COFFEE AND COLONIALISM @museum.de

For a long time, coffee arrived in Europe exclusively from Yemen, because removing coffee plants or fruits from the plantations was forbidden on pain of death. Besides, only processed coffee beans were exported, so they were no longer capable of germination. Which meant that nobody else could grow their own coffee.

That was how the Arabs managed to defend their coffee monopoly for almost 300 years.

It took until the middle of the 18th century before Dutch traders were able to get their hands on coffee plants and ship them to the Dutch colonies in Indonesia to be planted there. Over time, all the other colonial powers also managed to obtain coffee plants. To grow and distribute the coffee, slaves were traded and forced to work on the plantations.

The legacy of European, and indeed German, colonialism is particularly evident in the term kiboko. In East Africa, dried green coffee is known as kiboko even now. But it was also the name of a whip made of hippopotamus leather that was used to lash the slaves on the coffee plantations.

In the German colonial encyclopaedia of 1921, whipping with the kiboko was recommended as a measure “for the cultural improvement of the natives” and even regulated.

These days, coffee is grown in some 75 countries, most of them close to the equator.