KWADWO ASANTE BOAKYE

Cocoa farmer, Nkosuohene of Besease and a patient man who built a village's future

Cocoa does not forgive impatience, and Kwadwo Boakye was the most patient man in Ashanti. He planted every seedling himself, waited five years for the first pods, and spent the rest of his life teaching others to wait.

Born in Ejisu in 1940, the son of a cocoa farmer, Kwadwo finished middle school at Besease and went straight to the farm. In 1963 he inherited three acres of tired cocoa trees and a debt, and over the next fifty years he turned them into forty acres of the healthiest farm in the district. He kept a notebook of every season's rainfall, every tree's yield and every purchase he made from the Ghana Cocoa Board's licensed buying companies. When prices fell, he mentored younger farmers about shade trees and fermentation. When they rose, he told them not to spend it all at once.

In 1988 the elders of Besease made him their Nkosuohene, the chief of development, after he led a campaign to bring a borehole to the village. In that role he found scholarships for forty children, opened a small clinic with a visiting nurse, and shamed the local officials, politely, into grading the road. He chaired the Ejisu Cocoa Farmers' Cooperative for more than twenty-five years.

He married Akosua Pokua in 1966, and they raised four children and a small army of nephews. He loved fufu with light soup, the song of the early rains on a tin roof, and Asante Kotoko, who he said broke his heart on schedule every season. His son studied at KNUST and now teaches there.

Nana Boakye died peacefully in Kumasi in September 2022, at the start of the main cocoa season. He leaves his wife of fifty-six years, his children, and twenty-three grandchildren.

“Cocoa teaches you that the best things take five years and cannot be hurried.”