We’re constantly on a journey for hard-to-find coffees and honestly, no region is more fascinating for this journey than Africa. As most people in the specialty coffee world know, East African coffees are some of the best in the world but, what happened to those delicious Central and West African coffees? I couldn’t help but think about the similarities between the West and Central African coffees and West and Central African people in Western society.
One similarity i’m interested in exploring is this: The history of both coffees and peoples originating from West and Central Africa have had their histories erased through trade in western society. A little known nugget about our modern history is that Central and West Africans were brought to the “New World” in the slave trade, in part, to cultivate coffee. Not just cotton and sugar like history books teach us. As Mark Pendergrast, Author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed our World, states:
“European companies imported slaves from Africa to labor on plantations in the Caribbean, Asia, and the Americas in what is known as the Triangular Trade. Barbados and Jamaica were some of the earliest British colonies, and slave traders provided the outposts with human labor from Africa to work the sugar and coffee plantations. Goods and people were moved in a triangle between West Africa, colonies in the Caribbean and Americas, and Europe.”
It appears as colonialism dissipated in slave trading nations, so did the spread of their coffees, and other conflicts arose which would halt coffee production. This affected not only the Congo but West African countries and the Caribbean countries like Haiti who at one point supplied upwards of 40% of the world’s coffee. Coffee production in Central African countries like the Congo region saw a sharp decline from the late 90s onward as civil war crippled infrastructure. But this seems to be almost eerily in lock-step with the story of the people in America who are descendents of those who were brought to the new world in the slave trade. The history of the people from this region as they made their way to the new world, much like the history of this region’s coffee in Western society, has been scattered at best and mostly lost. Disconnected.
Drinking Disconnect helps us bring more of these hard-to-find if not rare coffees to life.
A little context here, I had my DNA analyzed and it came back that a good portion it comes from Congo/Cameroon part of Africa, making this exploration all the more fascinating. I’ve been disconnected from the history of those I share DNA with just as we’ve all been disconnected from the beautiful coffees of these regions in Africa.
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