numerous other traders and brokers to engage in the tea trade, especially the many young people who are independent brokers, which renders the tea market dynamic and competitive. Working with coxeurs has not raised the price for consumers but rather influenced the profit margin of importers who nevertheless welcomed brokers’ services. The cooperation also prevented wholesalers and importers, who could have easily negotiated directly with each other, to make fixed arrangements at the costs of other traders and consumers.

Conclusion

This article set out to examine the work of brokers in the tea trade between China and Mali, which consists in connecting buyers and sellers in alternating chains of brokerage and trading. It shows that entrepreneurial individuals step in to work as brokers at those intersections where the profit margins are high enough to bring forward a commission, and they prefer flexible price systems and payments. In the tea trade, I have distinguished between several types of brokers. First, those individuals who do brokerage only, who work individually to facilitate the transfer of the product, often without connecting the parties directly (in the case of the coxeurs). Second, those brokers who offer a portfolio of services such as being landlords or wholesalers who connect the parties if necessary and organise the itinerant traders’ entire commerce. Finally, we’ve seen the auctioneers who organise the sale of tea in a ritualised manner, often in the personal absence of importers and the product at the auction (only the broker and the buyers, holding a catalogue with samples).

All these brokers connect sellers and buyers; work independently, on their own account; receive a commission for their work of mediation; work with the product as mediators and facilitate its transfer though they do not own it permanently. However, (if possible), with increasing experience and capital, they accumulate several other responsibilities that overlap with brokerage such as being landlords, traders, property owners concomitantly. These brokers differ in the means with which they carry out their mediation and the degree of diversification of activities. Thus, there is not just one type of broker per se, not even in one sector such as the tea trade but their activities vary according to the local context. The status difference of the parties in the tea trade is less marked than in many other brokerage relationships, in which brokers mediate between individuals or groups who are in an asymmetric relationship and have divergent social status, as is the case in brokerage between governments and local people, migrants and state institutions and ethnic minorities and global players (see the contributions in this special issue).

Auctions as ritualised selling events seem to be a capitalist invention that is closely associated with anglophone countries and former British colonies and – despite arguments of being more transparent – tend to inflate prices in favour of large producers. The Malian importers’ procedure of providing consumers with tea at affordable prices and additionally nourishing the different intermediaries that are involved in the products’ distribution seems to be a working business model that contradicts the market economy and appears to be more social. In contrast, Chinese brokers in Mali tend to ignore the established Malian model and sell tea even to street vendors at wholesale prices. In the long run, they have not been successful because the Malian importers offer their tea to consumers all for the same price, irrespective of the quality and hence consumers decided for the better quality.

Whereas governments’ trade monopolies and the fair-trade movement have delimited the number of brokers, the changing circumstances such as the liberalisation of the markets have spurred the work of brokers. However, the present Sino-Malian tea trade involves less brokers than trade in the 19th century when numerous brokers were involved all along the tea trail. By then, it would not have been possible for Europeans and Africans to purchase green tea directly from tea factories in China’s interior without the involvement of brokers. It would also not have been possible for just anyone to trade across the Sahara. The classical landlord-brokers with their far-reaching social and political networks were indispensable to negotiate the safety of itinerant traders and their trade goods. Due to improved transportation systems, the shorter time spans of travel and the possibility for Africans to carry out trade directly in China, present markets have become easily accessible with new communication technologies that help connect buyers and sellers globally.

My examples also illustrate that brokers aspire to formalise their business in the long run, invest in offices and property and diversify their services and tasks with growing influence and standing. Once this is achieved, brokers no longer only offer brokerage services but enlarge their portfolio of services, which enhances their standing in the community and allows for negotiating of enhanced conditions for the trading community. Saharan landlord-brokers and African merchants in China are business brokers who also act as landlords and cultural brokers, mediating between different parties and translating the divergent business practices and worldviews with which their customers were confronted. With such an objective, African broker-entrepreneurs in China have encouraged the formation of associations and interest groups, which enable them to achieve impact as cultural brokers and mediate between the authorities and/or local people in the host country. In contrast, the work of the coxeurs in Bamako, the wholesale-brokers in historical China and the auctioneers in London includes less cultural brokerage because they mediate in roughly one and the same cultural setting.

The findings from the study of tea trade demonstrate that being a broker is not a status that one attains but a role that emerges through the skilful combination of cultural, social and – especially in the case of trade – also of monetary capital. How the work of brokers looks like depends on the opportunities that entrepreneurial individuals have discovered, on their biographical trajectory and the social, political and economic situation in a particular place in which their work is embedded. In such a scenario, hierarchies of brokers may be found who collaborate but also compete with each other. Although I have differentiated between brokers doing only brokerage and brokers who carry out other tasks in addition to brokerage, these roles are not exclusive but could be seen as poles in a scenario in which small brokers will with growing experience, capital and professional networks engage in becoming influential broker-entrepreneurs, permitting them to redistribute part of their benefits to society and/or to initiate social change. The study of brokerage in the tea trade also allows for a more nuanced perspective on the economic interaction between China and Africa. China cannot simply be seen to sell its products in African countries, globalisation not being a top-down force. The facilitation of such exchange involves the close cooperation of various African and Chinese economic actors or brokers who with their skills and networks are able to bridge geographic space, language barriers and business practices. The findings of this study highlight the particular active role African traders and brokers play in this process.