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Sara Byala, "Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African" (Oxford UP, 2023)
01:07:39
An interview with Sara Byala
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A
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B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased to have with me today Dr. Sara Baila, to tell us all about her book that's just come out from Oxford University Press in 2023, titled How Coca Cola Became African, which is a really interesting book in some ways. It is a very straightforward history of Coca Cola's engagement with the African continent. But I think that undersells it because the book talks about social aspects, commercial and business pieces of this, the environmental impact, and all sorts of other things that come together to tell us all about this particular company and its interactions in various parts in various places in Africa, as well as sort of more broadly continentally. So, Sara, thank you so much for being with us on the podcast.
- [02:00]
C
Thanks so much for inviting me, Miranda, and for engaging with my work.
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B
Well, I'd like us to engage with your work further, but before we begin our dive into the book, could you please introduce yourself a little bit to our audience and explain why you decided to write this?
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C
Certainly. So, I am a senior lecturer in critical writing and an Africanist historian at the University of Pennsylvania, where I also am the Associate Director of our Penn Global Documentary Institute. I was born in South Africa, and as a Child, we would travel back to the continent. And I've long been intrigued with not just the ubiquity of Coca Cola and its products, but also items made from Coke bottles and from Coke cans and things that I now know are called upcycled items. So for years I would collect them and just sort of have them there. And you know, even when I went to graduate school to get a PhD in history, I kind of at the back of my head was joking, you know, I should, I should write a book on this. And then in 2003, I was a grad student, I was living in South Africa, and I was traveling around West Africa with some other graduate students. We were trying to get to Timbuktu in Mali, and we're trying to do it overland. And we were just encountering just so many problems. We ended up spending like hours on the side of the road in the Sahara Desert and eventually being picked up by some sort of well wishers who said it wasn't safe for us to stay where we were, took us to a homestead and we, you know, in my, in my stupid youth now, I look back on this and sense a bit of a different story now that I'm a parent, looking back. But, but in my youth, you know, we, we slept out in the Sahara and it was all very peaceful and lovely with these gracious hosts, got up the next morning, hitchhiked, eventually made it to a ferry, finally, you know, had, didn't have our luggage, didn't, you know, dirty and grimy get on this ferry and somebody offers us an ice cold Coca Cola. And I remember in that moment having this kind of aha, which is not unique to me. Travelers across the continent have been having it for decades. Melinda Gates famously spoke about this in her TED Talk, which is, how is this Coke here? And I remember thinking that, how is it bottled? How is it cold? Where did this come from? And really, as an African historian, Africanist historian, like, what does this mean? That you can sort of not go anywhere on the continent or beyond the reach of this product again. I came back, I finished my dissertation, I wrote a book, went on with my life. And then in 2014, it was the anniversary of the end of apartheid in South Africa. And my husband sent me a BBC article about how marketers in Johannesburg decided to honor the Rainbow Nation, that's the kind of nickname for South Africa, by generating rainbows above a Coca Cola wrapped building. So these are Coca Cola marketers celebrating the Rainbow nation at the 20th anniversary of apartheid by making a rainbow out of Recycled water. And he sends me this article. And all of a sudden I think now is the time to write this book. And I immediately tried to read everything I could about Coca Cola and what I realized in the footnotes and sort of there was almost nothing written about Africa, but what was there sort of pointed my way to a great story. And since I'm sure you want to get a word in edgewise, I'll just say one more thing, which is a few weeks later I was getting together with my undergraduate advisor and she said, well, you know what? I happen to know someone at Coca Cola, used to be a TA of mine who works there. And so I was put in touch with the company. And Coca Cola is famously committed to its history. It runs a state of the art business archive, but it is a closed archive. And yet I sort of worked through this contact, I connected with them. And I was not the first or I'm sure the last academic to get in, but it was rare access that I was given. So I ended up spending a tremendous amount of time in the Coca Cola archives and later doing fieldwork in eight countries on the continent for this book.
- [06:18]
B
Wow. So the archival access, the idea, the personal experience really all comes together here. So kind of starting with that revelation you had that you of course mentioned others have had as well. Wait, how is this everywhere? Let's start off with some kind of basic foundations, I suppose, to lay the groundwork for what we're talking about. Just how extensive are Coca Cola's operations in Africa?
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C
Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, that's the great first question. Right. So I knew going into this roughly that, you know, Coke operates in every country on the African continent. I wasn't sure at the outset how old or how long that history was, and it turns out it's very long. But how extensive it is by most estimates that the company has put together over the years and outside observers. Koch is named as if not the single largest private employer then one of on the continent. So depending on when we're looking at, you're talking about 60, 70,000 employees. But where this gets even more interesting is the again, both company studies and outside observers, multiple different business schools and things like that have studied what they call the multiplier effect, which means that for every official job in the Coca Cola system, from everything from maybe farming to the actual plants to the selling of the product, there can be upwards of 10 other jobs and upwards of 10 other people supported. When you start doing the math out, the footprint is enormous. I mean, it's just. Yeah, it's enormous. I mean, you know, Africa is a huge continent of a billion people. So, you know, even if we're talking about a footprint of 700,000 people being impacted by this, it's still a lot. And there's nothing else that I've come across that really rivals this?
