Obroni and the Chocolate Factory

by Steven Wallace

  I timed my presentation so that, when I was ready to demonstrate that fine chocolate melts at body temperature, every thumb and forefinger in the room was marked with a delicious smear of melted chocolate. A look of relief passed over those who hadn’t yet licked their fingers clean. We are not slobs, I implied. This is what good chocolate ought to do—at body temperature it ought to melt, it needs to melt.

  Now the chocolate was melting in the audience’s mouths. “After you swallow,” I said, lowering the timbre of my voice, “the taste is purely subjective. Some may find our chocolate too intense or maybe too sweet. That’s okay. As I say, taste is subjective. But what you are tasting is pure, all-natural cocoa from Ghana, transformed from bean to bar in a matter of a few short weeks.”

  Applause! People were oohing and ahhing over the chocolate and comparing tasting notes as if they’d been doing this for years.

  I almost forgot to say, “My father and I will be over in the corner with samples of our hot chocolate and plenty of chocolate for sale if you’d like to pair Omanhene treats with some of these great DPQ wines.”

  Then came the transubstantiation—that miracle of commerce as people rose from their seats and made their way to our little table. People lined up to buy gift boxes of our dark milk chocolate and tins of hot cocoa. The queue of customers ran sixteen people deep by the time I threaded my way from the front of the house to our display. I was so excited, I could barely count out the change as twenty-dollar bills and checks piled up in our battered cash box. At long last, I thought, we’re in business.

  It was almost midnight when my father and I broke camp and finished loading the minivan with what was left of our inventory (not much). We stacked the empty Cambros of hot cocoa, drips of congealed chocolate dappling the sides like candle wax. We put the cash box on the floor of the passenger seat. Our voices were hoarse from celebrating the sales we made. Last thing we loaded was our green-metal thermos of hot chocolate to keep us warm and awake. DW and I drove off into the darkness, quiet now, on our journey home, snowflakes aglitter in the beam of our headlights as we passed the dented thermos back and forth across the front seat.

  * * *

  For a long time, this was how I conducted my oh-so-high-powered, glamorous business. Making deals with overworked baristas solicitous enough to listen to my pitch even as they expertly pulled shots of espresso for a waiting line of customers. Handing out samples. Driving and flying to make one-on-one connections. Roping in family members to help when they could spare the time. For example, on August 17, 1994, when the first sea-freight container arrived in Milwaukee, my father and I unpacked the Omanhene bars, only to find that nearly half of them had an unsightly scratch across the front of the label, caused by the label wrapping machinery in Ghana. There must have been 100,000 defective labels. I was shaking with anger at whatever employee let the wrapping machine continue to run when it wasn’t aligned properly. I found that if I used a damp paper towel, I could scrub the scratch marks off each label. This was a painstaking endeavor, but DW, Jonathan, and I set a quota for ourselves and hand-wiped chocolate bars every evening until we got the job done. I wondered whether Milton Hershey started thus.

  To the end, my father was always willing to pitch in and to offer encouragement. We spoke almost every day, usually when I’d call my parents on my commute into work. The last time DW and I spoke, I’d been running Omanhene for seventeen years and found myself in the throes of a difficult decision. DW and Junie Cookie were wintering in Florida and had just gotten back from the beach. I explained my anguish and received the encouragement I needed. I felt bad to have troubled his day with my problems, but by the time we’d talked it out, he had put everything right in my world, as he so often did. Then he laughed and shared his problem for the day: “Steverino, I’ve got sand between my toes!”

  Obi pae w’atifi no, na hyε wo kn mu den.

  If someone beats you about the top of your head, they exercise your neck muscles.

  “That which does not kill you, makes you stronger.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Song of Sarpong

  Back in Racine, I reveled in the afterglow of the Fancy Food Show. The Voice of America radio network called to interview me (the piece was broadcast in ninety-seven countries), and the editor of the Amsterdam News called to profile me and the company. Sarpong wrote an uncharacteristically affectionate letter—puzzling me, for he had previously been so formal, so consumed with pretense. Something had changed; he sweetly thanked me for the “care, love, and hospitality” shown him during his stay in New York.

