Coca-Cola has been consumed in Africa for roughly a century. Today, the company is the largest direct corporate employer on the continent; factoring in the wider supply and distribution network, an estimated 750,000 people earn a livelihood from Coca-Cola’s ubiquitous presence throughout Africa.
Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African by Sara Byala, a South African-born Harvard and University of Pennsylvania historian, delves into this story. Woven into the sociopolitical history of many nations, the Coca-Cola trajectory is complex and compelling, a hybrid tale of history, business and branding, politics and profits. And it is a portrait of capitalism through different lenses.
At the outset, Byala has no qualms: Coke is a “meta commodity”, she writes — or, referencing social anthropologist and globalisation theorist Arjun Appadurai, it is a quintessential one, with its own social impact, substantive economic weight and political value.
Byala demonstrates this often in the book. In the introduction she describes scenes at the launch in 2016 of Coca-Cola’s Ekocenter in Ruhunda, a town of 25,000 people outside Kigali, Rwanda.
Ekocenters are Coke’s community hubs, providing basic services, internet connectivity and recreational amenities. Ruhunda’s was a flagship version; those at the opening included the company’s then CEO Muhtar Kent, President Paul Kagame and US civil rights campaigner the Rev Jesse Jackson.
Ekocenters epitomise capitalism’s potential for social good. There are now about 150 such centres around the world, mainly in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Assuming all were launched with a similar fanfare of red-and-white branding and a who’s who in attendance, they clarify the not-so-soft power of Coke and capitalism.
In the case of the Ekocenters, the company’s reach has extended into areas of responsibility from which governments often walk away, or in which they cut their spend and allow the private sector to invest and dominate. The beveragemaker and bottler does “work on the continent that no-one else can or will do”, Byala points out.
Coca-Cola’s origin is actually part-African. Intrinsic to the name is the kola nut — a core original ingredient — which is the seed of the cola tree, indigenous to West Africa. It is central to West African societies’ hospitality and ceremonies, as Chinua Achebe wrote in Things Fall Apart: “He who brings kola, brings life.”
Almost a century after the cool drink was created in 1886, the “Coke Adds Life” global advertising campaign echoed this aspect of African culture, in all likelihood unwittingly.
Bottled doesn’t pull punches in detailing how the company was often disdainful of Africa even as it raked in revenues from the continent. One passage describes how Coke capitalised during construction of the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi in the 1950s. Coca-Cola’s Salisbury Bottling Co went to great lengths to ensure the product was constantly available in and around the construction site. The four-year project, including a hydropower plant, was a major feat of engineering. It provided electricity to the Copperbelt mining region and to large parts of then Rhodesia but it was ecologically destructive and ruinous for thousands of forcibly displaced Tonga people.
And there was Coca-Cola. Its presence says everything about its pervasive power; meeting a demand, certainly, but also making profits on the back of colonialism and underpaid local labour. As an “old-fashioned colonial endeavour”, says the author, Kariba’s construction symbolises “the ambiguity of Coca-Cola in middle Africa mid-century”.
‘Bottled’ doesn’t pull punches in detailing how the company was often disdainful of Africa even as it raked in revenues sourced there
Mysterious and contradictory
In the 1950s and 1960s the company generally found itself on the right side of history. As African nations fought to free themselves from colonialism, its leadership — notably under AE Killeen, who spent considerable time in various African countries and insisted the company understand local market conditions — stepped up its presence and advertising on the continent.
This was a time when corporates were permitted to be bystanders. But this changed over the ensuing 20 years. African nations found the company’s perceived co-operation with the apartheid government increasingly distasteful. Ironically, the South African government occasionally considered banning Coca-Cola because of its presence in hostile neighbouring countries.
By the late-1970s, like most worldwide enterprises, Coke faced intense pressure to cease doing business in South Africa. The company’s headquarters in Atlanta, US, decided to throw this conundrum at Carl Ware, at that stage vice-president of special markets.
Ware emerges as a quasi-hero of the book, able not only to rise to the company’s challenge in South Africa but also able to balance this with US domestic and global political considerations, and contribute to South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle.
