Edmund Abaka and the Diffusion of Kola: Modeling African Plant Diasporas and the Global Circulation of Knowledge

• In Event: Classic STS Papers, Re-incorporated, Reimagined, Re-enacted - II

Abstract

In 1998, Edmund Abaka published a seminal paper on kola nuts in West Africa for the inaugural issue of Ghana Studies that grew into his classic and important monograph, "Kola is God's Gift": Agricultural Production, Export Initiatives and the Kola Industry in Asante and the Gold Coast, c. 1820-1950. Abaka has been one of the main authors researching the rise and fall of kola, once a critical ingredient in Coca-Cola. Abaka’s research has been significant to my own thinking about the "healing plant diasporas" in African societies, particularly his analysis of the diffusion of plants and knowledge (Osseo-Asare, Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa, 2014). In this paper, I will reflect on the impact of Abaka, as well as Sidney Mintz, Judith Carney, and others on our understanding of how knowledge and healing plants circulate within global regimes of exchange. He developed innovative models to graph how knowledge of kola would have diffused overtime across West Africa and beyond. In the absence of written documentation for non-literate communities, he highlighted linguistic evidence, early port records, and historical kola plantings used to demarcate land boundaries, emphasizing the “counterdistiction” with respect to how the plant might be used in new sites.

Author

• Abena Osseo-Asare