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B
No, that's incredibly important to be aware of as we then go into the rest of the book. And I'd love to kind of do almost what you sort of mentioned just now and kind of go all the way back. Where does this come from? Where does this begin? Because it does start earlier. I'm kind of glad to hear you say that it started earlier than you thought, because it definitely surprised me reading this part of the book. Can you take us through these origins that go back even to the name and the content of Coca Cola?
- [08:49]
C
Sure, sure. So Coca Cola has a very kind of romantic lore about its origins. And if anyone ever goes to Atlant, Georgia, where Coke comes from, you can go to the Koch Museum and walk your way through. So Coke was invented in 1886, and it was invented by a kind of chemist, pharmaceutical, kind of in line with the nostrums of the day, you know, this kind of era of these drinks that were playing around with soda in various ways. And the man by the name of John Stith Pemberton, who invented Coca Cola was himself riffing on an earlier drink, which was an Italian creation that combined cocaine and red wine. And so now we're kind of taking ourselves back into a time in history where in that case, cocaine was a relatively new discovery and was thought to have all sorts of benefits. Pemberton was kind of playing off this idea, but decided to that for cost purposes, he would rather. And also in line with the temperance movement in the US he'd rather use water than wine. That was the first thing. And the other factor which maybe was surprising to you was that in the 19th century, word had gotten out in the global north of the kola nut. So again, if anyone of your listeners has traveled through West Africa or has read, for example, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, they would have heard of the kola nut, which is not a nut, but it's a kind of fruit that people chew for all sorts of reasons. It's thought to have a whole bunch of benefits, but essentially it's highly caffeinated. And Pemberton would have known this. And in the book I trace sort of how that knowledge got dispersed. Part of it was from enslaved people, part of it was from slavers, colonizers, military units. But so when Pemberton was sort of like making this brew in a copper cauldron and riffing on Vin Mariani, that Italian drink, and deciding to add water, he had this idea that cola from the kola nut would be a better source of caffeine in terms of the cocaine. It was decocanized leaves. This was not. I know there's a lot of idea, like, was there ever really cocaine in Coca Cola? But. But to your question of where the name comes from, then Coca comes from the cocaine leaves, and cola spelled with a C comes from the kola nut. And there's historians working on the history of the kola nut who really look to this moment now and say, what a lost opportunity for the continent. Because it wasn't long before Pemberton and then those who followed him to realize that the kola nut was not a very practical source of caffeine in terms of the. The kind of mechanisms in place to get it out of West Africa at the time. But all the way into the middle of the 20th century, the company kept traces of both products in its drinks so as not just to have false advertising, like, from a legal standpoint. Yeah, so that's where the name Coca Cola comes from. So 1886, it was invented, and it really wasn't long before it sort of made its way to the continent.
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B
So that's obviously where we have to go next. But in that kind of lovely concluding sentence, you give the implication at least that kind of it wasn't long until it comes to the continent. Like, the next sentence of how it does is going to be sort of straightforward. Right. And yet it's not. Why isn't it simple to determine when Coca Cola came to the African continent?
- [12:45]
C
Yeah, I mean, it's such a great question. And I think, you know, I think part of it is that. And I'm going to give you the history, the historical answer in a second. But I think part of that is what I found in 2014, which is while there are many, many books written about Coca Cola, for the most part, the story of Coca Africa has slipped through and slipped by. And that is astounding. Not just because of what I told you about the ubiquity, but also because throughout the history of the. The company, multiple high players, like people who go on to be the CEO of the company, cut their teeth on the continent. So there's this surprising sort of blind spot. Okay, but back to your question. So there is Coke lore again that Says the drink was first bottled in South Africa in about 1928 and it was bottled in plants that were previously part of like bottled water operations. So the plants that already existed. Somewhere in the lore there's often this kind of sentence where they say, well, some syrup may have arrived here earlier, you know, and that's all we know. When I was doing my research and looking through old advertisement across the continent, I found surprising evidence that suggests that Coca Cola, those kind of hidden gallons of, of concentrate really were arrived in Cape Town at something more like 1910. So we're talking very shortly after the creation of the product. By the 1920s. You're seeing ads for soda fountains, American style soda fountains and that's what they're called in most major cities on the continent. So from Nigeria to Kenya to Sierra Leone to what is now the DMC, Congo, etc. So the, what I gather from this is several things. One is that there's this amazing spread of knowledge about soda, you know, and in part of that is tied into this idea that I hinted to in the origin, which is that there were medical benefits to drinking soda. And if you look at early advertisements for Coca Cola in the United States, it's often, you know, put out to be, you know, healthy and healthful. But, but the, the second point, which is one that kind of jars with the Coke narrative is that really nowhere in the world did this drink just arrive and was immediately welcomed and taken on. I mean, it is, I know Coke people will tell you, you know, this kind of wonderful tasting drink that has this, they can go into the science of like, why your taste buds like it and things like that. But for the most part, consumers had to be grown for this. So just the fact that Coke arrived in Cape Town and was in these, you know, in this, in this cafe was not enough for it to succeed. And that would be end up being a kind of false start for the drink on the continent. So in the 1920s it was for the first time bottled officially on the African continent in South Africa.
