By
Daniel Bergner
April
6, 2012
 |
Jonathan
Torgovnik/Reportage
Andrew
Rugasira, chief executive of Good African Coffee, in the hills near
Kasese,
Uganda.
|
When he
set out to wedge his coffee onto supermarket shelves in England and America,
Andrew Rugasira didn’t start by making phone calls from his home in Kampala, Uganda. He didn’t begin by sending
e-mails. The distance seemed too great for that. At one end of his business
were farmers who, until he came along, thought their beans were purchased and
carried off to make gunpowder. At the other were buyers at the corporate
headquarters of chains like Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, Whole Foods and Wal-Mart.
If he was going to succeed, he felt he would have to do it physically; it was
as if he believed he could stretch himself to span the divide between the two
worlds. So he got on a plane to London, without trying any advance contact.
He
checked into a London hotel, and from there he called and sent e-mails to the
companies. Rugasira is a tall, tireless 43-year-old with an angular face and
slightly prominent ears and a smile that rearranges everything. Armed with a
laptop that held a PowerPoint presentation about his coffee, he intended to
pull off a kind of revolution. No longer would his country merely sell its
unroasted beans to exporters who supplied the European and American coffee
kings, from Nestlé to Starbucks; no longer would his nation just provide the
raw material for someone else’s riches. In the stores, his roasts would take
their place beside the high-end brands.
He was
bursting with the pitch he would deliver as soon as he met his first British
buyer. “We as a new generation of African entrepreneurs believe that we can bring quality products to
the global market. We believe we have what the consumer in the North
Atlantic market is looking for in coffee; we believe we have the capacity to design the
packaging to make it attractive; we believe. . . .” As he
recalled the speech he prepared — while we sat in December outside his little
purchasing office in Kasese, a town not far from the Democratic Republic of
Congo — he sounded like the most moving of preachers. And he felt poised, he
said, on that trip to London in 2004, to convert the Western world to his
product. In his hotel room, he sat dressed in beige slacks and a gray
turtleneck, with a blue blazer pressed and waiting. He watched for replies to
animate his in-box. None came. On the phone, the receptionists wouldn’t put him
through. The 4,000 miles he traveled didn’t seem to soften them. “Did you send
a message?” they asked. “Well, then he’ll get back to you.” No one did. Day
after day, his sermon went unspoken. And at last, there was nothing to do but
go home.
Yet
Rugasira has a resilience that may have been forged in childhood. He grew up in
Kampala during the terrors of Idi Amin’s reign in the ’70s. When he was around
11, with Amin just driven out, soldiers climbed over the gate in front of his
family’s house and carried away the TV, the refrigerator, the furniture, while
Rugasira and two of his sisters, who were 7 and 5, huddled on their knees and
prayed in a bedroom. He could hear the soldiers threatening and his parents
pleading out front. The gunmen left, but one evening, his father, who owned a
factory that made chalk for Ugandan schoolchildren, didn’t return home.
Imprisonment
and exile in Kenya — this was his father’s life for the next two and a half
years, yet when I asked Rugasira how that period of his boyhood affected him,
he said flatly that it hadn’t. “Context is so important,” he said. “Friends
were losing their parents. If you were successful, you were accused of being
Amin’s agent. It wasn’t difficult to figure out that I was fortunate to be
alive, to have my parents alive.” He didn’t want to dwell on that time. He was
far happier talking about the “value addition” achieved by the growers on the
rugged hills above Kasese, through a technique of processing beans that his
staff taught them. Or talking about “capturing the entire value chain” through
his quest to build a roasting factory in Kampala, offering perhaps the first
African-roasted coffee sold in British and American stores and creating a
thriving industry in sub-Saharan Africa, where factories of any kind are scarce
and where the export of finished products to the West is nearly nonexistent.
Three
months after his failed trip to England, he got back on a plane with the
identical plan in mind: land in London; dial the numbers and send the e-mails
and compel the buyers to respond by means of proximity and pure will. “I
thought, I can do this,” he remembered. He didn’t score
a single meeting.
Rugasira’s
company is called Good African Coffee. The Kasese office, about
200 miles west of Kampala toward the center of the continent, is a squat,
white-and-blue building surrounded by a dilapidated town that once served a
copper mine, now defunct. The town is framed by the Rwenzori Mountains, a
glacial chain that the ancient Greek geographer Ptolemy labeled the Mountains
of the Moon, borrowing from the name the locals gave to the glowing, snowcapped
peaks. Under a tree near the office was a waiting cluster ofboda-boda boys, the young men who taxi people
around on their motorbikes, their heedless speeds and buzzing engines speaking
of the constant motion and ambition that somehow exist side by side with a
profound inertia in Africa.