  I also had plenty of administrative leftovers from the Fancy Food Show to sift through. Even before the show, Sarpong had begun to question the letter of credit I opened to pay for the container. My bank assured me of the sufficiency of the letter, which was drafted according to terms specified by Sarpong’s own staff. Sarpong maintained that his team could not even find evidence of the letter of credit. Curiously, even weeks later, he still hadn’t presented the necessary documentation to satisfy the terms of the letter of credit. This meant his factory still hadn’t been paid. When you establish a letter of credit, the buyer (in this case, Omanhene) places in escrow with a bank the full amount of money due under the letter, and specifies the conditions with which the seller (Portem) must comply before the escrow bank disburses the funds. In Omanhene’s letter, we asked that an original set of shipping documents be supplied, consisting of various original, signed inspection certificates and recipe-compliance certifications. Sarpong had 120 days to submit the required documentation to the bank, or else the letter of credit would expire and the funds be returned to us; Omanhene would thereafter be under no legal obligation to pay for the chocolate. Sarpong’s clock was ticking.

  The costs of our first production run had long ago been deducted from Omanhene’s checking account; we had to establish the letter of credit in advance of manufacture, in essence prepaying for all of the costs of labor and raw materials, including procurement of the cocoa beans. This “lost” money was a hardship for us. Omanhene was not earning interest on this money while it sat in escrow.

  I asked Kojo Bamford for advice. “Let him hang,” Kojo said. “Did he submit the documents? No? End of story! Full stop. Finito.”

  In my mind, it wasn’t so clear-cut. I was trying to build a partnership with the Ghana Cocoa Board. I wanted to establish trust and good faith. What sort of foundation for future cooperation would I have if I wagged a finger at Sarpong and blamed him for not complying with the terms of the letter of credit? I concluded that I would eventually have to pay what I owed, or else the government-owned factory wouldn’t continue to do business with me. If I allowed the letter of credit to expire, then I would have to bear the costs of a replacement wire transfer to pay Omanhene’s obligation, plus I would have to contend with the administrative burden of recovering the escrowed funds for an expired letter of credit from a bank in Accra. The last thing I wanted to do was to bone up on the jurisprudence of Ghanaian secured transactions. But Kojo had a point: We all played by a set of rules, and we couldn’t unilaterally decide when to waive them. Kojo’s argument reflected a bit of private-sector swagger, and I loved him for it. If the Government of Ghana wanted to encourage private direct investment—transitioning away from the legacy of postcolonial state-owned enterprises—it would need to learn how to play by the rules of private enterprise. Asking Sarpong to comply with the standard rules governing letters of credit was not an unduly oppressive burden.

  I suspected that Sarpong’s failure was also an embarrassment for Kojo—an example of an inexpert Ghanaian trying to compete on a global stage and foundering. Kojo worked so very hard to overcome every tired stereotype of a West African businessperson, that when his compatriots didn’t exert equal effort, it set him off.

  I had seen this once before. Kojo and I had agreed to meet at my hotel in Accra at 2:00 pm. He said he would call me from the lobby once he arrived. Neither of us knew that the phone system at the
hotel had broken. Meanwhile, I waited in my room for the expected call, first worried that Kojo might have been delayed, and then angry that Kojo was so late and had made no effort to leave me a message. I didn’t realize that Kojo was waiting in the lobby, making repeated calls, fuming at my tardiness while the staff kept insisting I wasn’t in the room. After forty-five minutes, I decided, finally, to walk down to the front desk—where Kojo shot me an angry look.

  When I explained I never received a call from the front desk, Kojo turned on the clerk, yelling so that every person in the lobby paused. The entire hotel staff studied their shoes, heads downturned, a typical Ghanaian response to a public dressing down. Kojo turned to me and snapped, “Get in the car.” I sheepishly followed him out. He took a deep breath, both hands on the steering wheel. He turned to me, shaking his head, more with sorrow than venom, and said, “This, this is what’s wrong with my country. See what I have to deal with every single day?” We never mentioned the episode again.

