Cities around the world are suffering from a severe water crisis as climate change fears become real. There is also a huge push against sugar use with diabetes on the rise. However, travel almost anywhere on earth and you are likely to find a bottle or can of Coca-Cola. How has this fizzy drink become ubiquitous throughout the water-stressed world, whose main ingredient is only locally sourced water?
The story of Coca-Cola reflects the entrenched realities of globalization, development and capitalism, and Sara Byala Bottled he tells it from the perspective of Africa where sugary drink is available everywhere, while most life-saving medicines are unavailable. “In its profound breadth and depth, Coca-Cola offers an unparalleled lens on contemporary Africa,” he writes.
Cola nut in coke
However, as Byala points out, “there would be no Coca-Cola without the African kola nut,” and she begins her story with how America fell in love with the West African tree and its seed, which has a caffeine-producing stimulant. “In May 1886, as Europe tried to destroy the African continent, John Pemberton [in Atlanta, America] he created the earliest version of a beverage that would soon be called Coca-Cola, a drink whose name and origins derive in part from Africa.”
Coca-Cola, Byala says, tells its African story as one of “unstoppable progress” that began with its first bottling in South Africa in 1928 and is now present in every African nation as the continent’s largest private employer “with a multiplier result”.
Byala, a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, provides an in-depth assessment of how a global beverage brand adapted its marketing strategy to the sociopolitical demands of conquering a continent. While undertaking fieldwork in eight countries, Egypt, Eswatini, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa and Zimbabwe, Biala guided research assistants to conduct interviews in several nations.
From Cape Town to Cairo — the accompanying images and photos, including a Coca-Cola counter in front of the Sphinx, Egypt speak a thousand words — the company aligned itself with everything from education to the anti-apartheid struggle for locating drink in people’s lives. “The more I researched and talked to people, the more the Coke story emerged as a parable for late capitalism, full of cause for concern and seeds of optimism,” he says.
Marginal benefits
By 2020, more than three-quarters of a million Africans were supported by Coca-Cola, not to mention 10-12 indirect jobs created in related industries. It’s an intimate account of how companies contribute to solutions while creating problems in the first place.
Coca-Cola’s sustainability initiatives regarding water, carbon use and waste recycling are discussed. The company promotes healthy, youthful and active living in its marketing campaigns, but never in its centuries-old history has it ever suggested how much of its intake will be enough for a healthy body.
As elsewhere in the world, Coca-Cola’s century of existence in Africa is not without its fair share of contradictory compromises. While the world’s increased consumption of booze is not without serious ecological and biological consequences, its missionary effort to return a small portion of its profit back to social emancipation is anything but green – justifying capitalism’s logic of insatiable growth against what can sustain the ecosystem.
Bottled it is both a social story of colonization by a drinks company and an expression of self-determination and acceptance of modernity by an unsuspecting mass of people across the continent. Byala highlights how Coca-Cola positioned itself differently in each country, bending consumer power to create a distinct narrative focused on selling it. While it helps to enhance understanding of a globalized and integrated world, it also raises a critical question: at what cost can the planet and the human body bear it?
Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African; Sara Byala, Hurst, £30.
The reviewer is an independent writer, researcher and academic.
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