One
morning in the Rwenzori foothills, I joined Rugasira as he checked in with some
of the growers who sell beans to Good African. In a hovel below a harsh
incline, I sat with a group of farmers who had put on their best for our visit.
Two of the men wore battered wingtips; a woman was wrapped in a lime green
caftan rimmed with pompoms. The building is home to the village-run savings and loan, which Rugasira set
up, with blue exam booklets for passbooks. He hoped to guide the farmers to
invest in educating their children, upgrading their mud-and-thatch homes and
generally elevating their standard of living. But he brought things much more
rudimentary than banking. The farmers told me that until Rugasira and his staff
appeared, they hadn’t terraced their fields; somehow this fundamental,
millennia-old method of enhancing yields on steep terrain had eluded them.
Rugasira
also generated a miniature industrial revolution. He brought simple pulping
machines, knee-high metal contraptions, turned by hand crank, that free the
bean from its thick red skin. Over time, he gave out 200 of these, which the
farmers carry on their backs from hamlet to hamlet and share across the area.
His staff taught the farmers to soak the skinned beans as a way of culling
those that are damaged or unripe, while also removing an inner sheath. And
Rugasira impressed upon them the benefit of drying the beans in the shade and
off the ground, on platforms of wire mesh that the company hired carpenters to
construct. These methods would enrich the taste of the coffee down the line, he
explained, and in turn enrich the price he could pay them for their beans. The
new equipment and methods allowed the growers to liberate themselves from the
prevailing local system of selling their raw commodity cheaply to traders.
Instead, Rugasira paid 70 percent more — about 60 cents a pound, as his company
got under way — for a product that could go on to satisfy elite markets and
that he planned to roast and sell in a sector, he pointed out to me repeatedly,
worth billions.
When he
was three
years out of the University of London, where his family sent him for college,
Rugasira heard a radio show that led him to start his first company. After
graduating with a degree in law and economics, he worked for a research
institute in Kampala, studying the impact of World Bank trade-liberalization
policies, before taking over the chalk factory when his father died. But the
factory was being forced out of business by Chinese imports. Then, on his car
radio one Sunday, he heard a Ugandan promoter declare that he wanted to bring
the South African reggae star Lucky Dube to Kampala for a concert.
Dube,
Rugasira explained, was a world-class musician, and Kampala concerts were
slapdash affairs at the time, in the early ’90s, with minor bands and makeshift
staging. “I thought, No way can you bring Lucky Dube with the way you’ve been
doing things,” he recounted. “No, I’m going to try to bring Lucky Dube, and
I’m going to do it right.”
After
persuading a Zimbabwean friend to put him in touch with Dube’s management team,
he flew to South Africa and sat down with the star’s people. They were
impressed by his promises and asked about his track record. He told them he did
some promoting in England. In fact, he and a few university buddies staged a
single concert during his third-year exam week; they figured everyone would
want a break from studying and that the auditorium they rented would be
thronged. About 25 people showed up. But no matter: he got his fellow
impresarios from that event to fax letters about his promotional skills to
Dube’s handlers, and Dube signed on. Rugasira borrowed money from family and
ran overdrafts at two banks to put on three packed shows with giant screens and
explosions of smoke and V.I.P. tents, shows advertised with radio spots
featuring a woman divorcing her husband over his failure to buy Lucky Dube
tickets, shows that sparked a major change in the local concert scene and that
taught Rugasira a lesson in “capitalizing on the intangible,” on his own
resolve.
When Bill
Clinton paid a presidential visit to Uganda four years later, in 1998,
Rugasira’s flourishing events-and-marketing company was chosen to provide the
stages, lighting and sound for three Clinton speeches. “Ah, man!” Rugasira
said. “The sheer resources deployed! Uganda had never seen aircraft that carry
limousines, that carry helicopters. It was a sobering exposure to the power
disparity, the power dynamic between two states. But mostly this was a chance
for me to be a host. And to learn.” He reported to the presidential advance
team and worked under the watch of the Secret Service. “It was something else —
the methodical attention to detail. I relished the opportunity to operate at
that level.”
Having
reached that height, though, he began to feel he’d lost his way. His wife,
Jackie — with whom he has five children — talked to him relentlessly about
“internal prosperity,” as opposed to the kind of prosperity he was hustling to
attain. He felt “constantly bombarded with images of squalor, of despair, in
the neighborhoods and suburbs of Kampala.” He subjected himself to “a robust
critique,” he said. “I was born in a Christian home. I moved away from that in
my university years. Now I found myself going back to my faith.” In 2003,
Rugasira sold his business and used the proceeds — along with a loan taken out
against his house — to found his coffee company.
