Don’t credit Tetteh Quarshie with first cocoa pods to Ghana - Historian
- Tetteh Quarshie is not the first person to bring cocoa pods to Ghana-
- According to celebrated historian, Professor Perbi, Rev. Haas, Mole and other missionaries cultivated cocoa first in Ghana
Ace historian and Associate Professor at the Department of History at the University of Ghana Prof. Akosua Adoma Perbi has revealed that Tetteh Quarshie is not the first person to bring cocoa pods to Ghana.
According to the historian, available records indicate that Dutch missionaries planted cocoa in the coastal areas of the then Gold Coast as early as 1815, whilst in 1857 Basel missionaries also planted cocoa at Aburi.
She opined that: “ Historically cocoa was initially brought into Ghana from Brazil by Rev. Haas. Between 1851 and the 1880s, Rev. Haas, Mole and other missionaries cultivated cocoa.”
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“Tetteh Quarshie was an apprentice at the Basel Mission workshop in Akropong before he left for Fernando Po and popularised cocoa by beginning commercial farming of the crop at Mampong Akuapim,” she made the revelation at the sixth edition of Achimota School’s 90th-anniversary education forum.
Tetteh Quarshie was a pre-independence Ghanaian agriculturalist and the person directly responsible for the introduction of cocoa crops to Ghana, which today constitute one of the major export crops of the Ghanaian economy.
Quarshie travelled to the island of Fernando Po (now Bioko in Equatorial Guinea) in 1870 and returned in 1876 to Ghana in order to introduce the crop. He died on Christmas Day 1892.
Source: YEN.com.gh
