**Local workers and a supervisor dressed in ‘colonial whites’ at a cocoa drying area run by the Basel Mission Trading Company in Accra in what is now Ghana (1904/1905).** Mission 21, Bestand der Basler Mission

Cocoa in Ghana: how it all began

Ghana is the world’s largest producer of cocoa. Pre-independence, the Basel Mission was one of the players making money from the cocoa trade in the Gold Coast region. It ran an agricultural research station there from the middle of the 19th century and attempted to cultivate the cocoa plant ‒ with varying degrees of success.

Pascale Meyer

Historian and curator at the Swiss national museum

In the 1830s, European businessmen began attempting to grow cash crops like coffee, cotton, peanuts and cocoa along the coast of present-day Ghana, at that time a British colony known as the Gold Coast. The cocoa tree, a member of the mallow family, is actually native to Central and South America, not Africa. The Swiss-based Basel Mission was among those involved in these first efforts to cultivate the plant in Africa. A 1906 report by missionary Josef Mohr reveals that the Mission had been running an agricultural research station in Akropong since 1857. Missionary Johannes Haas had been experimenting with native cultivars and with plants imported from Surinam. But neither he nor his successors were to succeed. It was a case of one step forward and two steps back, with insects and worms repeatedly thwarting them. Reinforcements sent from home did not fare any better: Johan Jakob Lang from Witikon and, later, Johann Gottlieb Auer, a missionary who would go on to become an American Methodist bishop, also failed to keep the pests and diseases in check. Nevertheless, Auer did manage to oversee four acres of coffee and cocoa plantations shortly before leaving the station in 1868. However, his successors all succumbed to tropical diseases and were forced to return home for health reasons. The missionaries finally abandoned the experiment in 1870. No longer able to recruit any Europeans to the Agriculture Station in Akropong, they handed it over to the “Africans”. Just who they meant by this, is not exactly clear.

**Fruit and seed of the cocoa tree. The dried nibs can be turned into cocoa mass, the basic ingredient of chocolate.** Wikimedia

But the story of cocoa cultivation in Ghana did not end there, as Tetteh Quarshie (1842-1892) then arrived on the scene. He was born in Osu to a farmer named Mlekuboi. According to the records kept by the Basel Mission, he was freed from ‘pawnship’ by missionary Heinrich Bohner and given the opportunity to train as a blacksmith. He emigrated to the island of Fernando Po (a former Spanish colony now called Bioko) in the Gulf of Guinea, where he worked until 1869. He then returned home carrying several cocoa seeds, which he managed to smuggle into the country unnoticed. He planted them at Mampong, and some of the young plants thrived. He sold these seedlings to his neighbour, who then planted them in the hills at Akuapim, making these first attempts at propagation a success. Tetteh Quarshie has been revered in Ghana as a kind of national hero ever since. He is credited with having introduced cocoa to the country and thus with laying the foundation for what would later become Ghana’s main export commodity. His legacy is commemorated by a statue in Accra, the Tetteh Quarshie Memorial Hospital in Akuapim- Mampong and the Tetteh Quarshie Cocoa Farm & Exhibition Centre. Yet the question of who really succeeded in propagating cocoa trees, the Basel Mission or Quarshie, remains a matter of dispute. However, it is clear that, when planting his seeds, Quarshie was well aware that cocoa trees require shade – unlike the missionaries, who had left them fully exposed to direct sunlight.

