Blacksmith’s Curiosity Creates Cocoa Colony

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 59, 23 June 1948, Page 6

Blacksmith’s Curiosity Creates Cocoa Colony

A new commodity centre at Asmaukese, a Gold Coast village, has been built by a famous firm of chocolate and cocoa manufacturers and officially accepted by the Government of the colony. In 1879 a blacksmith named Tetta Quesi returned to the Gold Coast from the fertile island of Fernando Po. With him he brought as curios some strange and beautifully-col-oured pods, each as big as a man’s head, the like of which had never been seen in West Africa. They were the fruit of the cocoa tree. The blacksmith planted some of the seeds from the pods in his garden, and found that the fertile soil' and damp heat suited them admirably. From these seeds came the first tree of the Cocoa Colony, beautiful with great golden pods gleaming like lanterns and clusters of tiny pink and yellow blossoms. The cocoa trees, numbering well over 30,000,000 before the war, produce about 300,000 tons of cocoa a year, an amazing outcome of what, in the first place, was a blacksmith’s curiosity.