tl:dr – After leaning into my other interest, history, I starting trying to understand coffee’s own complicate past. I dived into one complicated part of coffee history: how coffee was a entwined with the transatlantic slave trade. A demand for coffee was created by colonialists, humans were enslaved to cultivate it and a network of cargo ships kept this operation going – this just one uncomfortable slither of coffee history.
In recent months, I leaned into my childhood obsession with history. If you had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up – one of my answers was…
“I want to be an archaeologist.”
Not only was I drawn to digging up things and getting my hands dirty (classic behaviour for child Anita), as I grew older, I found the process afterwards that equally intriguing. How we could use those collected fragments from the past to make some sense of what happened before us.
I hold our shared history highly because it influences our present history. From the languages we speak to the habits and cultures we follow. The views we hold about the world around us and the things we eat and drink; it is all the result of decisions and choices made by the people before us. The presence of coffee in most of our cupboards does not evade the influence and marks of the past.
I hold our shared history highly because it influences our now.
So I started reading about coffee history. How did this little fruit cherry became a global luxury product? Trying to summarise it all is a rather complicated as each country’s introduction of coffee would have it’s own story and timeline dependent on many things moving across oceans at different times. The movement of seeds, knowledge and in this blog posts focus – slaves, form a part of coffees history.
The Slave Trade
I was first introduced to the idea of the transatlantic slave trade in my early teenage years. I remember it vividly. I was in secondary school, sitting on surprisingly comfy cushioned chairs that only existed in our history class in the tower block. As one of three black student in my entire year of 200+ people, there was something palpably uncomfortable about reading and seeing imagery about the slave trade. Learning that a mere 200 years ago you would not have sat in this class, let alone be allowed an education at all was harrowing.
From memory, my history class in secondary school stated some general facts around the routes between Europe, Central / West Africa and the Americas. There were vague mentions of plantations and the abolition of formal slavery’s in the early 19th century (even though it took nearly a century later for people to halt this activity after its abolition). I saw pictures of cargo holds, crammed full of people laying down side by said, posters in thick print selling negroes like cattle.
You can imagine my surprise, in my present day, a couple of decades later as I’m reading into coffees history, when I come across the transatlantic slave trade once again. It rears it’s ugly head and I discover that amongst sugar cane, cotton and tobacco – another major cash crop in these plantations was coffee.
It made me feel sick.
Honestly, it comes from my own naivety. The slave trade was something I hadn’t linked with coffee until it had been spelt out in front of me. To think that the socio-ethical issues of coffee only existed in present day farming practice – was my own naivety being shown in the light of day. Current coffee growers are at risk of being overworked and underpaid. Of course, that dirty human pattern would be present throughout the history of coffee. The obsession our species has in oppressing others repeats itself often and coffee was not going to be an exception.
The origin of coffee and early popularisation in East Africa and Yemen and the present day mass farming of coffee away across continents away from it’s endemic region (e.g. South America, Asia). Just like the barrels of coffee loaded in the cargo bays of ships like Marie Séraphique, enslaved African people were contained, transported and forced to work on coffee plantations in America.
What an uncomfortable fact of coffee history.
But it is exactly that – just a part, a snippet and slither of what is a complicated past of coffee. This is only one part of time and space and there are certainly more historical and daresay, present day, practices of social, economic and environmental exploitation in this trade. Reading into coffees history has been eye opening and upsetting but as someone who adores the product, I have to understand it’s deeper darker flaws. I’d encourage you, to do the same and I shall continue on my own journey of education.
Until our next chat,
Coffee Log 
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