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B
This is something I always find fascinating about history is the false starts, the things that don't quite work because they do take us into this realm of it's not just about sort of wanting to do something. In this case, there's a whole kind of logistics side that needs to be sorted out really to make it so prominent. And I was very pleased then to read in the book that you explained this because it is such a key part of it. So can you take us through kind of from that Point of it properly being established, how then did Coca Cola expand its operations? What's the sort of production franchise model that's being used here?
- [16:38]
C
Sure, yeah. So you're exactly right. You know, nothing is ever preordained. Lots of things have to happen. And in this case, in the twenties, in 1928, Coca Cola was bottled in, in and around, you know, Johannesburg and again in the. In the early years. So that is before the advent of the apartheid state. But South Africa is a country at that point has declared itself. It's not. It doesn't immediately take off. And there's a whole bunch of reasons for this, one of which is that there's a global price for the concentrate. So maybe I should just back up and tell you that from the earliest days of Coca Cola in the US and everywhere, it's never been exported as a finished product. It's exported as a concentrate, and that's that. Coke is very famously secretive about its secret formula, this concentrate, and then that concentrate is sent around the world. Today, it's manufactured the actual concentrate in about seven locations, two of which are on the African continent. But it's distributed and mixed with local forms of sugar, of water, of carbonation, bottled in local forms of glass or cans. Because there was a set price, the earliest bottlers in South Africa really struggled to turn a profit. And there was much kind of back and forth on how they could launch this. Just getting people to drink a dark brown kind of fizzy liquid was itself a challenge in the days when most sodas were bright and colorful. So when I talked to the early guys, and at this time, it really was men, all men behind it, they explained that what they did to launch this drink was to create a beeline of beverages that they were able to produce at a cheaper price and use that money to kind of support the business. Now, if any of your listeners are in South Africa or in Kenya, they would recognize that some of those drinks still exist, and those would be under the Sparletta name. So green cream soda, which is my personal favorite, it's kind of a neon green and stony ginger beer, which is very, very popular. But those were part of this group called Sparletta. They ended up becoming very popular, so much so that the global Coca Cola powers bought out the copyright or bought out, sorry, the rights to them in the 80s. And they're produced as co products elsewhere, even beyond South Africa to this day. So that's sort of the earliest story, is this B range that supports it. But the flip side, because that's the bottom of the continent is that very quickly thereafter, on the eve of World War II, we see Coke arrive in Morocco and Egypt alongside military bases. And again, this is typical in the story of Coca Cola. Globally, it is World War II that propels the company around the globe. And largely that is done deliberately alongside military outposts. The company goes so far as to make the claim that soldiers fighting for America deserve a taste of home. And that taste of home is Coke. And so they get around sugar rationing this way they get around all sorts of things. So from the African point of view, you see this kind of start at the bottom of the continent, and then what happens in both Morocco and Egypt is what begins as these like military outposts are converted to civilian operations and start the spread across North Africa at the conclusion of the war. So I don't know if you want me to keep going about the rest of the continent.
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B
Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit before we move on to the next, next piece of the puzzle.
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C
Yeah, and I guess maybe it's a moment to just say that like, you know, I am aware that this is an enormous continent and an enormous scope of history, and I tackled that by design. But the downside there is, you know, certain differences and regional differences and histories are, of course, you know, I have to kind of brush over or synthesize in ways. But hopefully your reader, your listeners will forgive me for that and go read the book to see the details. Okay, so between North Africa and South Africa, there's a lot of space. And what happens is, just as everywhere else in the world, franchises are awarded often to sort of either fledgling families that become quite powerful over time, or entities that are already somehow embedded in power structures who then take over, get control for a certain, often a country or part of a country. For example, the Leventus family, a Greek family and a Greek operation, ends up running, as it does to this day, Koch operations in Nigeria and for a large amount of time in Ghana as well. You start to see operations like that set up across the continent. The vast majority are local bottlers, although over time there come to be some company owned bottlers as well for different reasons. So if you look at the subtitle of my book, it's How Coca Cola Became African. And that is the argument I make over and over again, which is that this is not the story of a Western or global North Company coming in and just like steamrolling a continent and fo product on them, but rather this kind of series of adaptations where the company is bent to the will of locals in all sorts of ways. And the very first way is through these local bottling plants. To this day, local bottlers are deeply enmeshed in their communities. Sometimes communities see the product and name it for the bottler, not even as a kind of global product. I think generally there's a sense that this is this American multinational, but that's not really how it's received either historically or again today. So to give you some specifics, you'll see over and over again, I found this in the archives and then later in fieldwork, where people would say things like, you know, we don't like America, but we love Coke, or, oh, wow, you Americans have Coke too. So do we in Egypt, or so do we, and, you know, wherever else. So there's this real interesting disconnect. It's not even a disconnect. It's in my mind, it's a sense that in many places, Coca Cola as an entity, as a product, is considered to be local. And maybe just because I haven't said this this far, is, you know, my book is bright red, and I use Coke red as the kind of main product. But when I talk about Coke, I'm talking about the entirety of its operations, which includes, very importantly, includes Fanta and bottled water. And say importantly, includes Fanta, because since you asked me how it spread, one of the most interesting interviews I did was with a man named Neville Isdell, who was born in Ireland, moved to Zambia when he was nine years old, grew up there, went to the University of Cape Town, graduated, didn't have a job, so he went to work for his girlfriend's father, who was a Coke bottler in Zambia. And he started out just driving, you know, driving shop to shop, trying to get people to buy Coke. And what he said to me was, you know, it's really hard to get people to drink warm Coke, but people are more willing to drink warm Fanta. And so it was really Fanta and to a certain extent, Sprite that pushed the spread of the product in the 50s and 60s across the continent. And to this day, if you go to many countries, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, you'll find that those Fanta and those fruitier drinks are perhaps more popular than regular Coke. And the addendum to Neville Isdel is that he went on to become CEO of the Coca Cola Company.