Between
the thousands of Kasese area farmers with their small orchards of waxy-leaved
Arabica coffee trees and his dream of a Kampala factory, he felt that coffee
was the perfect way to combine the motives of personal profit and wider good.
Africa supplies about one-tenth of the world’s trade in raw beans, mostly of
low quality. His company would be a luminous symbol of the continent’s ability
to rise, to compete: “We’re battling the idea of Africa being a backward,
primordial society with nothing going for it, a continent of conflict, a
continent just begging for handouts, a basket case.”
Quickly,
with their enhanced
yields and the price Rugasira was paying for their beans, the farmers saw their
incomes climb, but to keep buying from them, he needed to find markets for his
product. And by the middle of 2004, with his family’s home on the line, he
began to panic.
He flew
yet again to London, though this time, after the first two failed trips, he
switched tactics; a distributor he knew in South Africa put him in touch with a
British distributor named David Fine. “This was around the time of Bob Geldof
shouting, ‘Give money!’ ” Fine told me, thinking back to the rock-star-led cry
for African rescue that would reach one of its periodic peaks at the G8 summit
in 2005, in Scotland.
“Every
society that has prospered has done it through trade and not aid,” Rugasira
told Fine when they met in London. Rugasira touched on Asia in recent decades.
“Africa will be no different. Charity doesn’t incentivize. It stifles
innovation. It causes chronic dependency. Africa’s contribution to global trade
is 1 percent. If that were just 2 percent, the increase would bring far more
annual revenue to the continent than all the aid Africa receives in a year.”
Rugasira pledged to channel half of his eventual profits into more equipment
and training for the farmers and to basic educational programs like “financial
literacy” to bolster the village banks, but perhaps most thrilling to Fine was
the contrast between Rugasira’s message and Geldof’s or Bono’s. “Here was
Andrew saying, ‘Aid is not the panacea,’ ” Fine recalled.
Twenty-three
of the world’s 25 poorest countries are in sub-Saharan Africa, where half the
population lives on less than $1.25 a day, and the continent’s resistance to
economic development can be as puzzling to experts as how the fields above
Kasese remained unterraced for so long. Standing on one side of a heated debate
about how best to help is the economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia
University’s Earth Institute. Sachs argues that the forces of private
enterprise can’t bring significant development to sub-Saharan Africa unless
unprecedented international assistance establishes a better foundation of
infrastructure, education and health care. On the opposite side are William
Easterly, a professor of economics at New York University who served for many
years at the World Bank, and Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist and younger
World Bank veteran, whose book “Dead
Aid” was a best seller a few years ago. They lament that
philanthropy to Africa has barely any record of success, that trillions given
since the end of colonialism has accomplished next to nothing. Worse, in Moyo’s
eyes, it has instilled a kind of continental passivity, undercutting
entrepreneurial ambition.
Despite
Rugasira’s words, his company is not purely aid-free. Investors can be all but
impossible to find for African ventures, so over the years about one-eighth of
the funds used to get Good African going have come from the United States
Agency for International Development. In addition, Rugasira’s pitch can sound
like a roundabout appeal to altruistic rather than capitalist impulses: sell
this coffee in your stores because it is the right thing to do. He offers no
muscular advantage in price — like the kind derived from Asia’s cheap,
efficient labor in clothes or computer parts. And his coffee’s distinction in
flavor, however lovely, is relatively subtle: citrus accents arising from
Rwenzori soil and elevations.
So what
real meaning can a company like Good African hold for the continent’s economic
development and competitiveness? Easterly — whose research, in collaboration
with the University of Virginia economist Ariell Reshef, has examined
Rugasira’s company — emphasizes that stark advantages and outsize triumphs,
like China’s, aren’t necessary to the success of individual businesses or to
pushing Africa forward. He stresses that merely reaching the market and holding
your own there can be a major victory for a company like Good African, not only
because the brand may grow gradually but also because when it comes to African
enterprise as a whole, the continent needs to prove, for starters, that in the
world of business, it can just coexist. Sachs adds that what’s termed “the
Asian miracle” began with lesser-known progress in low-level commercial
farming. This is the very thing Good African is fostering around Kasese. And as
for the moral elements in Rugasira’s pitch, it doesn’t take an economist to
point out that an inspiriting message can be a strong capitalist tool.
