Obroni and the Chocolate Factory

by Steven Wallace

Lesson Number 5: Prepare, prepare, prepare—do your homework and anticipate what others are likely to do.

  My father was not the type who single-mindedly focused on business to the exclusion of family, service to community, and his own intellectual well-being. He loved the theater, and two of his favorite characters were Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof and the King of Siam from The King and I. The characters have much in common, and the roles resonated profoundly for my father. Both are authority figures (one a papa and one a king), and both are compelled by history and circumstance to extend themselves, to test the tensile strength of their character, to find ways to adapt to a changing, bewildering world. Tevye can compromise only so far before disowning his daughter Chava, who marries outside the Jewish faith. The King of Siam struggles to modernize his country while simultaneously preserving the essence of his infallibility. Within months of my joining DW in the family business, it became clear that the unrelenting consolidation in the wholesale garment industry was going to require us to either sell or risk going out of business, as deep-pocketed competitors surgically undercut our prices and poached even our most loyal customers. A few years earlier, my father had radically reengineered the family sweater business into the present-day blank goods distributorship when faced with the demise of the small-town haberdashers who were the lifeblood of the old business. Much like Yaw Brobbey reallocating his capital from farming yams to farming rabbits, DW possessed a remarkable capacity to adapt to his environment. DW was clear-eyed and largely unsentimental. This latest challenge, however, would ultimately prove insurmountable—no amount of pivoting could reverse the rising tide of industry consolidation in the wholesale T-shirt business. Midstates Sportswear had grown fast in the last two years, but not nearly fast enough. DW wandered into the sample room, arms outstretched, a Midwestern Yul Brynner, asking no one in particular, “Who is King?” Compromise is the defining attribute of emotional and psychological growth—it demonstrates your capacity to forgive and forget. My father bore no ill will toward the fast-growing, rapacious New Jersey distributor that had come into our market and so disrupted his congenial world. DW understood that the time had come to exit the rag trade, his economic well-being depended on it, but that’s not to say it was easy to do. And yet, when it came time to sell, he embraced the moment with equanimity. On the last day he owned the business, we walked, for the final time, the long rows of the warehouse, turning out the aisle lights one by one. We reached the last aisle and he turned to me and said, “It’s only T-shirts, Steverino. Let’s leave it all to the mice.”

  Lesson Number 6: Know what’s important. Discern what’s not. Have the capacity to let go and understand that much of life is just not that important.

  * * *

  Technically speaking, you could say I had a corner office at Midstates Sportswear, but it was tucked in a corner of the windowless sample room. Often, at the end of the workday, I turned out the lights and put my head down on the teak conference table, a reminder of plummier days, back in the 1960s, when the family sweater business had a New York showroom in the Empire State Building. These days, the imposing table had been repurposed as a workspace where I manually configured catalog layouts, using 3 x 5 index cards, Scotch tape, and bottles of Wite-Out.

  The question on my mind wasn’t How best to showcase a raglan sleeve or a 3-button placket? or How can we increase sales by highlighting the wafflelike weave of our pique golf shirts? No, if I were thinking about things like those, I’d be able to hold up my head. My overriding question was far weightier: What am I going to do with the rest of my life?

  I stared blankly at the jigsaw puzzle of notecards on the conference room table—our upcoming catalog layout. Regardless of how I arranged the pages, the final chapter of Midstates Sportswear was already written. Brutal consolidation within our industry had revealed our Achilles heel: we lacked the capital to secure national distribution that would ensure our long-term viability by making us indispensable to the mills that supplied our shirts. These mills offered price discounts to their largest customers. If we couldn’t grow sales, we’d have to pay more for our products than our larger competitors; and because our prices were just a bit higher, we’d continue to lose customers. We were in a death spiral. We were like the corner drugstore when Walgreen’s came to town, a soon-to-be anachronism in a world of predictive analytics and perpetual inventories. Our best course of action was to ready the company for sale to a fast-growth competitor with national ambitions who wanted to expand into our Upper Great Lakes market. Sitting in the dark, in the sample room, I contemplated this, my second career false start. Brilliant. Is this how it goes? Two strikes and I’m out? Is all this my fault—or that of a larger, tidal ebb and flow of the global economy? Did it matter? My old law firm had no real succession plan and was losing young partners left and right. I had the good sense to exit before I devoted more years to a firm that held little future. For Midstates Sportswear, I added new customers while simultaneously cutting our marketing budget—but the inexorable industry consolidation meant midmarket firms like ours had to grow jaw-droppingly fast, sell to a competitor, or go bankrupt. I felt I was in a very small skiff, with but a single oar—lacking agency, in a turbulent, roiling economic ocean.

