Bitter Chocolate

by Carol Off

  ALSO BY CAROL OFF

  The Lion, The Fox and The Eagle

  The Ghosts of Medak Pocket

  TO THE CHILDREN OF SINIKOSSON AND TO

  GUY-ANDRÉ KIEFFER, WHO GAVE HIS LIFE IN THE

  PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH ABOUT THEIR WORLD

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: In the Garden of Good and Evil

  1. Death by Chocolate

  2. Liquid Gold

  3. Cocoa on Trial

  4. The Geopolitics of a Hershey’s Kiss

  5. No Sweetness Here

  6. The Disposables

  7. Dirty Chocolate

  8. Chocolate Soldiers

  9. Class Action Cocoa

  10. The Man Who Knew Too Much

  11. Stolen Fruit

  12. Bittersweet Victory

  Epilogue: In All Fairness

  Source Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL

  “In my dreams I gorge on chocolates, I roll in chocolates, and their texture is not brittle but soft as flesh, like a thousand little mouths on my body, devouring me in fluttering small bites. To die beneath their tender gluttony is the culmination of every temptation I have known.”

  —JOANNE HARRIS, Chocolat

  THE BROAD HIGHWAY LEADING OUT OF THE CITY OF Abidjan is marked on the map of Côte d’Ivoire as a principal two-lane thoroughfare, but with the city behind us, it narrows quickly and degenerates into a potholed road no wider than a driveway. Tangled vines and shrubbery encroach on both sides of our vehicle while we push through what resembles a dark, leafy tunnel. Constant precipitation—a perpetual cycle from warm mist to torrential thundershowers to steam—seems to stimulate new jungle growth before my eyes.

  Koffi Benoît is at the wheel on this excursion into the unknown. He’s an unflappable Ivorian, and I would trust him in any situation. Ange Aboa is our principal guide into la brousse, as he calls it—the bush. Ange is a reporter for the Reuters news agency and spends much of his time in Côte d’Ivoire’s backcountry trying to make some sense of the murky, muddled world of African business. Together, we travel west out of Abidjan, deep into the tropical forests and remote farm country that stretches for hundreds of kilometres towards the Liberian border. Our mission is to seek out the truth about Côte d’Ivoire’s most precious commodity, cocoa.

  My two companions know the bush country well, but they are perpetual strangers here where people trust only their own clans. We need help from local residents if we are to penetrate the walls of history and vegetation and probe the mysteries within. In a small village, we meet up with Noël Kabora, a seasoned pisteur who travels the tiny pistes, or back trails, every day as he makes his rounds of farms, gathering sacks of cocoa beans from the farmers. Abandoning the relative comfort of Benoît’s Renault for Noël’s dilapidated truck, we turn off the highway and head deep into the bush. Ange has moved to the back of the truck to chat with some local people while I sit in the cab with Noël. Benoît decides to stay behind and have tea with some newfound friends.

  Nearly half of all the cocoa in the world comes out of this humid West African jungle and eventually finds its way into the confections that enrich the diets and the moods of chocolate lovers around the world. The bonbons, truffles, hot chocolate, cookies, cakes, ice cream sundaes and the ubiquitous chocolate bars; the sweet morsels that ostensibly say, “I love you” on Valentine’s Day, “Merry Christmas,” “Happy Birthday,” the Halloween treats; the Easter eggs—they started the long journey into our stomachs and our ceremonies here in this tropical hothouse. Yet I could not be farther away from those cherished ceremonies of life, the pageants of celebration and happiness in the developed world, than I am driving along these rutted paths through the jade-coloured forests of Côte d’Ivoire.

  Noël points out the cocoa groves tucked in among the tall banana trees, the mangoes and the palms. Exotic green, yellow and red cocoa pods, the size of butternut squash, cling precariously to the smooth trunks of the trees called, in Latin, Theobroma cacao—“food of the gods.” Farmers lop the ripe pods from the bark with machetes and split them open to harvest the riches within: dozens of grey-purple seeds the size of almonds embedded in pale tan-coloured pulp. Through the bushes, we can see the racks and mats where the contents of the pods are piled up to ferment for days in the humid heat, producing a marvellous alchemy in which the seeds steep in the sweet, sticky juice from the pulp while sweltering in the hot tropical sun.