- [25:17]
B
No, very important to add that in. And this idea of kind of naming it, calling it after the bottler, those institutions being so embedded such that it then becomes, well, this is our drink. Oh, it's available in other places. You mentioned that you kind of come back to that point over and over. And I'd love to ask you about kind of the other places it comes up, because to be honest, it would be a big thing even if it was just in this sense, even if it was just about the manufacture and the logistics. But you show in the book that it's not just that level of Coca Cola's business that's so embedded. There's also the workforce aspect, there's the marketing aspect of this. So can we add those into our understanding of how Coca Cola in all of its forms, becomes so integrated into daily life across the continent?
- [26:10]
C
Absolutely. And some of this, I think, is in some sense the genius of the company, if I'm going to put it that way, which is this understanding of a need to be embedded and a desire to be embedded. So some of it is the company being deliberate, but. But I think maybe even more of it is people responding and the genius of ordinary people kind of forcing this upon the company. And so I'll just sort of put that there. But okay, so, right. There's a lot of jobs that come from Coca Cola. That's one thing. When we talk about marketing. Early days of Coca Cola, you'd have one kind of ad, and that ad would get sent from the New York ad offices all around the world, and you'd see the exact same ad then show up in maybe like Hawaii and Singapore and Cairo and Atlanta. And it'd be kind of weird because it'd be the same model in all those locations. But around, as we move into the 50s and on, you start to see pattern advertisements sent. And so marketing and ads become localized. And that means having local models, local languages. So right away you see this kind of localization in terms of workforce. One thing we also see as we move into the era, specifically of decolonization, you start to see a much more deliberate move on the part of bottlers and also Koch executives to try to replicate the demographics of where they are and pay real attention to how many black Africans are being employed and promoted within the company and who start to really do achieve positions of power within there. But Koch's localization happens in all sorts of other ways as well. So one of the stories I tell in the book is around sport. And again, this was a wonderful kind of interview and kind of fascinating find on my part, which is I interviewed a man by the name of Sam Mfuzana in Harare in Zimbabwe, and he had been a. He graduated from his high school, he was a great soccer player. And so the local bottler enticed him to come work for them because they wanted him to play on their bottling soccer team. And he was a really bright guy. He's a really bright guy and rose through the ranks of the company until one day he was sitting at a meeting where people said, hey, how could we, what else could we do to market or spread our product? And he said, what about a youth league? And fast forward to what started out as a Zimbabwean only soccer youth league for boys and is now the single largest U18 soccer league in the world called Copacoka. A million, actually both men and women participate now in this soccer tournament that takes place. And I got to meet some of the a coach and some players in Eswatini or what used to be called Swaziland and elsewhere. And this is just this remarkable infrastructure and program. And in that case, it's very much a branded Coke Red. It's sort of very Coca Cola. But everyone I would talk to around it, yeah, it was branded Coke. But here was this way to play this game, to travel, to get, you know, boots and balls and things like that. You see a similar story around music, you see a similar story around sustainability, which we can talk about later. But in the, in the, in the early days, really those early decades of spreading the product, it's, yeah, it's marketing, it's ads, it's sport, it's music. And then it's a whole bunch of other things which I guess I just won't keep talking, but I'll gesture to which are things like bicycles and sewing machines and other markers of middle class and later upper middle class aspiration that Coca Cola bottlers are very savvy about integrating into their work. Or we could flip it around and say African consumers are very savvy about pursuing because they want those items. So good, so good, so good.
- [30:50]
B
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- [31:03]
C
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B
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D
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- [31:42]
B
No, absolutely. This, I think, would be my point for mentioning how much more detail is in the book itself just worth highlighting that. I think that that piece for me was perhaps the most fascinating just to read all the different examples of how it was integrated. So thank you for gesturing to them and I'm just reminding listeners that they are there. We've been talking sort of so far, kind of of sort of Coca Cola outwards. Right, so what's happening with the company? How does that spread? How do local communities respond? I'd like to bring in the kind of traditional high politics side of things, if you don't mind. Because if we're talking about these, you know, the 1950s and 1960s and we'll get to the later things, I think in a bit. But of course there's some pretty big high politics stuff happening in Africa at this time. We've got ways of decolonisation now, obviously Zimbabwe is happening at a different time than Ghana, for example, but this is very much something that no one can really avoid, especially not big foreign companies. So how did Coca Cola respond to decolonisation in various places in Africa?