Listening
to Rugasira’s faith in profit-driven metamorphosis, Fine was moved — “you see
the belief this man has” — and he thought the message might stir others. He
also recognized that here, in the selling of finished goods, was something
potentially far more significant than the “fair trade” purchasing of
third-world beans that the coffee giants like to announce as a feel-good ploy
on their packaging. A few weeks later, one of Fine’s colleagues contacted
Rugasira in Uganda with the news that a buyer at Waitrose was willing to see
him. Rugasira got back on a plane, walked into the chain’s corporate
headquarters and delivered the pitch he’d made to Fine.
“I told
myself, Don’t fidget. Though I don’t anyway. I thought, No sudden moves,”
Rugasira recounted. “I’m an African businessman. To counter the preconceptions,
my etiquette, my preparedness, must be perfect. What general perception do
people have of Africa? Corruption, H.I.V., genocide, celebrities fighting for
dying children. I have to be an ambassador to turn the perception around.
There’s no room for error.”
The
meeting lasted 15 minutes. He left some coffee behind for sampling. “We’ll get
back to you,” he was told. He flew home.
Then the
chain asked for another meeting at its headquarters and, a month later, another.
Now Rugasira was missing payments at his bank and receiving letters from the
bank’s lawyers that grew more and more threatening. It wasn’t until his 12th
London trip that he won Waitrose’s commitment.
He had no
budget for advertising, so he wrote an op-ed for The Guardian, pushing his
product along with his belief in Africa’s economic viability. But Waitrose
alone couldn’t keep the company afloat, couldn’t allow Rugasira to continue
purchasing all that the farmers could grow or save his house. A coffee shop he
and Jackie opened in Kampala, to take advantage of the city’s fledgling
interest in cafes, wasn’t enough help. And his vision of a Kampala roasting
factory remained a fantasy. Good African came in upbeat yellow packs that bore
the brand’s continent-shaped logo, but the coffee was being roasted and
packaged in Ireland.
He needed
another retailer. After an agonizingly long courtship, a buyer at Sainsbury’s,
a much bigger British chain, sent an e-mail one night in 2007 saying that the
corporation wasn’t interested in selling Rugasira’s coffee. Seeing his company
as all but dead and his house as all but gone, Rugasira knelt and prayed on the
floor of his Kampala office. Next, in a frenzy, he got hold of the e-mail
address for Sainsbury’s chief executive and typed out his dreams to a man he’d
never met. Almost dizzy with fervor, he clicked send. He reread his words and
discovered typos. Frantically he tried to recall the message.
In three
weeks’ time, a reply arrived from the C.E.O.’s assistant: “We are planning an
autumn launch” of Good African Coffee.
Wearing a
white lab coat,
Donald Isingoma, a roaster at Good African’s factory in Kampala, listened for
the second crackle of the cooking beans. He stood beside the machinery, the
hulking black cylinder of the roasting drum, the hoppers and the degasser, that
Rugasira was at last able to buy — used, in Turkey — and set into operation two
and a half years ago.
Just
after the second crackle, Isingoma released the beans into a cooling bed.
“Roasting is an art,” Ransley Sokia, the factory’s manager, said proudly. When
I visited the factory in December, he led me through a chipped wooden door to
where two white-coated young women, Faith Asagi and Beatrice Atim, work at a
simple Formica counter, performing what’s known in the business as cupping. In
loud, aspirating snarfs, the delicate-looking pair slurp up tablespoons of
coffee to distinguish flavors and guide the roasters. “Sometimes I taste some
apricot,” Asagi said, her eyes bright. “I’m like, Wow, when I find that.”
At one
end of the factory floor, a modest packaging machine — bought used, in China —
expels eye-catching packs of coffee onto a short conveyor belt. Unlike the
packs of most upscale brands, Rugasira’s don’t have folding fasteners or Ziploc
seals for easy reclosing. For that, he would need an additional $400,000 — the
company’s 2011 gross revenue was $1.2 million — to buy a better machine.