  Micro-organisms in the fetid pile go to work, stirring into action about four hundred different chemicals and organic substances that magically transform a bland bean into the raw material that is the essence of the world’s most seductive sweet. After five or six days of malodorous mulling, the beans are then laid out on racks to dry. This delicate series of operations, augmented by manufacturing techniques, has made chocolate addicts out of millions of people around the world throughout history. Children invest meagre allowances for just a bite of it; some women say they prefer fine chocolate to sex; and modern science claims for chocolate myriad potential health benefits, from reducing cholesterol to boosting libido. Chocolate is the embodiment of temptation. It creates a mysterious addiction, which, in turn, sustains a vast international trade and an industry with a seemingly insatiable appetite for raw product. For their survival, the captains of the chocolate industry depend on these remote farms and the pisteurs who make daily excursions into the bush, gathering sacks of carefully fermented and dried cocoa beans.

  Noël expertly navigates a mind-boggling road that seems at times to disappear completely. He points towards the tops of hills where groves of cocoa trees grope for sunlight and comments knowingly on the quality of each farmer’s produce, noting the ones who have perfected drying and fermenting and castigaing those whose beans are always dirty. From time to time, we can see a little one-room schoolhouse or tiny chapel surrounded by the poor mud houses of the people who cultivate “the food of the gods.”

  Farmers in this region have been growing the world’s cocoa for a relatively short time—since the 1970s and ’80s, when Côte d’Ivoire’s benevolent dictator and founding father, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, realized that this fecund farmland could grow a botanical equivalent of gold. He wanted to transform his post-colonial country, just reclaimed from France, into the economic engine of West Africa. In the 1960s Houphouët-Boigny announced that he would turn the jungle into Eden and everyone who lived here would enjoy the fruits of their own labour. The creationist vision worked and, for a time, Côte d’Ivoire became arguably the most profitable and stable country on the continent, mostly through providing the world with cocoa. All that has changed.

  Le Vieux, as Ivorians affectionately called Houphouët-Boigny, was the nation’s strongman, and when he died in 1993 the mantle of power passed to men of much lesser vision and much greater avarice. Côte d’Ivoire has been sliding into chaos and violence ever since, particularly in the coveted cocoa groves, where a low-grade war continues, despite ceasefires, to reduce this paradise to purgatory—and sometimes hell. Much of the fighting is over ownership of cocoa-producing land, as conflicting armies and paramilitaries vie for control of Côte d’Ivoire’s immense agricultural wealth. All of those involved in cocoa production are under constant threat of attack.

  Noël Kabora is wary as he makes his rounds, gathering jute bags full of cocoa for shipment out of the great ports of the Gulf of Guinea to factories and, ultimately, the candy counters of North America and Europe. At regular intervals along the trail I see the sacks stacked hopefully, despite the menace. Ultimately, war doesn’t interrupt a commercial venture that seems to be the economic salvation of everyone around here. Soldiers are paid with cocoa profits, and they know enou
gh not to impede its movement. But that doesn’t prevent the armed militiamen—who are everywhere—from augmenting their incomes through extortion. We encounter numerous roadblocks with demands for “special” fees. We hand over money to armed thugs who reek of cheap palm wine and do nothing to conceal their contempt for a foreigner such as myself, though Noël says he faces their loathing every day. He too is a foreigner, from the neighbouring country of Burkina Faso, and as such he is often the subject of both racism and robbery by armed forces.

  Our old cocoa truck coughs and wheezes up a steep hill, spinning its bald tires in the slick red mud for the final climb. We arrive at a collective farm run by people who are also originally from Burkina Faso. The village is called Sinikosson, which in the official French language of Côte d’Ivoire translates into “Faite pour Demain” and in English means “Made for Tomorrow.” In fact, the villagers seem to make everything for today, living hand to mouth with little remaining for tomorrow. They grow some corn and cassava and cultivate bananas for food, but their primary activity here is to produce cocoa for the international market. As such, they earn just enough money from cocoa sales to pay for rice and cooking oil. There’s usually nothing left over.