- [32:58]
C
That's a great question. So. Right. No one can avoid it. I, in the book I chart what are in fact two different paths that Coca Cola rides the wave to a decolonized continent. And they are somewhat contradictory. I should start by saying that the Coca Cola company's stated position when it comes to politics is one of not so much even neutrality, but just we're going to work with whomever, you know, if we're not Republican, we're not Democrat, we're just going to kind of work wherever we can and with whomever, and we can critique that, I think rightly so, or we can just, you know, state it as fact. But when it came to decolonization, the company made a fairly clear attempt across the continent to put their weight behind emergent majority rule, decolonized countries. So for example, you mentioned Ghana, which is the first country to win its independence. Coca Cola was there, put out a big magazine celebrating, it was part of Nkrumah's parade and inauguration and things like that. And that's really typical. So we end up seeing that across the continent as countries win their independence, Coke is part of it in one way or another. So think parades and floats and beauty pageants and spreads that celebrate this turn to independence. So that's a kind of, yeah, let's get behind the powers that be. But there is a separate move going on that jars with this and complicates it. So before we start to think how high minded the company really is, that as we see countries and people really fighting for their freedom in most of the continents, I'm going to leave out the anomalies like South Africa. Right now you see a real change in Coca Cola advertisements. And I argue this and Coca Cola is often lauded as being the most amazing marketer in the world. The advertisements are incredibly important. And so what you see is this real shift to celebrating not the peoples of Africa, but the animals, the natural. And I, you know, I opine, you know, or I put the position out there that this is a direct response to the anxieties that come up around decolonization, in particular in white settler, what were previously white settler colonies, so places like Kenya and later South Africa and Zimbabwe. And when we think about Africa as a place that has been branded the land of animals and safaris and things like that, I located in time around this moment and show the ways in which that the Coca Cola company actually had a hand in this branding in and of itself. There's a third thread as well, and that is that in South Africa, which was not, you know, just as the continent is, is becoming for the most part free, you know, South Africa is kind of doubling down. Coca Cola does align with traditional forms of government which were largely in cahoot with the apartheid state. So it's complicated what the company is doing. Again, most of it can be understand in this kind of, you know, very kind pragmatic sense of like we'll do business with whomever wherever. There's a kind of ambiguity to it. You know, it's hard to say. There are times when the company is definitely on the right side or the wrong side of history, but in the end it's sort of got an ambiguity to it. And that's why the moments where the company really gets involved in politics and it's few and far between, but they do stand out because they are unique.
- [37:18]
B
I'd love to pick up on at least what to me was one of those moments. And you've sort of hinted at it a little bit in that answer. Kind of the odd case of South Africa because of course as we're having decolonization, we're also having apartheid and responses to apartheid, right? Massive divestment calls that are global and especially prevalent in the global North. How did Coca Cola kind of manage the. Well, we want to work with everyone. We started off in South Africa, but also divestment is a real thing that's having a lot of impact.
- [37:53]
C
Right? So this is, I think, one of the most interesting chapters in the history of Coca Cola in Africa, but also, in a way, in the history of the company because it is extremely rare for the company to ever get involved in politics. And in the case of apartheid South Africa, it does. Okay. And this is in fact the kind of thing that egged me on to write this book because I could see it hinted at in the footnotes of other people's writing, but nobody had tackled it straight on. And that is this idea that Coca Cola had played a role in the end of apartheid that hadn't really been written about or explored before. So how did that come about and what did that mean? Part of it has to do with the fact that by the time you have called for disinvestment and divestment in apartheid South Africa, which had been around since 1948, the company, as you said, started there on the continent. It was a highly successful and lucrative enterprise for all the same reasons that made other enterprises lucrative under apartheid in terms of labor laws and things like that, or lack thereof. By the time those calls were happening in the United States, there were concurrent. They were coming on the heels of Africa. American activism in the United States to rectify racial imbalances in the United States in plants there were not African American owners, for example, of many bottling plants in the late 70s and early 80s. So people like Jesse Jackson, who was a kind of activist for that cause, threatened to boycott Coca Cola in America. So this is the kind of backstory of what happens. And into that climate, the Coca Cola company hired a man by the name of Carl Ware, who over the course of his life would end up being the highest ranking African American employee executive, sorry, not just employee executive within the company. And initially Mr. Ware was brought in to kind of sort out the threats to the business in the United States from a racial standpoint. And he was able to hold off that boycott through all sorts of, you know, concessions and, and promises and pledges of funding and things like that. So, you know, then you started as you pointed to, you know, this growing kind of desire across, like, colleges, college campuses and elsewhere for all multinational companies to. To get out of South Africa. And Mr. Ware was tapped into, tasked with going to South Africa and, you know, figuring out what the company should do. At the time, there were reports coming out of South Africa that the Coca Cola owned Minute Maid plant, for example, had, you know, quote unquote, American plantation style practices. So very concerning reports coming out within the company. So Mr. Ware went, he did a kind of tour of in fact, English speaking countries on the continent before getting to South Africa. For him, his parents had been sharecroppers. Arriving in 1983, South Africa was like going back in time. Even though a number of what we call petty apartheid restrictions were on their way out at that time. So things like separation by benches and water fountains and things like that, enough were still there. Never mind the, the large scale apartheid visible through space in terms of spatially and living conditions, et cetera. Mr. Ware