  But something wouldn’t allow me to dwell too long on that dismal topic, and now my thoughts again returned to Ghana, that country of wondrous enchantments. No wonder I like to reminisce. My past is more interesting than my future. And Ghana is a gallimaufry of great stories.

  I closed my eyes and I was back in Sunyani, tucked into the back seat of Yaw Brobbey’s Toyota after a day of traveling the back roads of Brong-Ahafo. We were driving home at night, the dirt road still radiating heat from the afternoon sun. As cozy as I felt, I knew even then that there was good reason to be fearful of auto accidents in Ghana. The prospect of death by vehicle far outweighed more exotic hazards such as malaria, political violence, or snakes. Ghanaian vehicles are often poorly maintained, though jerry-rigged in ingenious, resourceful ways. Many roads are in disrepair, riven with potholes and lacking adequate shoulders; often, there are no streetlights or traffic signals in rural areas. Emergency services back in 1978 were nonexistent outside of major cities.

  My thoughts wandered to the last accident I’d seen in Ghana. It had been a doozy: a lorry overturned, windshield smashed, blood on the hood. The truck had been piled impossibly high with jute bags of cocoa beans making their way from Brong-Ahafo to the port at Tema, bound for export. Onlookers were stunned, unsure how best to pry the unconscious driver from the cab. One man appeared to be stealing the cargo, which now littered the road.

  Still slumped over the conference table, I thought, almost dreamily, Cocoa is a valuable commodity. Too bad Ghana hasn’t found a way to make more of it.

  Suddenly, a light went on.

  It was DW, standing by the light switch at the doorway. “I don’t mind your saving money on the electric bill, Steverino, but I don’t want you sitting in the dark, either. You’ll ruin your eyes.”

  “DW, I just got an idea.”

  nyε da a w dua bayerεe no ara na w si ne pam.

  It is not on the same day that the yam seed is sown that the stick upon which its stem will crawl is also affixed.

  “An ambitious task is not begun and completed on the same day.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Chicken or Fish?

  My first phone call to the Embassy of Ghana in Washington, DC, did not go well. I attributed the staff’s diffidence to the fact that Ghana had once been a British colony known as the Gold Coast. I blame the British Monarchy for the institutional formality and unblinking adherence to bureaucratic procedure that met my first inquiries.

  “Please, sir, what is your name again?”

  I fought the impulse to raise my voice. We were struggling to understand our common English language. My broad Midwestern vowels and nasal intonation were as confounding, I feared, as my Ghanaian compatriot’s rapid-fire delivery and dropping of the letter R. I�
�m sure he thought he spoke English bettah and fastah than I.

  “My name is Steve. Steven Wallace.”

  “Ah, Steven Lawlor.”

  “No, Wallace.”

  “Steven Lawless.”

  “No, W-A-L-L-A-C-E. I’m trying to find out if there are any chocolate factories in Ghana. I’m thinking of building a chocolate factory in Ghana. I used to live in Sunyani.”

  “Ahaaaa. Mistah Steve. First, I will need to have you write me a letter. On your letterhead. You see?”

  “Why a letter? Can’t you just answer some questions now on the phone?”

  I doctored up some company letterhead for the Wifely Sprockets Company, a nondescript name chosen to keep our intentions secret for as long as possible. My laughable conceit was that Cadbury’s or Hershey’s might beat me to market with a single-origin Ghana chocolate bar, so I wanted to disguise my purpose. Only in retrospect do I realize that the Wifely Sprockets name did me no favors in Ghana, a place whose ministries had little sense of humor. I put myself in a deputy minister’s shoes: Would I want to associate with a chocolate company that didn’t even have the word “chocolate” in its name? What does this obroni mean by calling his company a sprocket company? What does a sprocket have to do with cocoa? I might have helped myself if I’d thought that through—but I didn’t.