  As remote as the community is, it is also the poorest I have seen in the region. Everyone looks tired and hungry, but at least for the time being the village has escaped the violence in the surrounding countryside. The drunken Ivorian soldiers we met at the last roadblock couldn’t exert themselves to come all the way up here to either conquer or extort.

  The arrival of a visitor from a faraway country is an extraordinary event in Sinikosson. Within minutes, the covered verandah of the central house in the village is crowded with people—all of them men and boys. The few women and girls who are visible remain a discreet distance away, preparing a meagre meal of rice and maize. But it is obvious that they are trying to hear what is going on.

  The village elders want an exchange of news. What is happening with the war? Will there be more French peacekeepers? The ones already in the region, brought in to protect villages from attack, don’t seem to be much help. Will there be elections, as the government has pledged?

  They tell me their village has been here since 1980, when they first came to work for local landowners and then to grow their own cocoa under a crop-sharing arrangement. There was a lot of fertile virgin territory then but very few workers, and Le Vieux lured thousands of poor farmers away from the depleted lands of neighbouring Burkina Faso and Mali to settle here and drive his economic miracle. At the time they were happy to do so but their existence here is now tenuous. No one has ever given these Burkinabè farmers any legal title to the land they have been cultivating now for decades. They have no deeds or documents to support their claims to ownership yet they believe that the land is theirs. And, morally, it is. But their future here is based on vague memories of handshakes and promises made while Houphouët-Boigny was still alive. Nobody has yet seriously challenged their claim, though it’s only a matter of time.

  The community’s livelihood comes from growing “the food of the gods,” but this is a long way from paradise. None of the children here go to school, and there are no services—no electricity, no phones, no clinics or hospitals. The farmers eke out an existence here in the hills, in a land infested by volatile gunmen. Yet they seem satisfied. Even in the midst of all the trouble around them, they say they are better off than they would be in their drought-stricken home country, where people are chronically hungry.

  I explain to them that I am writing a book about cocoa. They all nod. Cocoa is something about which they have immense knowledge. The quality of beans, the capricious rains, the unpredictable harvests, the cost of pesticides, the threat of witch’s broom (a disease of the Theobroma tree), the see-saw prices and the exorbitant government taxes. These farmers know everything about the difficulties of growing cocoa in this region.

  “What would you do if you couldn’t grow cocoa anymore?” we ask.

  “A catastrophe,” one man answers, and they all look very grim.

  “This is our life,” declares the chief, Mahamad Sawadago. He tells me he is fifty-four, but he looks many years older. Three of the women here are his wives; he has eleven children.

  “Where does the cocoa go after it leaves here?” Ange asks the villagers. There is a confused silence, and everyone turns to Mahamad.

  “It goes to the great port of San Pedro,” the chief explains with authority, “and then on to people in Europe and America.” They all nod.

  “What do those people do with the cocoa beans?”

  Silence again, and everyone looks to the chief. But this time, he too seems puzzled.

  “I don’t know,” he answers honestly.

  He’s certain they make something with it, for sure, but he doesn’t know what.

  They make chocolate, I explain. Has anyone ever tasted chocolate? One man says he tried it once when he was away from the village and thought it tasted good. No one else even knows what it is.

  Even Ange Aboa, who reports on the Ivorian cocoa industry, is surprised by how little these people know about the commodity they harvest. Ange tears a sheet of paper from his notebook and rolls it up into an oval tube. He explains that people in the West grind up the cocoa and add lots of sugar to make little bars this size. The bars are quite sweet and delicious. Sometimes milk and even peanuts are added. Children in Europe and America often get such things as treats.