felt like he was going back in time. And as he got there, he was deemed an honorary white, which is one of the many absurd policies of the apartheid state. And immediately he was moved to not just figure out, you know, what to do from a business standpoint, but as he told it, from a moral and ethical standpoint. So it's clear in my interviews of him and you can read his autobiography has come out that for him this was a kind of profound moment of getting to play a role in history. And to its credit, again, the company led him and followed and I think understood the position he came to take, which was that merely getting up and leaving South Africa, like just getting all the operations out of there would, would not help the people they were seeking to help. Okay, so there's, there's a little kind of business hubris to this, but, but this is the position that Ko came to, which is we're not just going to leave, rather we're going to find a way to leave, I'm sorry, to stay while depriving the apartheid government of our revenue. So through a kind of leaving that in the end helps the people we most want to help, which is the majority of South Africans. So how did they do this? They did this by all sorts of ways that I document. But One is that Mr. Ware comes and he works his way into meeting all sorts of anti apartheid stalwart courts, including Desmond Tutu. And initially Desmond Tutu wants nothing to do with Coca Cola. But eventually Mr. Ware is able to win him over, which is the story I tell, and to convince Tutu. At that point he becomes archbishop to head up a foundation that Coca Cola endows along with a whole bunch of other really high level anti apartheid guys. Guys mostly again men at this time. At the same time, Ware is living in London at the time and he meets regularly with Thabo Mbeki, who is deputy president later under Nelson Mandela and later the second president of free South Africa, and works on him from that point of view. He also secretly comes to fund meetings that take place between business and anti apartheid activists. Many of those, by the way, have been written about. They just have never included Coca Cola in them. So it's known now that towards the end of the 80s or throughout the 80s, businesses in South Africa started to meet with anti apartheid activists to start to consider what a future beyond apartheid would look like in these ways and others that I do document in of the book book, Coca Cola starts to really do a number of things at once. One is convince a certain segment of anc, African National Congress, the party of Nelson Mandela, a certain segment of that leadership that they are on their side and that what they have to offer is a system of economic liberation. So it's a system that has the potential to offer jobs and on ramps to economic participation to many people. That's one thing. The other thing they're doing is meeting with ANC in exile and then helping to fund these meetings. Then, on the eve of American sanctions, 1986, Coca Cola does technically move its operations out of South Africa. It follows the letter of the law of what's been implemented. But it does so in such a way that you never could. Here's a double negative. But you never could not buy a Coke product in the country. So what that means is when Pepsi got out of South Africa, there were no Pepsi products. When Coke got out, a new company was formed. All tax revenue from what had been the concentrate plant in the country was moved to Eswatini, but products still remained in South Africa. And then this created problems after the end of apartheid.
- [46:10]
B
Well, so we have to get into those now. You've told us half the story. So what happens after apartheid?
- [46:18]
C
Well, this to me was one of the. Again, one of the hooks. And one of the most interesting things to me is that right, sort of after Nelson Mandela comes out of jail in 1990 and shortly thereafter comes to the United States. And as he travels through to Atlanta, Georgia, all the major news outlets pick up on the story that he refuses to drink any Coke products. Have anything to do with Coca Cola personnel? Just this total snub of the company. And why was that? Well, there was this strong movement at the time led by Alberta Latuli's daughter. So Albert Latuli had been president of the African National Congress, the same political party. He was a Nobel Prize recipient and his daughter was living in exile in Georgia and running a campaign to boycott Coke with Under the headline of Coke Sweetens Apartheid, Tandi Abashi is her name. And so there was this sense that, yes, Coke products are still in South. They were still in apartheid South Africa. So Mandela comes, he wants nothing to do with Coke, and then you kind of flip forward a few, you know, a few years later. Notice that Mandela comes back right before being elected president in 93, and there he is on a Coca Cola jet, like what happened, what happened in those few years to compel that change. And again, that's a story I do tell. And part of it is that I've already gestured to is a. I think it helps us understand why and how the African National Congress, that had very strong communist principles changed gears upon coming, becoming empowered. And that's something historians are busy talking about today. How did this happen? Was this a matter of being captured or being corrupted? Or was it expediency? And I think that the story that the narrative that Coke sold to the apartheid incumbent government is also there's truth to it. And that is that what happens in that time that I was just talking about where Coke technically disinvests, it divests, it gets out of South Africa. But, but what happens ironically at that exact same time is that the bottlers go into all of these densely populated corners of the country, the places like mostly townships and open scores of spaza shops and little shops like that. And so many, many, many people get jobs during this time and they start to make money. And this, this is maybe the other component that I have not spoken about thus far, and that is that how Coke becomes local in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent is that people make money selling it. And they make money selling it enough so that they can then sell other things or they can do other things like wash cars and cut hair. And time and again, the story I found again across the continent was that this enabled a younger generation to go to school and later university, et cetera. So this, this model of on ramp to a kind of economic participation and different future is real. Of course it has downsides to it, which we could talk about in a second. But, but there's this, there's this change that is very visible through that anecdote of a Mandela, I told you. And it has to do with economic participation.
- [50:10]
B
That's something I'd love to sort of keep going with and move beyond just the early 90s and South Africa because it is, as you said, across the continent. So if we move into the 21st century, what then have been some of the key guiding principles for the company in Africa.
