Benjamin Sector Gbadago Shares a Sweeter Narrative for the Chocolate of Ghana

Editor’s note: Author and chocolate educator Estelle Tracy will be hosting a virtual chocolate tasting on Sunday, February 12, in honor of Black History Month. One of the featured bars will be from 57 Chocolate, a company based in Ghana. Benjamin Sector Gbadago will be the guest speaker. Chocolate Professor readers receive a 10% discount on tickets. 

In April 2022, Cadbury Exposed: Dispatches aired on British TV station Channel 4, sharing footage of Ghanaian children splitting cocoa pods with machetes. The beans in those pods, the investigative documentary revealed, fed into Cadbury’s supply chain.

The report added evidence to the issue of child labor on cocoa farms, further associating Ghana, the world’s second largest producer of cocoa, to unsavory labor practices.

The issue of children’s work and slavery on cocoa plantations has been well-documented in mainstream Western culture. In 2019, the Netflix series Rotten devoted the 5th episode of its second season, “Bitter Chocolate” to these very issues. Last year, Miki Mistrati released The Chocolate War, a movie “shedding further light on child slavery in the cocoa and chocolate industry.”

While these documentaries provide plenty of evidence of illegal labor practices, these single-focus accounts tell a single story of West African cocoa, one that is inextricably tied to suffering. “The consequence of a single story,” warns Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her TED talk, “is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.”

The question becomes: where do we find new stories for West African cocoa? 

Enter Benjamin Sector Gbadago. Benjamin describes himself as “a Ghanaian, a learner, and a writer [as well as] a storytelling enthusiast with a deep interest in the African cocoa/chocolate industry.” In other words, a great candidate for a conversation on cocoa. In January of this year, Benjamin launched African Cocoa Stories, a website whose mission is to celebrate Africa in the cocoa and chocolate world.

When we first met on Zoom in September 2022, Benjamin just finished French literature thesis and was snacking on plantain banana chips. Our interview quickly evolved to a bona fide conversation fueled by the desire to know how things are on each side of the ocean. Spoiler: there’s no single story.

First things first, cacao or cocoa? 

Growing up in Ghana, it was always cocoa, cocoa, cocoa, cocoa. I know cocoa’s botanical name is Theobroma cacao, but still, I say cocoa.

Your professional background is in French Language and Literature. Is that correct?

I’m a student and just finished my master's. Apart from my academics, which is in French Language and Literature, I also found an interest in digital storytelling, blogging, and writing. I learned that on the side after meeting cocoa… and I am getting the opportunities to explore my talent in that area. 

So how did how the cocoa find you? 

I've always known cocoa. People have cocoa farms all around [Ghana], but my parents never had a cocoa farm. My dad grows palm and, growing up, we’d go with him on Saturdays to the plantation and harvest palm fruits. We went through several cocoa farms to get to our palm plantation.

In 2020, after my National Service as teaching assistant at the University of Cape Coast, my girlfriend - Eli - recommended me to Dr. Kristy Leissle, a scholar of cocoa and chocolate, for a Research Assistant/Language Interpreter role. 

Dr. Leissle and I traveled from Accra to Dadieso in the far west of Ghana, and that was our first field trip together. I interpreted English to Twi [a Ghanaian dialect] and vice versa as she interviewed groups of cocoa farmers who spoke little or no English.

That was when I first tasted the complexity of the world of cocoa, the world of cocoa farmers and the numerous challenges they deal with. As I interpreted interview questions and responses, I got to hear several stories of how much farmers and their families depend on the crop, and what they go through when their farms don’t do well, or when cocoa prices drop. We conducted so many interviews, so I listened to different stories and learned many new things. 

That was my point of entry into the world of cocoa, and my mentor, Dr. Kristy Leissle, has been a great a teacher.

And what are some stories or things that you saw that really stood out to you? 

One of the things that struck me was the distance people had to travel from their home, or how to live somewhere else in Ghana to farm cocoa. 

