The Mampong plot
Seeds from Fernando Po planted in the shade on Badu family land at Akuapem-Mampong.
Ghana-Net.com · Eastern Region · Akuapem-Mampong
A boy from Osu, pawned for a debt and freed by missionaries, trained as a blacksmith, went to work on the cocoa plantations of Fernando Po and came home with pods in his luggage. The farm he planted at Mampong in 1879 is still there. Within a generation the Gold Coast was the biggest cocoa producer on earth. Whether he was really the first is another question, and this page answers it honestly.
Tetteh Quarshie was born in 1842 at Osu, the town around the Danish Christiansborg Castle in what is now Accra. His father, Mlekuboi, was a farmer from Teshie; the family was Ga-Dangme.
As a boy he was a pawn: a child handed over to a creditor as security for a family debt, working until the debt was paid. Pawning was common on the nineteenth-century Gold Coast and sat very close to slavery. He was freed by the Basel Mission, the Swiss-German mission that had arrived at Osu in 1828, and it trained him as a blacksmith in its workshops.
A mission product, but his own man. The Basel Mission trained hundreds of Ghanaian craftsmen: carpenters, masons, smiths. Most are forgotten. Tetteh Quarshie is remembered because he used that training to leave, earn money abroad and come back with something nobody could take off him.
Around 1870 he left for Fernando Po, the Spanish island in the Gulf of Guinea that is today Bioko, part of Equatorial Guinea. The island's cocoa plantations ran on imported West African labour, and Gold Coast craftsmen were in demand there.
He spent several years on the island. He learned how cocoa was grown: above all that young cocoa needs shade, a lesson the missionaries back home had not learned. The sources disagree on when he came back, with dates from 1876 to 1879, but they agree on what he brought: cocoa pods or beans, which were not his to export and which he carried home anyway.
In 1879 he planted the seeds on a plot at Mampong in the Akuapem hills, land granted to him by the Badu family. He had settled there as the town's first master blacksmith, a few kilometres from the Basel Mission's headquarters at Akropong.
Seeds from Fernando Po planted in the shade on Badu family land at Akuapem-Mampong.
Cocoa takes about four years to bear. When his trees fruited, he sold pods to other farmers, reportedly at £1 each, a very high price at the time.
Akuapem farmers planted his seed, then bought land in Akyem to plant more. The cocoa belt grew from there.
He sold, he did not give. Popular accounts turn Tetteh Quarshie into a patriot handing out free seed. The sources say he sold his pods, at a good price. That was not greed. It was the start of the African-owned, market-driven cocoa farming that built the country, and it was his seed to sell.
He died on 25 December 1892. He did not live to see what his trees turned into.
No, and it does not matter as much as people think. Cocoa had been tried on the Gold Coast before him:
At Akropong, Basel lay missionaries Johannes Haas, Jakob Lang and others grew cocoa from seedlings brought from Surinam and Cape Palmas. In 1865 Lang reported the trees "continuously in blossom", and by 1866 the mission was handing seedlings to other stations. The experiment was given up around 1870, when the missionaries died or went home and pests took over.
Governor Sir William Brandford Griffith set up cocoa nurseries and the Aburi Botanical Gardens on the same ridge, distributing seedlings from São Tomé to chiefs and farmers. His son, a colonial judge, later disputed Tetteh Quarshie's claim.
In the 1920s Governor Gordon Guggisberg looked into the rival claims and came down on Tetteh Quarshie's side. A Tetteh Quarshie scholarship was set up at Achimota, and his name stuck.
The Basel Mission planted cocoa first, and the government spread it widely. Tetteh Quarshie was the first Ghanaian to grow cocoa successfully as a business and sell the seed. The industry itself was built by thousands of Akuapem, Krobo, Akyem, Asante and Ga farmers whose names nobody wrote down.
The first cocoa exports left the Gold Coast in the 1880s and early 1890s (the sources give years from 1885 to 1893), a few bags at a time. By 1911 the colony was the largest cocoa producer in the world, producing about a third of the global crop, almost all of it grown on small African-owned farms rather than European plantations.
Cocoa paid for the railways, the harbour at Takoradi, the roads and much of the schooling of the colonial Gold Coast, and later for Nkrumah's development plans.
When European buying firms fixed prices together, Ghanaian farmers refused to sell, most famously in 1937–38. It was one of the first mass economic protests in the colony.
To fight the swollen-shoot virus, the colonial government cut down infected trees, and farmers lost their livelihoods. That anger fed the unrest of 1948 and the Christiansborg crossroads shooting.
A state board bought all cocoa at a fixed price and kept the difference. Under Nkrumah and the governments that followed, farmers were paid far below world prices, and many smuggled their cocoa across the border instead.
Ghana lost first place to Côte d'Ivoire decades ago, and it is still one of the world's biggest producers. It still exports most of its cocoa as raw beans. The chocolate, and most of the money, is made in Europe.
The worst threat is not a virus. Illegal gold mining, galamsey, has destroyed cocoa farms across the Eastern, Ashanti and Western regions. Farm owners sell or lease land to miners for quick cash, and the farms, the soil and the rivers are gone. The crop Tetteh Quarshie carried home is being dug out of the ground for gold. See our reporting on galamsey and the forest reserves and the Atiwa Forest Reserve.
The farm at Akuapem-Mampong is a small plot of about one acre, run by the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana (CRIG) and sometimes called the Ecomuseum of Cocoa. Trees said to have been planted by Tetteh Quarshie himself still stand among younger ones. It is modest: a farm, not a museum building. The Tetteh Quarshie Memorial Hospital in the same town also carries his name.
Mampong lies on the Akuapem ridge road north of Aburi, on the way to Akropong and Koforidua. From Accra, take the road up through Madina and Aburi, or a tro-tro towards Mampong. Madina and Adenta traffic decides how long it takes, so leave early. Aburi, Mampong and Akropong make an easy day trip together.
We have no verified current entry fee or opening hours. Ask at the farm, or through CRIG. A guide on site will show you the old trees, and the pods in season. The main harvest runs from about October into the new year.
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The Akuapem ridge, the mission that trained him, and what is happening to Ghana's cocoa land now.
The mission that freed him from pawnship, trained him as a smith and tried cocoa at Akropong before him.
The colonial garden on the same ridge, where cocoa seedlings were raised and sent out in the 1890s.
The missionary who built the Basel station at Akropong, a few kilometres from Mampong.
The stale numbers behind the mining that is eating Ghana's farmland and forests.
The Eastern Region forest in the middle of the cocoa belt, under pressure from mining.
Tetteh Quarshie did not invent Ghanaian cocoa, and he was not the first to plant it. He was a freed pawn and a trained smith who saw how cocoa was grown abroad, brought the seed home and made it pay, where the missionaries and the government had not yet managed to. That is enough. Ghana put his name on a hospital, a scholarship and one of Accra's busiest interchanges, and it is letting galamsey tear up the farms his seed started. If the country wants to honour him, it should protect those farms.
Verified: 28 September 2026. His birth year, Osu origin, father and training follow the Encyclopaedia Africana and standard biographies. Pawnship and the Basel Mission's 1858–1870 cocoa trials follow the Swiss National Museum and Basel Mission archive research. The 1879 Mampong planting, the Badu family plot, the pod price, his death date, the CRIG farm and the Achimota and hospital memorials follow published biographies. The sources disagree on his return date (1876–1879) and on the first export year (1885–1893), and we give the range. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.