If any man has drunk a little too deeply from the cup of physical pleasure; if he has spent too much time at his desk that should have been spent asleep; if his fine spirits have become temporarily dulled; if he finds the air too damp, the minutes too slow, and the atmosphere too heavy to withstand; if he is obsessed by a fixed idea which bars him from any freedom of thought: if he is any of these poor creatures, we say, let him be given a good pint of amber-flavored chocolate….and marvels will be performed. —

Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2263247.stm this news report in the beeb about the smuggling of cocoa in Africa took me rushing back to a quiet windswept night spent on an outpost in Ghana. I’d spent a fortnight drawing up plans for a missionary school being built by my good friend George Kapodo and he was repaying the favour by letting me spend a night in wait for a mythic creature that supposedly guards the precious Cocoa! Ghana by the way is the second largest producer of cocoa in the world and some of the finest chocolate makers in the world source the stuff from there.

Kapodo had a taste for the dramatic and he told me many stories about cocoa and its mysterious powers, imagining the somewhat innocuous looking cocoa as an aphrodisiac, a psychoactive food and even the food of devils! Ahh..i can almost smell the warm vapors warming my cheeks on that cold night spent on the farm with kapodo’s tales..but…there was a particular story, a mystery, well…a legend that he told with utmost reverence…(why are the hair on my hand tingling!!)

If I remember correctly, my memory is as tattered as the pages of my passport crammed with indelible stamps of places I’ve seen, smelt and tasted, he mentioned a particular type of cocoa grown in Ghana that was so fine that it was fiercely guarded by mysterious forces and only those who’d earned it would be allowed to partake.

A legend.

Now, as an architect I like things that fit, things that work with logic and I told him exactly what I thought of this TALE..

In the next few posts I’m going to tell a story that’s never been told, of my run-in with this Legend, how right my friend Kapodo was and how I earned it..