Author-historian Sara Byala had an epiphany about Coca-Cola’s role in African life and culture in 2003. She and a group of fellow graduate students had found their way across Mali’s Saharan Desert via an arduous journey that involved a broken-down jeep followed by bouts of hiking and hitchhiking.
When the exhausted group reached a Niger River ferry stop the next day, the pause that refreshes took on new meaning. “Boarding, grimy and parched, we are offered — as in a dream — ice-cold Coca-Cola,” she writes in her book, “Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African.”
At the time, she wondered, “How is this here … Where was this bottled, how was it transported and, most importantly, how was this cooled?”
Good questions, all — which she pursued and now answers in her new book. After writing it, Byala, associate director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Global Documentary Institute and a senior lecturer in critical writing there, has come to conclude “that an ice-cold Coke far up the Niger River was as much about Mali as it was emblematic of an American corporation’s reach.”
If this sounds a bit like an explanation for how the blog you are reading came to be called “Goats and Soda,” you are not far off.
“The blog is aptly named,” Byala affirmed in a telephone conversation about how Coca-Cola and Africa became so intertwined — and the pluses and minuses of their shared history.
Byala also explained how the American multinational company made its soda seem “local” in even the most out-of-the-way areas in Africa, how the company dealt with divestment and apartheid and how the company is addressing health and environmental challenges.
Here are excerpts from the interview, which has been edited and condensed for clarity and space:
How big is Coca-Cola’s footprint in Africa?
It’s huge. The company employs about 70,000 people in Africa. [Each of] these jobs in turn supports between four…
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