‘Everywhere there is coffee there must also be peace. May your house lack no Coffee, nor ‎Peace.’

-Afaan Oromo Blessing

Waaq, the ‘big Black God’ sought peace among humans and between humanity and nature, as recounted by the Oromo people of Ethiopia. Yet, one man tried to thwart his ambition, sowing discord and strife, to Waaq’s dismay. When the man died, Waaq did not rejoice; instead, he grieved deeply, shedding tears over the man’s death. From those tears, the coffee tree emerged. Thus, the coffee tree is regarded as a sacred gift from Waaq, intended to foster peace among people.

This origin story of coffee begins with Blackness—not blackness as a monolithic source of pain and suffering, but as a wellspring of peace, generative activity, and life. This perspective animates contemporary coffee ceremonies, such as the Buna Qalaa ceremony, which is filled with dancing and joy. ‘Buna Qalaa’ translates to ‘coffee slaughter’, symbolizing a sacrifice aimed at establishing peace. Led by women and conducted during weddings and conflict resolutions, the Buna Qalaa ceremony starts with prayers for peace and culminates in the sharing of coffee, symbolizing the consummation of that peace.

The Buna Qalaa ceremony offers a conceptualization and consumption of coffee that contrasts sharply with Western norms. It is rooted in different presuppositions: peace and divine harmony. From these principles arise joy and community. Different presuppositions shape diverse experiences, expectations, and ways of using coffee. When Europeans took coffee and spread it across the world, they were not interested in the insights of the people who discovered it, disregarding and stripping away the values and meanings it held for them. As a result, coffee was reduced to a mere commodity defined solely by its market price.

Yet, by revisiting coffee’s origins, we can rediscover and sample its inherent values and explore ways of reestablishing peace where it should exist. By ‘sampling’, we don’t simply ‘try’ coffee, we use it in a more expansive, hip-hop-inspired sense of creatively borrowing. Sampling involves acknowledging and honouring the past while forging something new. As we construct our futures, coffee invites us to reconnect with a way of being human that we have yet to fully embrace. To contemplate these past and future possibilities, we must return to origin—to the original origin.

In this article, we explore coffee’s origins as a pathway to decolonizing the coffee trade. Stories shape our identity and define our role in the world. The dominant and largely accepted narrative of specialty coffee begins not with the stewards who cultivate it, but rather with a perspective that views these individuals as objects of pity who require management. The narrative perpetuates the idea that to be black and brown equates to suffering, positioning white people in the global north as those who must atone for historical injustices. Ultimately, this story centres on the white experience. Black-led enterprises like as Cxffeeblack challenge this narrative by ontologically honouring the roots of coffee culture. We need a new story that allows us to redefine ourselves.

Coffee holds ancestral significance that often goes undiscussed and unrecognized, yet this history has the potential to empower those who engage with it. By framing coffee as a cultural artifact rather than merely an economic one, we can unlock its new, transformative potential.

To harness this potential, we must view coffee as more than just a means of escaping poverty. A cultural perspective frees us from limiting constraints and fosters innovation. For example, the Gurage people have practised anaerobic fermentation for nearly 500 years, but they were historically penalized for their preferred method because it was deemed defective by exporting companies. Today, however, following the recent re-evaluation of anaerobic fermentation methods as desirable, outsiders are providing funding for training in a process that the locals have been perfecting for centuries. This example illustrates the types of innovation that are often stifled by our preexisting, Western-centric narratives. Our understanding of coffee is shaped by preconceived notions about its purpose and audience—from where and whom innovation is expected to come.

Hip-hop pedagogy, as developed by Chris Emdin and others, views sampling as a method of co-generating dialogue. Sampling transcends mere extraction; it generates unique value in different ways. There are various approaches to sampling. One method involves selecting a portion of the original song, altering its tempo or key, and creating value through recognition. This technique is frequently employed at the beginning of a song, serving as a callback to the original source, and is then looped throughout the track. A more subtle approach involves rearranging chord structures and melodies so that the original becomes nearly unrecognizable. In this case, value comes from the listener’s ability to identify and rediscover the original, creating a sense of co-creation and the importance of honouring the source material. The coffee industry could benefit from adopting this model of sampling.

Most narratives about coffee start with its introduction to Europe, but it is enlightening to trace its origins back to when the seed first encountered humanity—back to the roots in Africa around 850 BCE, specifically among the Oromo people of Ethiopia. Indigenous peoples built a rich culture around this crop, cultivating a deep connection between creature and creation.

