Has Tetteh Quarshie been honoured enough?

I have read with interest a couple of write-ups lately claiming that Tetteh Quarshie, who has been credited with bringing cocoa to Ghana, has not been honoured well enough. It means a hospital and a road interchange named after him is inadequate.

When I was barely five years old, I swallowed a cocoa bean as I was nibbling at the sweet coating from inside the pod on a visit to my father’s cocoa farm at Suhyien, near Koforidua in the Eastern Region.

As was usual of children, my siblings made a jest that a cocoa tree would grow inside of me. I cried my eyes out but my mother, in her motherly duty to assurance, ensured that I saw the chocolate colour in my stool the next day.

Later in Primary Five, my class teacher, Mr Congo, caned me for daring to challenge him in class that Tetteh Quarshie could not have swallowed five cocoa beans as the teacher was drumming into our young minds. He explained that that was what the history books said. He shut me up when I tried to tell the class that I swallowed a bean and passed it out digested in my stool the next day.

I have always held the strong belief that there was cocoa in our parts before Tetteh Quarshie, as I always remember vividly the farmhand on our Suhyien plantation ever saying, “Oyi oye cocoa dadaa, ena oyi nso oye Tetteh Quarshie,” to wit this is the old cocoa and this one is Tetteh Quarshie.

As a student of the Presbyterian Training College (PTC) at Akropong in 1973, I encountered one Opanyin Akuffo who also told me that there was cocoa at Akropong before Tetteh Quarshie, and some of the old crop could be found in a forest close to the college’s big sporting field. I dared not go there as the place was known to us students as the Evil Forest. I state here that I believed Opanyin Akuffo’s narrative as those from places such as Ahamansu and Mempeasem in the Volta Region.

Joseph Dupuis’ book

In my teaching career, I always held my view on this issue of cocoa, more especially as the son of a cocoa farmer. Then a couple of years ago, one of the young ones I taught in Primary Five referred me to a publication titled Journal Of A Residence In Ashantee, which I quickly ordered in hard and soft copy. This journal, published in 1824, was authored by a British man called Joseph Dupuis and commissioned by The Crown to mediate a trade route from Cape Coast to the Asante Kingdom because of the conflict between the Asante and Fante people of the coast.

Dupuis, who set off from Cape Coast by foot in early 1819, documented almost everything he encountered on his way to Kumasi, which included cocoa plantations in the 462-page book. It is instructive to note that Journal Of A Residence In Ashantee was published in 1824, 18 clear years before the birth of Tetteh Quarshie. On page 25, Dupuis writes:

“We next arrived at a small stream that flowed to the southwest, but its insignificance was such that it had no name. A mile beyond this stream is the Atonsou, a little rivulet flowing S.SW. into the Pra. Here, an opening presented itself to our view, in which the scene was animated by the reflection of the sun upon a rich foliage that surrounded a sort of dam, where a body of water had stagnated. Having left the Atonsou a mile in the rear, we came to a few bamboo huts like those at Abandou. The area, which was free from forest trees, was about 300 paces in diameter. The sugar-cane, and a few banana and plantain trees, grew hereabouts in luxuriant clusters, besides which there were both high and low palm, bamboo, cocoa trees, and erasma. The name of this place is Fooso.”
After crossing the Pra, heading north, Dupuis writes again on page 32:

“The forest itself, frowning in awful majesty to the very verge of the embankment, formed a romantic background, while the surface beneath was buried in darkness. To enumerate half the different species of vegetation is not in my power, for the greater part by far were unknown to me. Those which I recognised of the larger growth, were such as have been already mentioned. Ganyan, however, was a very conspicuous object on the opposite embankment. It is characteristic for this tree to shoot out fibrous tendrils from its branches, and these are prolongated in the growth, until they strike into the earth in various postures, although generally perpendicular. The smaller trees and shrubs, besides bamboo, rattan and common cane, were Guava bush, in limited quantity, indigo, umbrella trees, dying woods, erasma, cocoa, male and female migratory and stationary vines, wild fig, aloe, tamarind, &c.”

Dupuis admits here that he did not know some of the species of vegetation but is emphatic in mentioning those he knew, including cocoa. On reaching the outskirts of where he mentioned as Coomassy, capital of the Asantee Kingdom, Dupuis writes on page 66:

“In the more central parts of the kingdom, the features of the land render the process of clearing it infinitely more complicated and laborious, notwithstanding: the method resorted to is the same. Here, trees of more than ordinary dimensions must necessarily be rooted out, or felled with the thicket. The exempted trees are those which possess useful qualifications, such as the high and low palm, bamboo, tamarind, papa, cocoa, and some other kinds that yield valuable nuts. The sacred kinds of vegetation of every growth, are religiously respected, and suffered to exist ; nor are they even mutilated like the trunks of those giant-like classes whose tops soar to the elevation of one hundred and thirty, and more feet, and whose ramifications are necessarily subjected to the operation, in order to admit a free circulation of air.”

It is unfathomable that our historians are in a haste to go public without doing in-depth research to unearth the bare facts. The original of Joseph Dupuis’s book is in the Harvard School library, but copies can be obtained from Amazon. This publication, which precedes the birth of the man credited with bringing cocoa to Ghana, cannot be in competition with any modern historian. The facts speak for themselves.

Or, is it possible that our historians only consider the areas around Accra and parts of Akuapem as constituting the then Gold Coast? Assuming this were not so, how then do we explain the presence of cocoa in Cote d’Ivoire, parts of Liberia, Togo, Benin and Nigeria? It has been proven that cocoa is a plant native to Brazil and West Africa. But Dupuis’s book was not interested in this because that was not his remit.

Assuming, without admitting it, that Tetteh Quarshie introduced cocoa to Ghana, what were the people doing on their land? Farming, of course. Would they have abandoned their crops, cultivated a new crop that would take five years to bear fruits and starve their families? But because they already had the plantations, replacing the already existing crops with a new variety would have made more sense.

In spite of the facts I have enumerated here, Tetteh Quarshie deserves the honour done him by naming national monuments such as a hospital and road interchange after him, because the variety of the crop he brought from the Camerouns was a bigger pod and contained more beans than the smaller and elongated pod that was native to our parts at the time.
No one can downplay the importance of what Tetteh Quarshie offered his motherland, but the historical records must be set straight

Writer’s e-mail: akofa45@yahoo.com