**Memorial to cocoa pioneer Tetteh Quarshie in Mampong, Ghana.** Philipp Kessler

But, as rights and patents for plant breeders were unheard of at the time, Quarshie did not benefit financially from his success. His relatives were also left with nothing. In 1926, they petitioned the British Governor Gordon Guggisberg for financial assistance. In vain. After two years delay, the family was finally granted 250 pounds – a derisible sum given the huge profits being made by the British trading societies and the Basel Missionshandelsgesellschaft (BHG). Established in 1859 by those at the head of the Basel Mission, it continued to operate in the Gold Coast after the First World War under the name of Union Trading Company (UTC). Although cocoa was becoming an increasingly important crop in the region, it was still the British who were profiting most from its cultivation. By 1911, the then British colony had already become the world’s foremost cocoa producer. Nevertheless, many merchants, chiefs and smallholders in Ghana itself also reaped the benefits and rose to affluence. But in 1906, Basel missionary Josef Mohr warned that: “Cocoa is a blessing, although our judgement all too frequently suggests otherwise, (…) when we live and stand among the people and see what disastrous consequences are visited upon our careless, easy-going populace by this windfall, then we are forced to let out a sigh.” He goes on to complain about the deforestation of the jungle, about the greed of the local advocates, about quarrels and litigiousness, and about ‘pawnship’, a form of bondage rife in cocoa farming, in which people, especially the young, were pledged as collateral and sent to work in the fields as a means of repaying the debt. Incidentally, the practice of poor parents sending their children off to work was still common in Switzerland towards the end of the 19th century, e.g. the chimney sweeps in Ticino known as ‘spazzacamini’. But although he deplored these human rights abuses, the missionary also bemoaned the lack of human resources, e.g. messengers or porters, writing: ‘it is now impossible to find men or women in Akropong to carry foodstuffs from Accra to Akuapim for the missionaries” ‒ and all because of the temptation of the ‘brown gold’.

**Sacks of cocoa being organised for further transport in what is now Ghana.** Mission 21, Bestand der Basler Mission

The cocoa trade proved extremely lucrative for UTC – until 1937. That was when the cartel (also known as the pool) of European trading companies, of which UTC was a member, began to allocate buying quotas, and profits began to fall. The cartel was damaging to the country’s farmers: it put pressure on prices and prevented the up-and-coming African merchants from shipping cocoa to Europe on their own initiative. By 1947, the golden years were well and truly over: the Gold Coast Cocoa Marketing Board prohibited the Europeans from continuing their operations in the Gold Coast. UTC gradually withdrew from the cocoa trade – 10 years prior to Ghana’s independence – and turned towards other, more lucrative areas of business.

**School mural depicting cocoa farming, between 1900 and 1950.** Swiss National Museum

On 12 November 1957, the Basel notary Dr Laurenz Zellweger authenticated a collection of historical documents from the Basel Mission Archives in his office: he confirmed that the Basel Mission had succeeded in cultivating cocoa plants from 1868 to 1874. Why the mission’s trading company felt the need to have its efforts to propagate the plant legally recognised remains unclear. A letter from Max Preiswerk, the Managing Director of UTC at the time, had preceded this process, but yields next to no information about what motivated it. Did UTC hope to claim the cultivation success (achieved by the Basel Mission) as its own in order to gain ground or attract government orders (e.g. for car exports)? The sources do not provide any answers to this question. What we do know is that UTC ensured the Swiss chocolate industry’s survival after the two world wars by providing it with raw material ‒ it was the only Swiss company purchasing cocoa in the Gold Coast during the colonial era, give or take a few years. And we also know that modern-day Ghana would go on to become the world’s largest cocoa producer in the 20th century.

colonial — Switzerland’s Global Entanglements

13.09.2024 19.01.2025 / National Museum Zurich

Swiss citizens and companies were heavily involved in the colonial system from the 16th century onwards. Some Swiss companies and private individuals took part in the transatlantic slave trade and earned a fortune from the trade in colonial goods and exploitation of slave labour. Swiss men and women travelled the globe as missionaries. Other Swiss, driven by poverty or a thirst for adventure, served as mercenaries in European armies sent to conquer colonial territory or crush uprisings by the indigenous population. Swiss experts also placed their knowledge at the disposal of the colonial powers. And the racial theories prevalent at the time, which were used to justify the colonial system, formed part of the curriculum at the universities of Zurich and Geneva. The exhibition at the National Museum Zurich draws on the latest research findings and uses concrete examples, illustrated with objects, works of art, photographs and documents, to present the first-ever comprehensive overview of Switzerland's history of colonial entanglement. And by drawing parallels to contemporary issues, it also explores the question of what this colonial heritage means for present-day Switzerland.

More of: Modern Age 20th / 21st century Economy Research Politics Colonialism Nature

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