Coffee as commodity: Capitalism and colonial legacies

Coffee is often seen as a quintessential colonial product. Its rise to popularity in Europe in the 17th century coincided with the emergence of global capitalism, colonization, and the trade in enslaved people. Coffee was taken from the indigenous peoples of Ethiopia, and its history has been white-washed and distorted from one of communal harmony to one of conflict and exploitation. To envision a future rooted in peace, we must return to a genuine understanding of coffee’s origins.

Coffee, as a capitalist commodity, was born of violence, deeply intertwined with colonization and slavery. Like other commodities, it is detached from its social, cultural, political, and spiritual meanings, reduced to an economic good that can be traded without regard for its origins. This commodification alienates workers from the fruits of their labour and from broader social and cultural networks. In the trade of commodity coffee, the identity of the grower and the nuanced differences between lots become irrelevant; as a commodity, it loses its unique connections to its origin and the people who toiled to grow it. Consequently, starting with the era of Western colonization and slavery, coffee has become emblematic of inequality, alienation, and exploitation.

While we often assert that trade brings people together, it can also perpetuate separation. Marx observed that the essence of a commodity—good made to be traded—lies in the removal of all social ties, cultural values, and embedded meanings associated with it. In his view, commodities are alienated from the intricate web of relationships that brought them into existence, ultimately reduced to a single metric: price.

Nearly every retelling of coffee’s history begins with colonial powers imposing a system that dominated black and brown people, fetishizing the material aspect of coffee, focusing on the seed.

Coffee companies, in their marketing, typically present this history in two ways: by emphasizing either the materiality of coffee and its seed-to-cup journey or the violence visited on marginalized groups. While the material process and the brutal history of coffee are important to acknowledge, why do we start with the physical seed or violence? What alternative stories exist that could offer a different perspective on coffee and, more importantly, a richer understanding of what it means to be human?

Coffee and Community: Origins

If we delve deeper, we find that coffee’s history starts not with violence, but with peace—a means of celebrating and fostering sociability and reinforcing community through Ethiopian coffee rituals and social practices. Bartholomew Jones writes:

When I travelled to Africa, as an African American, I sought restore my humanity in light of the dehumanization our ethnic group endured. In coffee, we found an opportunity—not only for African Americans but also for descendants of indigenous communities worldwide—to reconnect with our origins and reclaim our humanity through this crop that has been historically linked to dehumanization. The Amhara origin story serves as an effort to rehumanize our species, reminding us that we had strayed from our path, and coffee is a gift that helps us to rehumanize and reestablish a sense of Shalom, or peace.

During my first trip to Ethiopia in 2021, Ture Waji shared with me an indigenous, precolonial history from the southern region of Ethiopia, centred around a black god, black people, and a black beverage that connects them to all of Creation. He spoke of coffee blessings, saying ‘Buna fi nagaaya hin dhabina,’ and explained that they believe the big God, Waaq, is black. He even mentioned that traditionally, people have practised fortune-telling using coffee grounds.

That experience was overwhelming, especially since it was my first time in Africa; I cried 11 times. My host, Mike Mamo, affectionately teased me, calling me a big baby during our journeys together. On returning home, I took time to reflect on the indigenous perspective I had encountered and how it intersected with my own as a black man in America. Imagining an uncolonized possibility within a community of Afro-descended people in a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood, felt almost like science fiction prior to meeting the Oromo people. The blessing, ‘May your house lack no coffee nor peace, or everywhere there is coffee, there is peace,’ resonated so deeply with my vision of what coffee could represent for our multiversal selves. Discovering this connection felt, in many ways, ways more real than reality itself. It was like uncovering the name of my family bloodline, speak in my native tongue for the first time, and finally falling in love. It felt like peace.

Wherever there is coffee, there must also be peace—this is my interpretation of that blessing. Perhaps its an application of my Sunday School theological vocabulary. Chemically speaking, wherever coffee exists in its natural state, there is literal peace, right? On a biological level, the ingestion of this plant has been shown to provide numerous benefits that could be seen as peace for our species. This is a fact we can all agree on. In its blackness, coffee brings peace.

However, historically, especially for global indigenous populations and their descendants in the diaspora, colonial powers have worked to distort this truth through the introduction of what I would summarize as a whole lot of sugar and cream. And so while there has always been and naturally is peace in coffee, we must also advocate for it today. History compels us to hold accountable the false narratives born of oppression and to honour the truths that our indigenous elders share. My roots remind me that the true science fiction lies in colonial existence. This blessing, too, is a commandment—a new manifest destiny that calls us to return to this fruit and honour the purpose it was always meant to serve: Peace for all our homes.