  And so, on Wifely Sprockets letterhead, I sent off a formal letter requesting information. Weeks later, a reply arrived, directing me simply to resubmit my request to Ghana’s Embassy to the United Nations in New York, as that office had a staff member with private investment as part of his portfolio.

  He replied—by letter—that I must write to someone else. Who in turn instructed me to write to someone else. And so on. There was no e-mail in 1991, and there was no progress in my epistolary quest: no response led to any advance. This went on for a year.

  At last, after exchanging many letters with Ghana’s US Embassy in Washington, DC, and its UN Embassy in New York, I reached out to the US Embassy in Accra. I figured that if Ghana wasn’t so keen on the investment, perhaps the US Embassy would see some benefit from having an American private investor in-country. But the first-tier commercial and economic officers did not know quite what to do with my chocolate factory proposal. In retrospect, I can hardly blame them, as the proposal came from a company with a confounding name and was headed by a former tax attorney who had never sold a single chocolate bar in his entire life; moreover, he had zero experience running a cocoa-processing factory.

  Since the Embassy could not simply ignore a written request from a tax-paying US citizen (thank goodness for bureaucratic procedures …), my file passed down the chain of command until it landed on the desk of Michael J. “Cogs” Caughlin, a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) staffer in Washington, DC, who worked with that agency’s resident office in Accra. “Cogs” had curiously bested the mandatory two-year rotation system of the diplomatic corps, designed to prevent staffers from becoming too close to their host country and perhaps susceptible to local influence-peddling. After a brief stay in Washington, Cogs was about to return for an unprecedented second extension of his original tour of duty in his beloved Ghana. I would soon learn that his maverick style got more done, in less time, than anyone else in the entire mission that included USAID, the Embassy proper, and the Peace Corps—and I sensed he had the institutional enemies in each agency to prove it. Yet it was not my intent to run the chocolate company as an aid project. My plan was to create an arm’s-length, for-profit, sustainable business; it puzzled me that my proposal found its way to USAID, the arm of the US government concerned with international humanitarian aid.

  Even over the phone, it was obvious Cogs possessed a gregarious sociability—part singing cowboy, part fraternity rush chairman. He did not fit my preconceived notion of a diplomat responsible for foreign-aid projects. Cogs would chuckle at something I said and then turn deadly serious, his soft drawl leading me to suspect he was a man with a mysterious past. Over time I would see that Cogs loved hijinks and seemed to have a gravitational affinity for finding trouble. He was a man with magpie interests, and on one occasion in Ghana, he insisted on stopping the car and snapping photos of a strange-looking bird—a bird that alighted on the security wall of what turned out to be a top-secret Government of Ghana facility. He was detained by the Ghanaian police, who did not buy for a moment his earnest bird-watching story. His insouciance for authority made me wonder how he’d succeeded for so long in his peripatetic career—one that included stints in the Green Berets, the Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agriculture Service, and, finally, USAID. Of course, I wondered if he might not be CIA—that would explain perhaps, his extended tour of duty in Ghana. Like many Vietnam veterans, Cogs possessed an abiding hope that this time perhaps his government might get something right and help someone, someplace, for the good of the US and for the good of the world.

  Within a year, Cogs became my tactical team leader, father confessor, and sage guide through the impenetrable sea of acronyms that is the lingua franca of any bureaucracy, especially that of the US government. He could deconstruct a government regulation or agency funding initiative with the inventiveness of any K Street tax lawyer back in Washington, DC. He could uncover previously unavailable dollars or neatly sidestep, with balletic skill, a burdensome legal requirement. I’m certain most of his superiors found him a colossal pain in the ass. But most importantly, Cogs embraced lost causes. And my chocolate factory was certainly beginning to look like a lost cause.

  After several months of exchanging letters and phone calls, Cogs told me it was time for me to come to Ghana and, with the help of one of his staffers, see what progress we could make. He was due to fly over on other business, and he invited me to meet him there. I hadn’t been back to Ghana since 1978, and I was trying to save money by postponing my first trip until it was clear my plan had some likelihood of success. My wife and I had twins barely a year old. Money was tight. But Cogs and I had exhausted all we could do from a distance.

