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What Have My Cocoa Beans Got to Do with Canada?
A Journey on the Global Sociological Imagination Lane

I was barely five when my auntie "borrowed" me to live with her in the village of Teawiah in a remote part of the Eastern Region of Ghana. As a child growing up in the village, I planted a great deal of cocoa beans and seedlings. At the age of eight I was already growing cocoa beans on my auntie and uncle's farms. Planting cocoa beans and seedlings was my part of the division of labour on the farm. And I did this for more than 10 years.

"So what?" you ask. This little slice of my life-story will offer you a lucid lesson in the global sociological imagination. The global sociological imagination is based on the assumption that our individual biographies are not written or created by us alone as individuals, but are also the collective products— actions and indeed inactions— of legions of people, many of who live in far-flung corners of our global landscape, and whose paths may never cross ours in our lifetime. The global sociological imagination is an extension of American sociologist Charles Wright Mills' sociological imagination (1959), which posits a link between personal biographies and societal histories, private problems and public issues, the present with the past. Having the global sociological imagination enables us to develop a keen awareness of the fact that our actions, seemingly inconsequential, do have ramifications, rippling far beyond our immediate environments and our shores.

Think about it. Have you eaten chocolate or had a cup of cocoa drink or hot chocolate of late? If you have, chances are that the chocolate bar you ate or the cocoa drink you had contained beans from the cocoa trees I planted some thirty years ago in Teawiah, a.k.a. Owiafi (Sunrise Village). Canada imports cocoa beans and cocoa products from various countries, including Ghana. Thus, the cocoa beans I planted as a child are today providing nourishment to you and hundreds of thousands of your compatriots and employment to even more Canadians who work in the chocolate industry.

That is not all. All my education, from high school to graduate school, was paid for by people I call my unsung heroes and heroines in villages and cottages across Ghana. Money set aside by cocoa farmers in Ghana in the form of the Cocoa Marketing Board Scholarship Scheme financed my education. And here I am today, an instructor in Canada, helping in my own small way, to educate the future leaders of this country, my new found home.

But my education would have been impossible without Canadians buying cocoa products, including chocolate and cocoa drinks. What's more, my biography as a Ghanaian-Canadian professor is ineluctably linked with the roles and actions of individuals and forces in the history Ghana, including Ghana's national hero, Tetteh Quarshie, the Ghanaian farmer, who introduced the plant from the Fernado Po Island (in New Guinea), now called Bioko and the British colonial administration, which encouraged/forced Ghana to specialize in cocoa production as part of her grand scheme of imperial division of labour.

Canadian communication studies scholar and social philosopher Marshall McLuhan put us all in the Global Village, where willy-nilly, for better or for worse, we inhabitants are increasingly becoming interconnected, integrated, intermixed, intermingled, and interdependent. Whatever happens at one corner of the village affects all of us almost instantaneously.