It is the activity itself that is resented

A series of passages from the recently read Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell. Combative to the point of provocative but as usual crammed with unexpected facts or interpretations of facts. Page 80.

While such individuals might be of any ethnic background, in Nigeria they were often from the Ibo tribe, in whose culture "thrift, resourcefulness and foresight were the principal themes." Some Ibos "began trading with a few shillings or even a few pence derived from the sale of agricultural or jungle produce." From there they proceeded to rise, step by step, as they "slightly enlarged their still very small scale of operations" until eventually they were able to become established in retailing. "In practically all cases they were members of farming families."

In West Africa as elsewhere, the rise of middlemen from poverty to affluence has been widely seen as having taken place at the expense of others. This applies to both indigenous and immigrant middlemen, such as the Lebanese:

The opinion derives superficial plausibility from the fact that many traders began operations in West Africa with little or no capital, so that the increase in their capital and their prosperity have been obvious. However, this belief is fallacious because it ignores the productivity of trade. The wealth of traders has not been taken or extorted from the Africans but has been created by their trading activities. It was not previously in existence...

As in the prisoner-of-war camp during World War II and in countries around the world, middleman activities have usually not been seen as producing wealth, but only as appropriating pre-existing wealth, since the middleman does not visibly create a material thing. Neither does anyone else create or destroy matter, except for a few nuclear physicists. Turning iron ore into steel products is not creating any material thing but only changing its form to something that people
want more. That is precisely what middlemen do when they make goods or money available earlier than otherwise through retailing, credit, or loans. They change the time when things become available. Consumers could, in theory, drive to factories to buy goods directly but retailers make this time-consuming activity unnecessary, for a price - a price whose legitimacy has often been questioned because the middleman did not change the physical nature of what was sold.

Resentments against both indigenous and expatriate middlemen in West Africa - with violence having erupted from time to time against both - underline the fact that it is the activity itself that is resented. The same has been true in other parts of the word and other periods of history. Moreover, moving into middleman occupations from other kinds of work has not been solely a characteristic of farmers. Korean shopkeepers in American black ghettos did not come from a farm or business background in Korea, but from an urban background. They had no special training in retailing, and the great majority had not even been salespeople before opening their own businesses. Most relied on their own savings, rather than bank loans or government loans, and these savings came chiefly from working low-paid jobs, including two jobs at a time for about one-fourth of the Korean businessmen in Atlanta. They worked an average of nearly four years before saving enough money to set up their own business. In short, they worked their way up from the bottom, much like the Ibos in Nigeria and like other middleman minorities around the world.

When the very same ethnic group plays the middleman role in some countries but not in others, the hostility to them has been greatest where they have been middlemen. Japanese immigrants, for example, were long subjected to far greater hostility in Peru, where they worked in middleman occupations, than in Brazil, where they became agricultural producers - the latter partly as an organized and conscious effort to avoid the social and political problems associated with operating as middleman minorities.