Constantine Zochonis
From 1929 to 1951 he was chief executive and primary shareholder of Paterson Zochonis (PZ), a company which then had a head office in Cheshire but was operating mainly in Africa.
Zochonis' management, PZ expanded from Sierra Leone into the Gold Coast, invested in its host countries by opening factories and shops there, took over a Nigerian soap manufacturer.
His father was Polychronis Basil Zochonis (Greece c. 1856 – Bowdon 26 February 1933)[nb 1][1][2] a buyer for an African merchant.
His mother was Eleni or Elene Polychronis Zochonis (Greece c.1870 – Altrincham 11 February 1943),[nb 2][3][4] and his sister was Alexandra P.
The other guests included Sir Gordon Nairne, Lady Mary Oppenheimer, wife of Ernest Oppenheimer, Lady Nevarte Gulbenkian, wife of Calouste Gulbenkian, Emile Mond, T. P. O'Connor, Pandeli Ralli, Harold Spender and George Eumorfopoulos.
[16] Their son was Sir John Zochonis (2 October 1929 – 30 November 2013),[7] who later inherited control of the company, in the form of chairmanship.
[21][22] The Dictionary of National Biography describes what happened next:[14] Incorporated in 1884, PZ grew from a trading merchant into a merchant-supported network of retail and wholesale stores across West Africa.
Zochonis was a manager of PZ and before he was chairman, the company had to deal with an expensive court case in which shipping companies Elder Dempster, British and African Steam Navigation, and Griffiths Lewis Steam Navigation had allowed "damage to a part cargo of palm oil in casks carried from two West African ports to Kingston upon Hull on the steamship Grelwen".
By the end of his career, the company was "investing heavily in sub-Saharan Africa",[9] it had bought the Nigerian soap-manufacturing firm Bayley's (incorporated in 1948 as a subsidiary, Alagbon Industries Ltd. of Aba).
In Onitsha, Nigeria, Madam Onu Okwei had made her fortune by British-Igbo currency exchange, and in the 1930s Zochonis leased one of her 24 houses.
Zochonis' management era, PZ was one of the group of Greek merchants which "dominated the Cameroonian trading space" directly after World War II.
Zochonis' management era, PZ was one of the most successful companies in Sierra Leone,[33] and in Nigeria where the firm had "branches in practically every inland river port".
[7] Zochonis' unexpected death, his son's promotion and political factors facilitated an increase in business.
However PZ, among other European companies, was diverting rice to uncontrolled areas "up country" in Sierra Leone where more than double the price could be had.
Zochonis inherited from his uncle a situation of fierce competition and rivalry between European and Lebanese merchants.
Those merchants, headed by PZ and apparently with humanitarian intentions, had already banded together with local Africans to eject the projected plantation economy of the oil company Lever Brothers from Yonnibanna in Sierra Leone, and that had benefited Temne farmers who were already able to earn more by producing oil themselves, than by working for Lever.
Zochonis era caused some African peoples to be alternately beneficiaries and casualties of that business competition which was now driven primarily for profit.
Zochonis in the 1930s, PZ affected Ghana socially by continuing colonial attitudes in the north, using (and sometimes forcing) uneducated labour for production of goods, and promoting the advancement of southern Ghanaians by working with them as farmers, brokers and retailers in its commercial retail houses in the south.
Thus a perception grew, of uneducated, proletarian northern locals who were disadvantaged by an emerging class of bourgeois traders in the south.
Zochonis continued the colonisation process initiated in around 1893 in Yorubaland, to control that area as the British Empire and sell European imports via local entrepreneurs through its company's wholesale merchant houses.
Such market places benefited the populace, but also brought in petty criminals such as the Jaguda boys, whose behaviour could not be controlled by the locals.
Bishop Herbert Tugwell had already criticised beer imports to Africa as "a destructive force", saying "it is a very easy and cheap way of raising revenue".
The colonial trading system kept the pastoral workers and the middle men continually in debt, preventing them from exporting the hides themselves.
Zochonis joined the Archbishop of Canterbury and other VIPs in a public appeal for help on behalf of those in need following the Macedonian earthquake of 26 September, in that year.
[54] Through PZ, he also supported the British appeal on behalf of victims of the Gold Coast earthquake of 22 June 1939, to the tune of £150 (equivalent to £11,747 in 2023).
[58] The bursary was used, for example, to support the research of Robert W. Nicholson in his doctoral thesis, The Hida Scan in Hepatobiliary Disease (1980).
