Mother and Child

I stood in line waiting to have my turn at the serving table. My mind was in places, working to come up with appropriate illustrations for the mid-morning teaching session after the break.

We were at one of the upscale hotels in Fort Portal, a town situated approximately 300 kilometers west of Kampala the capital city of Uganda. It is a beautiful town—cool weather, gently rolling hills and easy-going people. From anywhere in the town, one can easily see the Rwenzori mountain range in the distance and if you are not too pressed for time, a drive to Bundibugyo 70 kilometers away further west will bring you to the foot of these breathtaking ranges that stretch across the impressive distance of over 120 kilometers.

 

The Rwenzori Mountain Ranges

In front of me was one of the participants at the training workshop we were conducting for a team of community leaders from the Bundibugyo Area Development Program of World Vision Uganda. If I remembered correctly, his name was Joseph. Always smartly dressed and well-spoken, he was no stranger to me as we had interacted informally at previous workshops. As we neared the table, he turned to me and started to make small talk, asking about how the training sessions were progressing for me as a trainer. I indulged him for a while and before long, it was our turn at the tea table.

There were three giant thermos flasks with labels that read “milk tea”, “milk” and “hot water”. There was also a tribe of beverages to choose from which included tea, drinking chocolate, instant coffee, soy coffee and several others I would not be too bothered to sample. I had already decided that I was going to make myself a cup of strong coffee to give me some kick and help me combat the drowsiness that I was beginning to feel. Teaching can be a draining job and I had been at it for four consecutive days.

As I was stirring my mug of coffee, Joseph was busy adding spoonfuls of chocolate powder to his milk. Almost casually, he asked me a question that caught me flat—footed and set me thinking in a whole new direction. “Teacher, what is this?” he asked as he scooped more chocolate from the tin labeled “Cadbury drinking chocolate”.

The question caught me off-guard mainly because it seemed to me trivial and misplaced at that time in that hotel lobby. But as my tired brain slowly digested it, its implication struck me like a blow and jolted me back to life.

 

Cadbury Drinking Chocolate

Basing on my secondary school geography/agricultural lessons and from what I had read up on the subject here and there, I could clearly remember that chocolate is processed from the cocoa plant. The cocoa pods are harvested from the cacao tree growing mainly in countries in the narrow belt 10ºN and 10ºS of the Equator, where the climate favors them to no end. The largest producing countries of this much sought—after crop are Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana and Indonesia.

West Africa and the Indian Ocean aside, I also knew that Joseph hailed from the Bundibugyo region, an area famed for growing cocoa as its number one cash crop. No homestead in this part of the country is complete without numerous plants of the cacao tree strewn across its gardens. Trade in cocoa has educated the children of Bundibugyo, built imposing mansions, constructed schools, sparked endless feuds, been responsible for lavish weddings, and made many well-intentioned folk polygamous.

It is that lucrative, and divisive.

I frowned in complete bewilderment at Joseph and at what I thought was his simplistic question, and informed him that the dark brown powder was called cocoa. His face quickly became a picture of complete shock as his mind digested this latest piece of information. I think it was the word “cocoa” that triggered him off. “You mean to say it is the same cocoa that we grow back at home?” I replied in the affirmative and all he could do was look down and slowly shake his head. He was clearly baffled by this new knowledge. It would seem that my answer had caused him to experience a total paradigm shift.

 

A Cacao Tree Plantation in Bundibugyo

The irony of this seemingly mundane episode could not be lost on me. Here was this well-intentioned gentleman enjoying the luxury of a beverage made from a crop he grew in his backyard, a crop I was certain he interacted with on a daily basis from when he was a child, but blissfully ignorant of how it was inseparably connected to the beverage he was now enjoying from the comfort of this hotel lobby.

As I walked back to my seat thoughtfully sipping from the now-tepid mug of coffee, I silently shook my head at the absurdity of the whole situation. I was certain that from Joseph’s perspective prior to our little chat, the chocolate powder in these fancy tins was an exotic beverage imported into the country for the luxurious indulgence of the well-to-do who could afford to sleep in this hotel.

For the life of him, and except for that fateful question he asked me innocently, he probably would never have been able to relate this sweet brown powder to the golden—brown pods that hung from the cacao trees in his gardens back at home, that the pods gave birth to the said powder.

Mother and Child!

 

Mother and Child...

And I thought, what a pity that from the perspective of Joseph, the child was completely unknown to its mother. He grew the crop, harvested it year in year out, sold it to some middle men who in turn sold it to some other higher-middle men, who then aided it on its elite journey to Cadbury’s state—of—the—art factories in Singapore, and onward to Tasmania and Victoria (even Kenya and the rest of the world) where it was processed, packed in those fancy, shiny tins and eventually re-exported to Uganda.

Here it was distributed to various supermarket chains and up—market hotels in places like Fort Portal so that during one random training seminar there, the likes of Joseph tasted the beverage with their milk and discovered for the first time that the tree which birthed this exotic powder grew in their plantations back home. Imagine the odds!

His could have been an isolated case of a child’s lack of knowledge of its mother, and I honestly hoped it was but I knew in my heart of hearts that I was wrong and that my hope was but a sham.

A few months later, I made a trip to the town of Bundibugyo. Everywhere I passed, there were these cacao trees in full bloom, laden with their unmistakable golden brown and maroon colored cocoa pods. At the Ntandi village cocoa cooperative union, I met a gentleman who was weighing out a sack of dry cocoa beans, all nicely fermented and ready to be sold to a waiting middle-man. I engaged him in conversation and asked him what the beans were used for. He gave me a blank stare like I had requested him for directions to Mars. He blurted out “I do not know”.

My heart silently wept at my government’s 30-year ineptitude to build modern infrastructure for value-addition to agricultural produce, and by extension, its active participation in the hypocrisy and sheer robbery of capitalism.

Walking through a peaceful cacao plantation on an overcast morning the next day, birds chirping cheerily in the sky, I stopped by a tree with three beautiful maroon cocoa pods. Pointing my camera lens at them, they seemed to look straight back and smile at me. With no premeditation, I smiled back, clicked away some more and waved to them as I walked off thinking: Mothers deserve to know their children, anything less is an affront to and a rape of their dignity.

My Three Maroon Friends