Tetteh Quarshie was a blacksmith from Osu who went to Fernando Po — Bioko, off the coast of Cameroon — to work.
The Tetteh Quarshie farm at Mampong-Akuapem; and every cocoa farm in Ghana.
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Six Pods in a Pocket
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Six Pods in a Pocket
Tetteh Quarshie was a blacksmith from Osu who went to Fernando Po — Bioko, off the coast of Cameroon — to work.
He came home in 1876 and he brought cocoa pods with him.
The Basel missionaries had tried to introduce cocoa before and it had not taken. Quarshie was a farmer's-eye man rather than an institution: he planted at Mampong-Akuapem, in the hills where the soil and the shade were right, and it grew, and he sold seedlings and pods to his neighbours, and his neighbours planted, and their neighbours planted.
Within thirty years the Gold Coast was the largest producer of cocoa in the world. Not on plantations — that is the part that gets missed — but on small farms owned by Ghanaian families who bought the land themselves, cleared it themselves, and got rich enough to build schools and send sons to London to become lawyers.
Those lawyers founded the UGCC. Cocoa money paid for the education of the men who ended the colony.
He died in 1892. There is a hospital named after him, and a farm you can visit where one of his original trees is claimed to stand, and roughly eight hundred thousand Ghanaian farming households whose lives run on what he carried home in his pocket.
If you visit Ghana. The Tetteh Quarshie farm at Mampong-Akuapem; and every cocoa farm in Ghana.
Tetteh Quarshie was a blacksmith from Osu who went to Fernando Po — Bioko, off the coast of Cameroon — to work.
He came home in 1876 and he brought cocoa pods with him.
The Basel missionaries had tried to introduce cocoa before and it had not taken. Quarshie was a farmer's-eye man rather than an institution: he planted at Mampong-Akuapem, in the hills where the soil and the shade were right, and it grew, and he sold seedlings and pods to his neighbours, and his neighbours planted, and their neighbours planted.
Within thirty years the Gold Coast was the largest producer of cocoa in the world. Not on plantations — that is the part that gets missed — but on small farms owned by Ghanaian families who bought the land themselves, cleared it themselves, and got rich enough to build schools and send sons to London to become lawyers.
Those lawyers founded the UGCC. Cocoa money paid for the education of the men who ended the colony.
He died in 1892. There is a hospital named after him, and a farm you can visit where one of his original trees is claimed to stand, and roughly eight hundred thousand Ghanaian farming households whose lives run on what he carried home in his pocket.