  Ange goes on to explain that one of these bars costs about 500 West African francs (roughly equivalent to a Canadian dollar). Their eyes widen in disbelief. The sum strikes them as staggering for such a small treat—almost enough to buy a good-sized chicken or an entire bag of rice. It represents more than the value of one boy’s work for three days, if they are being paid at all, which I’m sure they are not. I explain that a child in my country

  will consume such a chocolate bar within minutes. The boys look awed. Days of their effort consumed in a heartbeat on the other side of the world. And yet they don’t begrudge North American children such pleasure. West Africans rarely express envy.

  As I look at the young faces, the questions in their eyes are the measure of a vast gulf between the children who eat chocolate on their way to school in North American and those who have no school at all, who must, from childhood, work to survive. And I feel the profound irony before me: the children who struggle to produce the small delights of life in the world I come from have never known such pleasure, and most likely, they never will.

  It’s a measure of the separation in our worlds, a distance now so staggeringly vast … the distance between the hand that picks the cocoa and the hand that reaches for the chocolate bar.

  I tell the boys of Sinikosson who do not know what chocolate is that most people in my country who eat chocolate don’t know where it comes from. The people in my country have no idea who picks the cocoa beans or how those people live. The boys of Sinikosson think it would be a good idea if I told them.

  Chapter One

  DEATH BY CHOCOLATE

  “The main benefit of this cacao is a beverage which they make called chocolate, which is a crazy valued thing in that country. It disgusts those who are not used to it, for it has a foam on top, or a scum-like bubbling … It is a valued drink which the Indians offer to the lords who come to pass through their land. And the Spanish men—and even more the Spanish women—are addicted to this black chocolate.”

  —JOSÉ DE ACOSTA, National and Moral History of the Indies, 1590

  THE STORY BEGINS IN THE PREDAWN OF HUMAN HISTORY, more than three thousand years ago. At least, that’s the beginning we can glean from the scant records of Meso-American people, about whom we know only fragments: the Olmec. And it probably begins with women, harvesting the colourful gourds from the dappled limbs of wild cocoa trees then liberating beans from the pulpy interior; mashing them to a fatty, viscous goo mixed with water and starch and then dispensed among the more elevated classes of their people
.

  The staple of the Olmec diet was maize, which sat overnight in tall urns filled with water and wood ash, or sometimes lime and the pulverized shells of snails. In the thin light of the early day, the women scooped out the dissolved mixture and washed away the transparent hulls. They’d beat the grain into a doughy mass, then serve it to the masters often fortified by the dark, magical substance they’d extracted from the bean called kakawa, or, as we know it, cocoa.

  It was a perfect gastronomical marriage. The starchy maize absorbed much of the heavy, fatty cocoa butter and made it more digestible, while the rich flavours of the bean gave the mixture zest. The Olmec women served it as thick, bitter-tasting drink, stimulating, nourishing and—they believed—healing as well. The wisest among the Olmec would have been hard pressed to explain the origins or the mysterious chemistry of this dark and bitter additive. Why it seemed to restore the weak and add vigour to even the strongest among them; why adversity seemed more manageable and pleasures more enjoyable under its benevolent influence; how it helped them through their daily challenges—fatigue, despair and even, among their warriors, fear. But time and custom had evolved a deep, unshakeable faith in the beneficial properties of cocoa. The purity and potency of an Olmec chocolate cocktail is impossible to come by nowadays—the mass-produced and processed product we know as chocolate is a pale substitute. But one thing is consistent: then and now, chocolate is a luxury consumed by the privileged at the cost of those much less so. For thousands of years, the chocolate cravings of an elite have been satisfied by the hard labour of an underclass.

  Theobroma grows in a band around the world, hugging the equator, and thriving only where there are perfect temperatures and plentiful moisture. But three thousand years ago, when the Olmec first harvested its riches, cocoa could be found only in the dense tropical rain forests of Central America and southern Mexico. According to American anthropologists Sophie and Michael Coe, the same fecund climate that allows cocoa to thrive also provided the perfect conditions for destroying written records about its cultivation, as well as many of the Olmec’s more fragile artifacts. What did survive were some of the most renowned and recognizable Meso-American relics: giant stone heads with smooth faces as inscrutable as the history that time erased.