Ware’s playbook was smart, almost outrageously so. An African-American of humble background, and convinced that a straightforward exit would hurt the many employees and structures the company had set up to mitigate some of apartheid’s impacts, he strategised a very different version of disinvestment. This involved shifting the concentrate plant to what was then Swaziland and transferring Coca-Cola’s in-country operations to a new South African company, National Beverage Services, a place-holder entity meeting the requirements of US sanctions rules.
So by 1986 Coca-Cola had officially disinvested, but four years later its products were still available everywhere. Indeed, its distribution footprint had expanded significantly, as part of Ware’s plan was to broaden township reach for the brand by empowering entrepreneurial black South Africans.
This hybrid form of withdrawal was enough to mollify most US anti-apartheid figures and most struggle leaders in South Africa, even as it outraged activists on the ground.
To this day the balancing act leaves a bitter taste for many who remain highly critical of Coke’s disinvestment model. For example, Thandeka Luthuli-Gcabashe, daughter of former ANC president and Nobel peace prize winner Albert Luthuli, still refuses to drink Coke. And Edward Mchunu, the company’s de facto second-in-charge in South Africa at the time, wrote in his autobiography that disinvestment was “obviously a lie”.
This moment has forced us to interrogate what will be possible and what will be essential to humanity’s survival
— Sara Byala
Divide and rule?
Yet struggle luminaries such as Arthur Chaskalson, Jakes Gerwel and Nthato Motlana, chair of the powerful Soweto Committee of Ten civic alliance, were persuaded, partly by Coke’s establishment of a R25m nonprofit organisation, the Equal Opportunity Foundation, headed by then bishop Desmond Tutu.
Motlana supported the model precisely because it empowered black entrepreneurs, and he features in a Coke corporate video from the late-1980s. Byala references a snippet from the video in which he urges young black people to “get off your backsides and make money”. Naturally, adds Byala, “[t]he best way to make money, as described in this video: sell Coca-Cola”.
Technically, it was disinvestment. And, per the chapter’s title, “A Catalytic Role Untold: Coca-Cola and the Undoing of Apartheid”, on balance the author is right to suggest that once the company had fully committed to assist in ending apartheid it did more than most organisations.
Ware also secretly facilitated meetings between the ANC in exile and South African business people and politicians who wanted change. This was networking for the long term, and if there is one business lesson from Bottled, it is that corporate leadership would do well to play the very long game — to think in the mode of historians such as Byala.
Appropriately, Bottled also takes a quo vadis angle. One of the issues it examines is Africa’s scarce water resources. It’s all very well that Coca-Cola aligns with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal for safe and affordable drinking water for all, but 39% of the water used in its production globally comes from water-stressed areas, including parts of Africa, Byala notes.
The company’s Replenish Africa Initiative (RAIN), launched in 2009, is a wide-ranging project not only to improve this and other related statistics, but also, by collaborating with partner organisations, to improve lives. The most emotive passage in the book is Byala’s description of a visit to Beni Warkan, 300km from Cairo. Generations of residents lived without accessible running water and basic amenities. Now, taps are in all homes, and RAIN has transformed the village of 18,000 people.
“Nothing about this project was branded Coca-Cola,” says Byala of RAIN’s presence there.
Still, does a company’s work on water wipe the slate clean on its areas of dubious practice, such as an obscenely high sugar content that contributes to the world’s diabetes epidemic, or the mountains of packaging in landfills and plastic pollution in the oceans?
Byala doesn’t dismiss the techno-optimism in the arguments that Coke will continue to rise — and further shine — in Africa. Corporations are made up of people, who can innovate to address global problems; just because they were the cause of the issues doesn’t mean they can’t help to solve them.
She also makes the point that big companies bring scalability to these solutions, which small enterprises, and even governments, cannot. So perhaps the jury is still out on the argument of environmental historian and sociologist Jason Moore that “capitalism created this mess and this mess will ruin capitalism”.
Byala’s insights extend beyond a continental perspective. “Ultimately,” she writes of the Covid era in our late-stage Capitalocene, “this moment has forced us to interrogate what will be possible and what will be essential to humanity’s survival on the other side, including asking: will a beverage company?”
Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African, by Sara Byala (Hurst & Company, 2023)
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