#1 Reading my coffee origins: Kenya
The spell is wearing thin. An ode to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, liberation, and anaerobic respiration.
Frozen knuckles and burnt palms are now things of the recent past as I’ve swapped the espresso bar for the office desk (boooo, sell out). Yet, my passion for coffee has remained. Every morning I’m pulled out of bed by the ritual of hand grinder and pour over. The crema’s hypnotic galaxy-like portrait floating atop hot water still wows me.
Discovering that coffee had more to offer than Nescafe Gold created a rabbit hole I’ve lived in for quite some time now. I needed to know everything. Altitudes, plant varietals, processing methods, sensory descriptors, brew methods, flavour pairing, the history of the industry.
The history of the industry. The history of the industry. The history of the industry.
“Then nobody noticed it; but looking back we can see that Waiyaki’s blood contained within it a seed, a grain, which gave birth to a movement whose main strength thereafter sprang from a bond with the soil.”
A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, P.37.
The world many of us have grown up in is one marked by perpetual capitalist crises.
We’re peering through the cracks in the political establishment to see the pain, the exploitation, and the violence that allowed for the construction and maintenance of their decaying fortress. As we check the barcodes of our dates and hummus, it’s becoming harder and harder to be anything but glaringly aware of the rottenness of the system. It’s hard to avoid feelings of guilt as you sit in cafes, scrolling through the atrocities inflicted daily upon the people of Palestine.
The dominoes of illusions fall fast when the so-called ‘bastions of democracy’ are exposed for all to see.
On an app.
That we were supposed to just dance for.
Their bloody fingerprints appear, all over the place, illuminated by the light of those fighting against their tyranny.
This isn’t their first offensive. The bags of coffee on the shelves, flown from Ethiopia, Kenya, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Yemen (it goes on) are looking redder and redder as capitalism’s spell wears off.
It’s time to shake off the dizziness. Join local protests and campus encampments. Speak up. Organise in your workplace (check out the ‘Serve Solidarity’ campaign by Unite the Union’s Glasgow Hospitality branch for more on this)1.
I’ve also set myself an accompanying task, to learn from those in the fields, mountains, and farms across the coffee belt. To listen to those whose lives and homelands were ransacked and drained by imperialist leeches. To absorb their history, their lives and their culture.
So, my endeavour: for every new coffee I drink, I want to read at least one book from its origin country, fiction or non-fiction.
But where to start?
Have you ever been to one of those second-hand bookshops where the books are stacked floor to ceiling, rows deep? In what other situation is the tangy smell of mould and ageing so comforting? Yet, what a devastating privilege today, for something to stay in place for so long.
Everyone has a different tactic for tackling the stacks of bookish tumult. You can spend an age digging deep, brushing every hidden spine. You can spend a mere moment marching through, letting the cover art and authors’ names find you.
In this instance, I didn’t have to pick a side. Six steps through the threshold of an Oxfam bookstore and there it was. A grayscale cover, Penguin Modern Classics, an author I’d never heard of before. A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. The blurb, “The mighty British government has been toppled… As we learn of tangled histories, a masterly story of myth, rebellion, love, friendship and betrayal unfolds, confirming Ngũgĩ’s status as a giant of African writing.”
Interesting, I don’t think I’ve read much African literature before. ‘No, put it down, you’ve bought too many books this month already’. Back it slid onto the shelf. I headed to the cafe on the same street to sit down and try to read some of the book I’d been lugging around with me all day. Not even two pages in, and something was still pulling at me. Out came the phone.
Who is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o? What did Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o write about? Kenyan independence struggle. Kenyan coffee growers’ work conditions.
We all know how strong that pull is between a reader and a book that randomly catches their eye during a book-buying ban. So, off I trotted, back to the bookstore. £2.50.
£1 less than the coffee I just bought. The coffee whose seeds were planted years ago, diligently maintained on a mountainside, harvested, washed, fermented, dried, shipped, roasted, packed, prepared, brought right to my table. £3.50. For all that?
A Grain of Wheat, a literary masterpiece.
The novel2 is set in the days leading up to Kenyan independence in 1963, with flashbacks of events from previous decades. It follows a group of people from a village in Thabai, tracing their relationships to each other and the Movement. This creates a delicately spun web, showcasing the dialectic between the micro and the macro, the individual and the community, history and fiction. It can hard to keep track of everyone and every entanglement initially, but let it wash over you, you’ll reap the rewards.
In this review, I want to cover two aspects that I found both the most interesting and educational. These are 1) the complexities of the anti-colonial movements and 2) the role of women in such.
On Anti-Colonialism
This novel, first and foremost, is a scathing critique of the exploitation of people and the land by capitalist and colonialist powers, and, crucially, a map for liberation. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o delves into complications, contradictions and weaknesses within the Movement, using characters to personify various political threads.
General R and Kihika are both Mau Mau freedom fighters, once comrades. However, it becomes increasingly clear that although General R is devoted in the struggle to overthrow British rule, he still ultimately wishes to replicate the existing oppressive hierarchical structures within the community. On the other hand, Kihika reflects the idea that the struggle for national independence must go hand in hand with the fight to overthrow capitalist private ownership. That there is an evil lying in the very fact some sweat and suffer just to produce wealth for a small group of people.