Since
Good African’s start,
Rugasira has been trying to break into American stores. (America’s
specialty-coffee consumption outstrips Britain’s, yet he initially concentrated
on England, because it felt familiar from his college years.) The U.S. market,
he said, “seemed a monstrous labyrinth.” But in 2009, through its African
outreach program, the Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago, one of
America’s most powerful mainstream megachurches, invited Rugasira to address
its annual leadership summit. Soon after his factory opened, he told Good
African’s story and gave his sermon in front of 7,200 in Willow Creek’s indoor
stadium and more than 20,000 by simulcast: “A lot of people with their hearts
in the right places advocate aid, because they somehow believe that through
handouts they’re going to bring about change. But how can that be?” His voice
leapt with incredulity. “Look at the United States — 200 years of
trade-generated growth and prosperity. Look at China. Trade is the only
sustainable way to take societies out of poverty.” Sitting in an upper tier,
Jerry Kehe, a church elder who had just retired as head of one of the largest
distributorships that trucked goods to American supermarkets, was rapt. The
next day Kehe drove Rugasira to see the company’s headquarters — “an eight-mile
conveyor system!” Rugasira marveled to me — where the current C.E.O., who also
heard his speech, declared, “We just feel we need to do something about this.”
Through
the distribution company’s influence, Rugasira recently won shelf space in two
Midwestern chains. The distributorship is also selling Good African online,
with promotional support from an organization of African-American churches he
has long been wooing. In 2012, Rugasira expects to sell $2 million worth of
coffee — around 200,000 pounds — here and in the U.K. and through a newly
signed deal in Austria. For the first time, Good African will turn a profit.
Two
million dollars represents a speck of the world’s market in packaged specialty
coffee. But that speck may also symbolize a bit of hope for sub-Saharan Africa.
Whether Rugasira is right in the part of his thinking that condemns aid, or
whether Sachs is correct in viewing tremendous assistance as crucial, the
continent may be inching upward. Many of its nations, including Uganda, have
seen surges of 5 percent or more in their gross-domestic products during the
last eight years. The increases are dismissed by some because they may largely
reflect the export of natural resources like oil rather than the creation of
goods, like Rugasira’s. Still, a recent McKinsey & Company analysis made
the case that the figures are signs of true change. The report emphasized the
growing number of Africans with at least some disposable income, purchasing
power that is spurring the expansion of businesses. This expansion could lead,
ultimately, to a proliferation of exports to the first world, trade that is
essential to serious advancement.
One day
in Kampala, I went with Rugasira to a conference of about 50 Ugandan
entrepreneurs, from a mobile-phone magnate to the owner of a lone dry-cleaning
shop. There I met a sprightly 29-year-old, Ashish J. Thakkar, who is about to
open call centers in Kampala and across Africa. Thakkar’s family is Indian and
has been living in Uganda for a century, beginning as petty traders. He quit
school at 15 to test his prowess at importing electronics. Several businesses
later, he is setting out to lure the patronage of huge Western corporations
from the call centers of India and the Philippines to his own outfits. The
actual luring is a phase or two away; first he’ll establish a track record by
serving African cellphone companies. His strategy might seem far-fetched,
except that Thakkar’s previous endeavors have made him many millions. And if he
succeeds, it will mean a boon to Africa in tens of thousands of jobs and an
assumption that the continent’s people are capable of professional competence.
In
Katabukenene, a village
perched on a ridge above Kasese that is among the most productive in Rugasira’s
network, growers showed me that since his arrival they have been able to
replace their mud huts with ample brick and zinc houses. They are raising pigs,
adding meat to their diet. One man has bought a blue motorcycle, a
well-polished machine on a hill with no other vehicle in sight. Lately the
villagers have sent two of their young women to train as nurses. A teenage son
of one prolific grower — a grower whose earnings have gone from around $250 a
year in 2004 to $3,500 now — said that he had no intention of becoming a farmer
himself. He plans to be an engineer.
Rugasira
gathered a meeting of 40 of Katabukenene’s farmers. They are among 14,000 who
these days supply Good African, many selling Rugasira one or two 220-pound
sacks per season, some bringing in up to a dozen. The men and women sat on a
low wall outside the shed where they process their beans. The landscape of
Arabicas and plantain trees fell away behind them; the village seemed suspended
in air. Rugasira announced that their coffee was now in the United States, and
he described the three high-speed processing stations, driven by small
electrical generators, that he would soon introduce in their village and in two
other spots in the hills. They would in part substitute for the hand-cranked
pulpers and cumbersome method of soaking. All would be a little more
industrial, a lot more efficient. Wearing a dusty blazer, a grower touched his
head and smiled in astonishment. “I am trying to imagine it,” he said.
And in
Britain and America, meanwhile, Rugasira works to nurture his speck of a
company. In lieu of advertising, he sometimes loiters in the aisles of the stores
that carry his brand. He shifts the packs to an eye-level shelf or casually
asks shoppers: “Have you tried this coffee? I hear it’s really good. It’s from
Africa.”
----
Daniel
Bergner is a
contributing writer and the author of "In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black
in West Africa."
Editor: Ilena
Silverman