  So it pained me to disregard Kojo’s advice. Nevertheless, I decided to waive the conditions attached to the letter of credit; I released the funds. I would have gotten no joy from the pugilistic thrill of sticking it to Sarpong and my Ghanaian counterparts. I had no desire to take advantage of them or the situation. At the same time, I was deflated and didn’t fully understand why. Kojo thought I was crazy.

  Sarpong was off the hook, whether he knew it or not. My next contact from him wasn’t a thank-you note; I didn’t expect that. But I was surprised by his request. He wrote asking me to help his daughter register for the SAT college entrance exam, as a precondition to her coming to study in the US. I was happy to help. Maybe this small gesture on my part would improve our working relationship. Over time, Sarpong sent three of his four children to college in southeastern Wisconsin. Did this signify some degree of his increasing respect for the collegiality between us?

  And then one afternoon Sarpong called to ask for another favor. It was late evening in Ghana, and immediately I knew that something was up: Sarpong was never this considerate of my schedule. He was probably calling from home, too, which meant that this transatlantic call was on his dime (or pesewa), not Portem’s. Sarpong was trying hard to sound especially friendly, but I could tell he was worried.

  “A shipment I sent to a customer has been impounded by the Milwaukee Sheriff’s Department,” he said. He paused to read aloud. “They say it is ‘suspicion of drug trafficking.’ It is too bad!”

  That didn’t surprise me very much. At the time, Ghana (along with most of West Africa) was considered to be a prime narcotics transshipment point, and all imports from the region were highly suspect. No, the surprise was this “customer.” What sort of customer could Sarpong have in Wisconsin? And what was Sarpong selling?

  “Please, Steven, if you could go to the sheriff and explain that I am a person of good faith.”

  “Paul,” I said as kindly as I could, “I can’t vouchsafe for you. The sheriff doesn’t know who I am, any more than he knows who you are. For all he knows or cares, I could be a drug dealer. It wouldn’t do any good for me to talk to him.”

  There was a pause as Sarpong reflected on this. Then he said, “But please, Steven, if you could look over the letter and tell me what to do? You have said that you studied the law.”

  It was easy enough to say yes, and I admit that I was intrigued. About an hour later—the time it took Sarpong to drive to his office at Portem—my fax machine began to whistle and hum. Scrolling out came the notification that his shipment had been impounded, along with some other documents, seemingly chosen at random: the whole file on his Wisconsin customer and a couple of pages that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the case at-TALL. For all I knew, pages from a Nigerian technical manual might come through next.

  One page caught my eye. It was the letter Sarpong had written to his customer to confirm that he’d sent the shipment: five hundred bars of Golden Tree Dark Milk Chocolates, a carton about the size of a grocery bag. Along with Sarpong’s Ghana address, the box would have been more than sufficient to raise suspicions among customs agents and sheriff’s deputies.

  But my suspicions were raised, too. Because, until now, I was manufacturing the only dark milk chocolates in Ghana, indeed in all the world. So unprecedented was this dark milk chocolate that I had called the FDA to determine how properly to label our unusually high-cocoa-liquor-content chocolate bars.

  Sarpong had stolen not only my chocolate recipe but very likely my chocolate bars coming off the production line. He repackaged them, and tried to sell them in the US. Not only in the US—in Milwaukee.

