How one of the world’s richest companies rose to power - Shantel George

We now know that Coca-Cola was more than a catchy phrase invented by Pemberton. Moreover, its linguistic origin narrates the story of how African cultures shaped the modern world. Among the Temne of West Africa, the nut is known as kͻla, which was adopted by the Europeans in the fifteenth century as they traded in the region. The word for kola in several European languages (Portuguese: cola, English: kola, and French: kola) thereforereveals the legacy of West Africans, the first producers and traders of kola.

In Jamaica, the kola is referred to as bissy, which is also the name for the tea produced from the nut. Some accounts dismiss or ignore the West African provenance of the word bissy. William Freeman Daniell (1817–1865), a British army surgeon and botanist, believed that a European slave trader named Biche or Bissai brought kola from the Gold Coast (Ghana) to Jamaica around 1630–40 and that the nut eventually took the name of the slave trader. However, historian of kola Edmund Abaka identifies that the name originates in present-day Ghana, among Akan speakers, where it is known as bese.

In the adinkra writing system among the Akan people, a bunch of cola nuts is known as bese saka, a powerful symbol of affluence, power, abundance, and unity. Kola nuts, then, are a compelling reminder of the intellectual and literary cultures of African peoples, which are often seen as non-existent.

The kola nut is known as obi in Brazil and Yorubaland. From the 1840s, a long-distance trade was established between Lagos, Nigeria, and Bahia, Brazil. Enslaved Africans and their descendants used kola for divination, retaining the name from their Yoruba homelands.

On the island of Grenada, kola nuts are known as obi and were also a key item in divination in Orisa worship, a practice brought to the island by Yoruba peoples after the abolition of slavery in 1834. Studying kola in the Americas reveals the role of Africans and their descendants as distributors andconsumers of global commodities across and within the Atlantic world.

John Pemberton was not the only North American pharmacist to experiment with kola in the production of soft drinks. In 1893, the chemist Caleb B. Braham in North Carolina created Pepsi-Cola by combining sugar, vanilla, oils, spices, and the kola nut. It was marketed as a medicinal tonic for dyspepsia and peptic ulcers. Even before this, Scotland was producing kola beverages. In 1879, seven years before the invention of kola, “a trade notice reportedly informed enterprising American bottlers of the popularity of kola drinks in Scotland and encouraged them to introduce kola drinks in the US market. Since Pemberton went on to launch Coca-Cola a few years later, Scotland is even considered by some as the national origin of this class of beverage” (Leishman, 2020). Pharmacists in Scotland produced a variety of kola-infused goods from 1887.

Kola is no longer used as a key ingredient in Coca-Cola. Over time, Pemberton reduced the amount of kola extract as it was bitter in taste and expensive to import. He supplemented kola with synthetic caffeine and leaf fragments from tea warehouses. By the 1960s, Coca-Cola was said to contain around ‘a hundredth of one percent’ of kola, so little that it was undetectable by laboratory analysis. The reduction in kola by Coca-Cola and other soft drink firms undoubtedly affected kola producers in West Africa.

Researchers at the Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria are considering innovative ways to improve the production and utilization of the kola plant, such as suggesting Coca-Cola reconsider its decision to abandon the use of natural kola flavor. For more from Dr. Shantel George, read on here.