- [50:33]
C
Great question. So I didn't know any of this when I started doing my research. And when I say this, what I didn't realize is that in the 21st century, the key guiding principles beyond the continually grow the business from a financial point of view, have been sustainability. And that does mean a variety of things. To the CO company, it means sustainability. Normally they're talking about water, they're talking about energy, they're talking about waste, and often about women, youth as well. There's other sustainability projects, but those are kind of the big umbrellas of them. And early on in my fieldwork, so I ended up going and looking at a lot of this work, and I can tell you about some of it in a second. But early on I kept wondering, like, why is the company doing that? What, why, why, you know, work on these things that seem like they should fall under the purview of governments or, you know, NGOs primarily. And the answer is simple. And that is, to protect a license to operate, it is essential that this company, or any company does this kind of work. In some ways, I think the Koch story in Africa then really benefits from some of the mishaps and missteps that the company took elsewhere in the world that have been very well documented around things like using more than their fair share of water, you know, however you want to define that, or producing, you know, excessive amounts of waste for the planet to bear. So the sustainability work, all of it is conceived under a, a similar kind of model, which is the company calls the Golden Triangle. In that model, Coke brings itself as what it calls a convening partner. It has the weight and the power to bring other people to the table. Who are those other people? It tends to be governments and then NGOs. And often those NGOs are a combination of a large, large multinational, like a global ngo, and then a hyper local implementing partner ngo. And the expertise that Coke brings generally is the expertise that I talk about in my book. It's the expertise of like, how can you get a Coke everywhere on the African continent? So how you do that is you're an expert in moving stuff around on difficult terrain, using trucks, but then also bicycles, tricycles, mules, dhow ships, things like that. It's the expertise of moving. So when we talk about the spread of Coke, we're talking about the spread of electricity and we're talking about the spread of clean water technology. I spent a lot of time looking at Coke water projects. Those are predominantly not branded Coke, unlike the soccer Tournaments or Coke Studio, which is a music show. Water projects are very different. Why? Because they cut to the core of a human dignity. Access to clean water is a human right. But in many places on the continent, governments either cannot or will not or just are unable to, you know, provide adequate access to their, to populations for a variety of reasons. So when we look at Coke water work and actually all of their work generally, there's kind of two tiers. One is the stuff that happens in the plants itself and in the Coke business. So, you know, one of the most interesting I think, or yeah, I think interesting for me is the idea that the company will tell you time and again is that there's like literally thousands of ways to clean water, but that you have to use technology that's able to last and be sustainable on the ground in different circumstances. So in Coke plants, for example, excess runoff water is run through in many of them. I went to one in Ghana, it runs through a kind, what's called activated sludge, and then into fish ponds, and then the fish swim in the ponds. And so it's a very quick kind of metric for if the fish are swimming, the water is safe enough to be put back into the atmosphere. So there's, there's sort of the strain that happens in the plant and then there's the strain that happens elsewhere. And I know, you know, I could talk about this for way longer than you want to hear, but I'll just say the water operations, I went to a number of them and some of them are just extending municipal access to places that didn't have it before. So I met communities that had waited 25 years to have piped water near them. Some of it is cleaning water that is profoundly unclean and unsafe, just environmentally. So for example, in Naivasha, which is a flower growing region in the Rift Valley in Kenya, the water is hyper, hyper fluorinated and that creates all sorts of health problems and some of it is unclean. And then in a totally different way with dissolved solids and all sorts of other problems. So why is Koch doing this again? It's an embeddedness, it's a localness. It is helping people. It is of course helping secure the license to operate as well. I saw similar projects around women's empowerment, waste and recycling and energy. So I do document a lot of these in the book. But I could keep talking.
- [56:27]
B
Well, what I'd love to ask you about to kind of continue on this point is of course not just the balance between, well, a bunch of these things seem to help There is also the element that of self interest there, but there's also the fact that the company itself is a source of ecological stress, of biological stress. So can we add that piece into this evaluation?
- [56:53]
C
Absolutely. So, yeah. Okay. There are two separate things to say here. One is, when it comes to the self interest part, in 2016, I was invited to go to Rwanda to watch the launch of Koch's Eco center, which is something I document in the book. And those are these little, little modular shops essentially that sell. They sell Coke and they sell a whole bunch of other stuff. They're very much branded Coke. They also do that kind of golden triangle work I was talking about where they provide, along with partners, Internet access, electricity, clean water, things like that. When I was with the people behind this project, I had this kind of aha moment, which is that the people who work in sustainability within the Coca Cola company, and I mean that from the highest tiers down, do not strike me as people who are necessarily interested in selling more and more of the product. In fact, they've felt a whole lot more like a kind of missionary or some really people out to do good in the world. And even to the point where some said to me, you know, if Coke stopped doing this project, I would go somewhere else else to do it. It's that important. It's making that much difference. And I said, well, where would you go? Like, who else does this? And there we hit the sticking point of who else has the footprint, the will, the desire to do this kind of level of work at this high level. The Coke water operations that I told you about, while nowhere near enough of what is needed on the continent, still remain the single largest project trying to address the water crisis in Africa. And part of that is the self interest. I think we need to be very clear about that. I don't know that that's necessarily a bad thing. Okay, there's that. But as you said, Coke is not just some neutral player here, but actually a company producing carbonated