On the Eastern part of Ghana, you have the Volta region near the Togo border. Then the other side of Ghana is the Western region, which shares a border with Ivory Coast. We went deep into the Western region and found people from the Volta region. I could never have imagined that, especially since I'm from the Volta region and I know how far that is.

Do they travel that because of the lack of opportunity in their original area?

Yes, I think that’s it for many people. For example, a young man with farming skills in the Volta region may hear the news that farm hands are needed [in the Western region]. So he leaves his home to go work and earn a living. First, he works for a landowner as a tenant farmer. Then after some years, he’s able to gather money to buy his own piece(s) of land. 

The people I met in the Dadieso have been there for a long time. And after working for other people as tenants, they now own huge cocoa plantations.

Have some people made an impression on you?

In November 2020, Dr. Leissle and I visited a gentleman named Razack in Brakwa, a farming community in the Central Region. He was the first farmer I had met who was deeply in love with his cocoa farm. He told us that if he went to the farm, and a single pod was struck with a disease, he could feel pain in his heart. 

He wasn’t rich and, he lived in a small house with his wife Abiba and their children. But he was just happy to farm cocoa and make alliances. For instance, he would gather cocoa farmers and voluntarily train them on how to handle their cocoa and get the most out of it. Unfortunately, he passed away shortly [after we met], but it was my first insight into the passion someone could have for cocoa farming. 

And there’s another story. Dr. Leissle does a series for Confectionery News called I am a cocoa farmer.

And once I traveled with her to chase a story in Assin Fosu, another town in the Central Region of Ghana. We met and interviewed two sisters; Ama Ampomaa who was about 75 years old, and her younger sister Felicia, who was about 60. 

Ama, the elder sister never attended school. As a girl-child in the early days of formal education in Ghana, she helped her father on their cocoa farm while her brothers attended school. But once she started working in cocoa, and trading in yam, she vowed to let her younger sister get formal education. So with her own money, she sponsored Felicia to attend school so she could make something out of life. 

The cool thing is that Felicia ended up working as an Administrator in the Department of French at the University of Cape Coast, where I studied. She even told me stories about my professors in their freshmen days. I won’t forget Ama and her sister.

You recently launched African Cocoa Stories, what’s the inspiration behind this project? What would make it a success for you?

Since I met cocoa I’ve learned that people hunger for stories from the African cocoa production and chocolate-making scene. They want to know and understand how cocoa affects lives and how lives affect cocoa in Africa. But stories often published are often on the negative side, and the cultural contexts are unexplained. So I wanted to start this project to give the world positive, beautiful, and inspiring stories from the cocoa scene in Africa. And there are so many of them, like the examples I just gave you.

If my stories can inspire a young African to contribute to the cocoa industry here, that will be a success. If this project helps correct the wrong mindset of just one person about Africa, that will also be a success for me.

What are some chocolate brands you’ve tried in Ghana? 

I tasted Golden Tree Chocolate, Fair Afric and Mia. I’ve also tried Loom Chocolate in Nigeria and my favorite. 

You’ve been living in France since September 2022. How did this experience shape your vision of cocoa and chocolate? What chocolate products stood out to you?

First, I can’t help but notice that “chocolat” is everywhere and people consume a lot of chocolate products. Chocolate is in bread, it’s in cake, it’s served as dessert, etc. But people I’ve met have no knowledge about the cocoa plant and its cultivation, and they’re always thrilled to learn about it. I have a dried cocoa pod in my bag, and I take it along when I’m invited to dinner. It’s always beautiful to see my French friends treat it like a rare artifact.

And then I attended Salon du Chocolat in Paris. It was shocking to me that for five days the venue was full of all kinds of people coming to taste and buy chocolate in various forms. For the first time, I understood how big the cocoa-chocolate industry was. I also appreciated the bigger picture farmers back home were contributing to.

Pain au chocolat stands out to me. Light bread with a light touch of chocolate. And it smells great, too. Every boulangerie has it.