  His audacity stunned me. What was he trying to gain? I was his de facto marketing department. I bore all of the costs of production, the marketing, recipe development, and transportation costs. Was he jealous? His factory spent 99 percent of its time and energy doing first-stage cocoa processing. My only concern was making chocolate, and I needed his cocoa liquor and butter to make chocolate. We didn’t compete with each other. We supported each other.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out what he’d done. He knew—I’d told him often enough—that no American who bought one Golden Tree bar would ever buy a second one. So Golden Tree conveniently appropriated a new recipe for dark milk chocolate. Only Sarpong hadn’t had time to come up with his own recipe: hell, he’d only just started to produce chocolates that followed my recipe. And five hundred bars isn’t a big batch, so in all likelihood this was a portion of a run he’d done for me, an amount he thought I wouldn’t miss. But if he was going to use my proprietary recipe, why would he sell it in my own backyard? And use a brand name that was like a signpost on the trail leading directly back to him? If I’d happened to visit his customer’s business and seen a bar of Golden Tree, was there any chance I would not think Sarpong was behind it? Clueless as he was about branding and marketing, he probably thought that, once he slapped a Golden Tree label on an Omanhene recipe bar, it wasn’t mine any longer—and that would be enough to assuage any guilty thoughts he had. The good Christian was sleeping soundly—Hallelujah!—until the Milwaukee Sheriff stepped in.

  “Unbelievable,” Linda said. “And this is a guy you’re doing business with?”

  “I didn’t hire him,” I replied. “Portem did—the Government of Ghana did—and Portem is my partner. I’m stuck with him.”

  From the start, I’d feared that somebody in Ghana would start manufacturing chocolate for sales and distribution in the US. To copycat the Omanhene model, you could modify my exclusive recipe only a little, and then you’d be able to make the same claims about freshness and single origins and all the things that made Omanhene more than just great chocolate. I’d done everything I could to prevent that scenario from playing out. But I wouldn’t have believed that the perpetrator could be Sarpong himself. Without question, he had contravened the spirit, if not the exact letter, of our production agreement. If not for an accident of fate, I might never have found out.

  “Sue the bastard,” my brother said. But my legal training wouldn’t be good for much in Ghana, where the rule of law is costly to enforce.

  “I’ll bet he thought he was clever, circumventing your agreement this way,” Linda said.

  What could I do? Complaining to the Ghana Cocoa Board or any other higher-up, I realized, would merely invite Sarpong to devise an intricately contorted self-justification, which might be accepted. Worse, I risked making myself look bad: the foreign obroni tattling on a God-fearing son of Ghana. I couldn’t fire Sarpong, I couldn’t sue him, and I couldn’t ignore him. Some kind of response was not only warranted but also necessary, I thought.

  I wished I had access to the immense store of Ghanaian folk wisdom. With its intricate web of ethnic and extended family relationships and its pervasive “old boy” and “old girl” boarding school subculture, Ghana was extraordinarily good at rebuking miscreants. Once, back in the 1970s, a council of chiefs reputedly gave coup leader General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong a ceremonial cloth wi
th a design that in the Akan proverbial tradition meant “Wisdom is at an end”—a subtle, public rebuke that spoke more loudly than any direct confrontation. Another time, at another durbar of chiefs, another head of state, who also grabbed power by coup, was portrayed in a pantomime as a person with a wounded arm—symbology that meant a head of state was unfit for office. But I couldn’t exactly walk around Portem with my arm in my sling wearing a T-shirt with DR. SARPONG printed on the chest.

  One thing was certain: I wasn’t going to help Sarpong recover his inventory from the Milwaukee Sheriff’s Department. I don’t know what became of it. I said to Sarpong, “In the future, why not let Omanhene serve as Portem’s official representative in the US? I can take responsibility for clearing customs and storing inventory in our FDA-approved warehouse, and we won’t have problems like this anymore. There is no need to skulk around my back.” That was the only rebuke at my disposal. Sarpong didn’t acknowledge it, but he understood it.

  The writer and activist Anne Lamott once said, “Hope is revolutionary patience.” I agree. I wouldn’t have come this far without hope—a hope that persisted when there was no good reason to continue. Ask me what I learned from my time in Sunyani back in 1978, and I’ll tell you I learned patience. Since that first trip to Ghana, it had taken me sixteen years to make export-quality chocolate in Ghana. Say what you will, that’s patience. But my patience for Sarpong was wearing thin.

  Obi soma wo dupn tow a, tow, na tokuro da mu.

  If someone tells you to chop down an enormous tree, go fell it, for it may be a hollow tree.

  “If you are faced with a burdensome task, do not be discouraged, as it may be easier than you think.”