Tetteh Quarshie and the Seeds That Built Ghana's Cocoa
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Ghana's cocoa story, and so a part of every Ghana bar we make, goes back to a blacksmith and a handful of seeds almost 150 years ago.
His name was Tetteh Quarshie. If you grow up in Ghana, as I did, you learn it in school. Outside Ghana, few chocolate lovers have heard it. Chocolate's story is usually told through famous European names, while the places where cocoa is grown are left out. Yet the seeds he planted helped start an industry that, at its height, grew nearly half the world's cocoa, and became the backbone of the economy that carried Ghana to independence in 1957. His story is a good place to start setting that right.
A Blacksmith, Not a Planter
Tetteh Quarshie was born around 1842 in the Accra area. As a young man he trained as a blacksmith with the Basel Mission, and later set up his forge in Mampong, in the Akuapem hills north of Accra. Farming was something he did on the side.
Around 1870 he went to work on Fernando Po, the island now called Bioko, off the coast of Equatorial Guinea. The Spanish-ruled island had thriving cacao plantations. When he came home, he brought cacao with him.
The Seeds That Took
Others had tried before him. Missionaries at Akropong had experimented with cacao for years, with little lasting success. In 1879, Tetteh Quarshie planted his seeds at Mampong, and they did. Historians still debate some of the dates, and who deserves credit for what, but his farm is the one Ghanaians remember as the beginning.
What happened next is the part I love most. He didn't keep the trees to himself. He shared pods and sold seedlings to neighbours, friends and relatives, and they planted them across the hills. Farmer taught farmer. Within a generation, cocoa had spread across southern Ghana. Small farms, not large plantations, carried it.
The first exports, in the early 1890s, were tiny: a few bags. By 1911, the Gold Coast, as Ghana was then called, was the largest cocoa producer in the world.
What He Never Saw
Tetteh Quarshie died on Christmas Day, 1892, before Ghana's cocoa boom. He made no fortune from it.
Today his name is on a hospital in Mampong, and his farm is still there, open to visitors.
Why His Story Matters
When I visited the cocoa farms of Bawjiase this summer, I watched the farmers there do what Tetteh Quarshie's neighbours did: read the trees, care for them, and pass what they know to the next person.
That is the real legacy. Not one man's success, but knowledge shared freely, farm to farm, until it built a nation's industry. It is also a reminder of how little of chocolate's value has stayed with the people who grow it, then and now. It is a question I keep coming back to.
The next time you open a bar of our Ghana 70% Dark, I hope you'll think of the blacksmith from Mampong, and of the farmers who still carry his work forward.
— Ebo Nunoo, Founder, Xoxoa Bean-to-Bar Chocolatier
A note to our readers: an earlier post on this journal described Benjamin Jackson, an 18th-century Philadelphia chocolate maker, as a Black chocolatier. We could not verify that, so we have taken it down and told this story instead. Black hands were part of early American chocolate, from enslaved Africans who grew cacao and sugar in the Caribbean to enslaved cooks and chocolate makers in the colonies, but we have not yet confirmed a free Black chocolatier in colonial Philadelphia. We are sorry for the error, and we will keep looking.