“Kenya belongs to black people… Shouldn’t everybody have a share in the common shamba, our Kenya? This soil belongs to Kenyan people. Nobody has the right to sell or buy it. It is our mother and we her children are all equal before her. Take your whiteman, anywhere, in the settled area. He owns hundreds and hundreds of acres of land. What about the blackmen who squat there, who sweat dry on the farms to grow coffee, tea, sisal, wheat, and yet get only ten shillings a month?”
Kihika, P.96.
The above quote draws out a number of the novel’s key themes:
To note, firstly, the fact that coffee is explicitly mentioned here and in that context is what inspired me to begin this series. Its unashamed and forthright naming of colonialism and capitalism as the root cause of the pain of coffee farmers felt like the most appropriate place to start.
The firm bond between oppression and class society. When talking about freeing land from the claws of imperialist countries, we must also ask the question of why people can own land, nature, in the first place.
The idea of nature being a family member alludes to the concept of the metabolic rift. The idea that capitalism has severed the natural symbiotic relationship we once had with the world around us.
The personification of nature specifically as a mother points to the next aspect of this article. The hidden leading role of women.
On Women
In much of written history we see the role of women negated to cheerleaders and bystanders. A Grain of Wheat rejects this narrative3.
Behind every male character paralysed by doubt is a woman with long-held convictions trying to push him to keep strong. Okay, you might ask, isn’t this just a different form of cheerleading? Aren't the men, in this case, still portrayed as the final agents of transformation? And that would be a fair criticism. However, I think this changes when we are given Wambui’s story. It’s worthwhile sharing this section in length, because whilst she is referring to the case of Kenya, her words can also be applied to the significant role of women in strike waves the world over. Groundwork done by women is frequently ignored to discuss the heroism of the men who followed them.
“She believed in the power of women to influence events, especially where men had failed to act, or seemed indecisive. Many people in old Thabai remembered her now-famous drama at the workers’ strike in 1950. The strike was meant to paralyse the country and make it more difficult for the whiteman to govern. A few men who worked at a big shoe factory near Thabai and in the settled area, grumbled and even said, so the rumours went, that they would not come out on strike. The Party convened a general meeting at Rung’ei. At the height of the proceedings, Wambui suddenly broke through the crowd and led a group of women to the platform. She grabbed the microphone from the speakers. People were interested… Women, she said, had brought their Mithuru and Miengu to the platform. Let therefore such men, she jeered, come forward, wear the women’s skirts and aprons and give up their trousers to the women. Men sat rigidly in their seats and tried to laugh with the crowd to hide their discomfort. The next day all men stayed away from work.”
- P.175.
On to the Coffee
I would guess everyone who drinks coffee regularly has tried Kenyan coffee. For years, Kenya has been one of many major sources of gross multinational domination in the coffee scene, with farmers being paid poverty wages (if at all) to allow for mega CEO salaries and sexier shareholder dividends. This is not just an abstract philosophical discussion about wealth and private property: this system has stolen the lives of thousands of Kenyans.
Buying from speciality roasters does not undermine all of the problems connected to the coffee trade, but it does allow us a greater degree of traceability. Most speciality roasters work directly with farms in the origin countries, often workers’ and farmers’ co-ops, to source their coffee. This ensures the money paid for the beans goes into the hands of farmers. Of course, each farm will divide this intake differently, some more fairly than others.
Therefore, the coffee I opted to try alongside this book was purchased from Sumo Coffee Speciality Roaster,s based in Ireland4. Specifically, their offering from the Sakami Coffee farm, a women-run farm located in the Trans-Nzoia County.
This batch was grown at an altitude of 1800 masl, which is pretty high up! The height at which coffee is grown massively impacts its flavour. Due to the relative lack of oxygen, these plants rely more heavily on anaerobic respiration, creating more natural sugars in the cherries. This leads to a fun, often wine-like, fruity, and floral cup of coffee. I tend to crave coffee that tastes like being hit in the face with a bouquet flowers.
This certainly shines through in this cup, with the notes of blackberry and rose jumping out at me most strongly. I have to say though, it took me nearly half a bag to find the ‘sweet spot’ with my AeroPress! It was a delicate process, but worth the wait.
What Now?
The month I spent with Kenya’s literary and agricultural gold was eye-opening. It pays to take your time, to think about what we are consuming more deeply, more gently. There have been humans, people with lives as complex as your own, who have passed your coffee through their hands. Often suffering greatly in the process, or walking in the footsteps of those who have.
This book was tasty, but it was only an appetiser. So here are some more reads I want to get to:
Coffee Milk Blood by Vava Angwenyi. An exploration of the lives of Kenyan women in the coffee industry.
More books by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. I’ve since got my hands on his Decolonising the Mind, about the role of native languages in anti-colonial struggles.
Crimes of Capitalism in Kenya edited by Shiraz Durrani, Kimani Waweru. It analyses how and why Kenya’s past presidents have tried to stamp out popular movements for socialism.
The Permanent Revolution by Leon Trotsky. Not Kenyan author, but provides further analysis on that same question of the connection between anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements.
More recommendations are very welcome!
Until next time x
Find links to information packs on Instagram at @/UniteHospitality and @/UniteHospitalityGla.
The specific version I read, that the page numbers in quotes align with, is the Penguin Modern Classics 2002 edition.
I have not read it yet, but this article looks like an interesting read on this topic: Boehmer, E. (2005). ‘The master’s dance to the master’s voice’: revolutionary nationalism and women’s representation in Ngugi wa Thiong’o. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt155j4ws.6
You can check out their current offerings here: https://www.sumocoffeeroasters.com/