9 8 COCOA AND CHOCOLATE 



cacao on their heads. " Women and children, light- 

 hearted, chattering and cheerful, bear their 60 lbs. 

 head-loads with infinite patience. Heavier loads, ap- 

 proaching sometimes 

 two hundredweight, 

 are borne by grave, 

 silent Hausa-men, 

 often a distance of 

 thirty or forty miles." 

 One day, not so 

 many years ago, some 

 more ingenious native 

 in the hills at the back 

 of the Coast, filled an 

 old palm-oil barrel 

 with cacao and rolled 

 it down the ways to 

 Accra. And now to- 

 day it is a familiar sight 

 to see a man trundling 

 a huge barrel of cacao, 

 weighing half a ton, 

 down to the coast. The 

 sound of a motor horn 

 is heard , and he wildly 

 turns the barrel aside 

 to avoid a disastrous 

 collision w r ith the new, 

 weird transport ani- 

 mal from Europe. 

 Motor lorries have 

 been used with great 

 effect on the coast for some seven years ; they have 

 the advantage over pack animals that they do not 

 succumb to the bite of the dreaded tsetse fly, but 

 nevertheless not a few derelicts lie, or stand on their 

 heads, in the ditches, the victims of over-work or 

 accident. 



Having brought the cacao to the coast, there yet 



Drying Cacao Beans at Mramra. 



Reproduced bv permission from the Imperial Institute 



series of Handbooks to the Commercial Resources of 



the Tropics. 