  Cogs told me that I would have the help of his right-hand man in Accra, a Ghanaian, Daniel Gyimah. Daniel was an FSN, a Foreign Service National (young Ghanaians in their mid-thirties who displayed unusual talent and were appointed to two-year stints with the US Embassy in Accra). FSNs represented a long-term bet—they were people with whom the US government wanted to build a relationship, in the hope they might rise to take leadership positions in Ghanaian politics or industry. In the short term, from what I could discern, the Embassy used FSNs as “fixers” to get things done in Ghana’s bewildering cultural and political landscape.

  Cogs and Daniel had developed an extraordinary relationship, and I could see that Daniel loved working with Cogs. Cogs was “the rare American who knows how to play the game in Ghana,” Daniel told me, and together we marveled at the way Cogs could push, cajole, shame, and compliment, all in one breath. At the same time, Cogs valued Daniel, and I observed that it took a rare sort of diplomat to realize that a hotshot with an advanced degree from a fancy School of Advanced International Studies would be simply no match for a resourceful thirty-six-year-old Ghanaian with gumption, wit, and a few connections. Cogs wisely determined that, if these FSNs were to reap results, they required a good deal more freedom from supervision than you would otherwise demand of your own career foreign service officers.

  Daniel’s sincerity of purpose and love of country meant that he often played the straight man to Cogs’s antics. Taking great pride in his roots, Daniel often appeared at official functions in full traditional robes and leather sandals, something of an anomaly in modern Accra. He bore the weight of high expectations from his family, his Akan ethnic group, and his nation. Daniel, for his part, delighted in Cogs’s freewheeling approach, even though it nearly always left Daniel to clean up the mess, like bailing Cogs out of a Ghanaian jail for taking unauthorized photos of a singularly feathered bird.

  As it turned out, Daniel grew up in Sunyani. As far as I was concer
ned, this meant that we were practically related—two Sunyani boys—surely a stroke of good fortune. Daniel even knew Yaw Brobbey very well; they attended the same Catholic church.

  “I expect that Sunyani was like nothing you had ever seen, when you were a boy,” Daniel said to me once. “Ghana is not Wisconsin.”

  “I was disoriented from the minute I arrived,” I replied. It occurred to me to tell him how I disembarked from the plane, getting reprimanded by the flight attendant and winding up on the front page of the newspaper. I hadn’t even finished telling the story before Daniel started to laugh. He asked me to repeat exactly what I did as I disembarked. I stood up and mimed the gesture of tying my windbreaker around my waist.

  “Oh, Steven! That is too much!” Daniel laughed, emphasizing the word “too,” an emphatic used throughout Ghana. “That is too funny! Ei! When you adjust your robe about your waist, it is regarded as getting ready to fight an enemy—you are girding your loins. It is a sign of aggression from a warrior! Ha! I can’t believe you did this on your first day in Ghana. Steven, you are too funny.”

  “I was just hot.”

  At long last I realized that it had taken me all of ten seconds to offend the country that would be my new home. And my transgression had been there for all to see, on the cover of the Ghanaian Times in the summer of 1978.

  * * *

  The Labadi Beach Hotel, in 1992, was the nicest hotel in all of Ghana. The low, two-story building boasted dark wood railings, broad verandas, a tranquil swimming pool, and an abundance of charm. The Labadi’s lobby bar was the favorite haunt of spies both corporate and government, deal seekers, information traders, diamond merchants, brokers of gold, and dealers in cocoa.

  I had come to the Labadi to meet Michael Caughlin face-to-face for the first time. I walked the length of the second-story veranda, where all the fanciest rooms are. Surely this can’t be right. I double-checked the room number and knocked on the mahogany door. A uniformed Ghanaian porter peered out, bowing slightly. From behind him, I heard a voice calling, “Jes’ a minute, Steven”—a hint of a drawl. No one at home calls me Steven, it’s always “Steve,” and I immediately brightened at the formality of his greeting. A hint of jocularity infused his address, as if Cogs might be playacting. I peeked in.