sugary water that nobody knows needs to live, but that is bringing with it, in many cases kind of life saving other things like water and electricity. And that's by design, but it itself puts both ecological stress and biological stress. And that is the fundamental question at the heart of my book, is how do we reconcile them? How do we reconcile the fact that there's really only so much, for example, sugar that people can or should drink? And I trace that in the book. I mean, that wasn't always thought to be the case, right? Sugar was not always Named as the kind of sin product or health crisis that it is in many places of the world. That has to do with levels of consumption. And, and in the UK or in the US those levels are high enough that it's a problem. Same with South Africa. The rise of non communicable diseases, the rise of diabetes, the rise of dental caries that are tied clearly to liquid sugar in particular are troubling. Okay, so that's one kind of stress, the stress on the body. What I show in the book is that Coca Cola, you know, initially pushed back against this, but eventually came to get it, you know, and to get ahead of it. And so what does that mean, to get or to try to get ahead of it? I don't think we're quite there yet. But that means doing things like shrinking packages, you know, making sodas smaller so you're drinking less. That means pushing low sugar and no sugar drinks, including bottled water, including juices, although those are sugary themselves. It's not added sugar in the same way. The, that's the, the. Oh, I'm sorry. And the third way is actually like reducing the amount of sugar in drinks people already drink, like without even telling people. But, you know, there's all sorts of funny, not really funny, but, but strange things that come up around this. So for example, South Africa at the corporate Koch office showed me a study they did where they went and interviewed people about sugar and intake. And people said, why would we buy a diet soda when why would we pay the same amount of money when we want those calories, you know, we want, why would we do that? So you really, it's shifting minds as well. The second kind of stress, as you pointed to is, has been the bane of Coca Cola's existence since it was born. Which is the packaging, right? It's the glass, it's the cans, it's the plastic, right? That people, it's very visible. And you know, most of the African continent is returnable glass bottles to this day, which raises a whole other series of questions of whether those are environmentally better than plastic. I mean, they're heavier, so they take more fuel to drive around. They must be washed, so they use water and soap. But in general, glasses, like in theory, at least, least endlessly recyclable, whereas plastic is not. That said, there is at least one plastic to plastic recycling on the continent. And that, as almost everywhere else in the world, is driven by Coca Cola. So here in the United States, where I am, we feel really good because we put our stuff in recycling bins but the vast majority of it ends up in landfall. And that's very well documented. And there's all sorts of reasons that have to do do with the price of oil and the fact that places like China used to take the world's trash and repurpose it and won't anymore. The UK levels are not much better. South Africa, on the other hand, is in the early days of having recycling, and it's rudimentary, and it's driven by not just Coca Cola, but Coke, running a consortium of other pet plastic uses to. Essentially, if you get up early enough, you will see mostly guys in reflective vests going curb to curb, picking the plastic and the glass out of people's homes, pulling it off of landfills and taking it to be recycled. Now, it's clearly neither hygienic nor the kind of work that anyone would want or would see as just or noble. But what you find is the end result is that the levels of recycling are significantly higher than what's occurring in most of the global North. So it's not a solution, but it's one way the company's trying to offset that problem. But you're right, I mean, what you have brought up, and I hope readers, if they look at this, notice that if they read the book, that this is the fundamental question, and it's not one that I necessarily am able to answer definitively, which is how do we weigh the costs and the benefits of a company like this on a continent like Africa?
- [64:07]
B
Well, we certainly can't do any weighing up if we didn't have a book that laid it out for us. So thank you for taking us through that very complicated equation and evaluation. But as much as you've sort of taken us very much up to the present and into the future, we're not done yet. I do have one final question for you, if you'll allow. The book is obviously out and done and available. Is there anything you might have your eye on to work on next, whether or not it's a book, whether or not it's about Coca Cola that you'd like to preview?
- [64:42]
C
Well, no, sure, I'd love to. You know, you spend so much time doing something like this, you can't sort of stop doing it. And I always like to joke that if you travel around the African continent, it's like the world's easiest scavenger hunt is looking for Coke. So Coke signs, Coke products, Coke, Coke things. So my new project is not. Well, I'll say this. I, in the back of my head, have always wanted a coffee table type book documenting the remarkable Coca Cola signage across the continent that I've seen. And my new project is not related to this, although I'll tell you a funny story in closing and that is looking at various communities of African Jews across the company continent. So from the Beit Israel in Ethiopia where I was last year, to the Lemba in South Africa, to the Abu Udaya in Uganda and more and more and more. And so my funny ish closing story for you is on my last day in Uganda in July, we went to meet a Jewish community on the outskirts of Kampala. And as we pulled up, that little synagogue was located on top of a Coca Cola depot. And I just thought, well, worlds are colliding. Old project, new project, all in one place. And I still to this day call it the Koch Synagogue. Yes, so. So that's the new project. But I'm hoping because I can't stop looking at the Coke stuff. I keep taking the pictures, keep looking because it's just such a fascinating story.
- [66:17]
B
No, it very much is. Thank you very much for sharing a sort of highlights tour of it. And of course the book in all of its detail is available under the title How Coca Cola Became African, published by Oxford University Press. Sara, thank you so much much for being with us on the podcast.
- [66:35]
C
Thank you so much for having me, Miranda. I really appreciate it.
- [66:52]
D
And Doug, here we have the Limu.
- [66:54]
A
Emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [67:07]
C
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera.
- [67:11]
A
They see us.
- [67:12]
D
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty, Liberty. Liberty Savings Ferry, underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.