This was my first time realizing that there are aspects of coffee that God intended to convey, but which never been communicated to the world. Coffee requires something from us. It, along with Creation, asks us to engage in the process of understanding and filtration. The tools for this process are not refractometers or WDTs. I learned this from an indigenous man in Ethiopia during a five-hour ride to the Guji Zone three years ago. I’m still searching for the words to describe what happened when I met his elders in November ’24.

Coffee was spread by force rather than faith, which often obscures its deeper, more human beliefs—those that are indigenous, righteous, and less focused on transactional consumerism. As a child of its diaspora eager to learn more, I found no resources in America. There were no classes or courses offered through the official coffee-knowledge hubs that addressed this aspect. In the midst of a gentrifying neighbourhood of the blackest city in America per capita, where Tyre Nichols had just been killed and adult reading level were below fourth grade, we desperately needed this knowledge. We aimed to create it, to figure out how to bring the blessing of coffee to life in our new home. We were trying to channel its essence here, but we had no clear sources to guide us. We did have a book on the history of the Gadaa system, recommended by Ture Waji, which offered fascinating historical insights into how coffee functioned in pre-colonial times, but it lacked context for our current environment in America. As a child of 36 Mafia and Kanye West, I found no blueprint for how to remix these influences—how to chop the sample.

Fast forward to November 2023: I arrived with six other black Americans, later joined by Lem Butler and Anthony Ragler who were there on behalf of Black and White Coffee Roasters, to a gathering of over 20 indigenous spiritual and cultural leaders, including Aba Gedas and Hade Sinques. They had travelled more than 10 hours to meet us, a group representing Africa’s stolen seeds, reconvened in the birthplace of humanity. We came to learn from the roots shared between our heritage and coffee’s heirloom varietals, exploring how to truly connects with the gifts of our Motherland. Our aim was to create and centre peace, rather than the pain that many of us had come to associate with being descendants of the slave trade, cash crop capitalism, gentrification, and colonialism.

We were introduced to numerous reimaginings of coffee’s role within our species, far beyond what I can expound here. We learned about the significance of the titles Aba Geda and Hade Sinque, and the central role and spiritual authority that black women have held in coffee’s origin. We learned how coffee mediates our relationship with the plants that grow alongside it and ourselves. We learned the value of coffee as a bridge between humanity’s shortcomings and our Creator’s design.

The part of the events in that room I feel compelled to speak on is how coffee became a means to reclaim a name, a title, and an identity that encapsulated my humanity with words I desperately needed but never had access to. These are words that all the YouTube videos, Instagram posts, and coffee conferences never knew to offer. In Addis, Ababa, after roughly two hours of academic presentation, cultural prayer, ceremony, and ritual, with Buna Qualla fresh on our lips, my wife Renata and I were invited to sit in front of the Hade Sinques. In that small room at the Ramada, I was named an African American Aba Geda, and Renata an African American Hade Sinque. That moment forever changed our lives.

Coffee as a force for connection and democracy

Coffee has long been anchored in a world far richer than bare commodification. It has served as a bridge between people, woven into the rhythms of daily life. However, today we primarily view coffee as a commercial product, stripping it of its relational qualities. The difficulty we face in envisioning coffee as anything other than a commodity highlights the depth of our severance from indigenous ways of being with one another. Yet, by centring coffee as a medium for democracy, agency, and freedom, we could catalyse transformative change.

Anthropologist David Graeber, in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, argues that debt lies at the heart of commodities. Debts are settled to right wrongs or to end relationships. Once a debt is paid, the connection is dissolved, leaving us at standstill and needing to start afresh. In a commodified world, coffee exemplifies this transactional function: we grab our drink, swipe our card, and sever the social tie. In contrast, Ethiopian indigenous practices view coffee as a way to mend and deepen relationships, especially during times of conflict. These ceremonies emphasize reconciliation over division, encouraging lasting bonds instead of just balancing a cold ledger.

The Ethiopian ‘buna’ coffee ceremony embodies a different economy entirely—one where markets operate on the periphery while social life flourishes at the centre. In these ceremonies, smallholder farmers don’t focus on market prices or scales; they gather in spaces defined by storytelling, peacebuilding, and trust. Graeber often argued that we are transformed more by direct experience than by knowledge, suggesting a valuable lesson we might apply to coffee: to fully appreciate coffee’s potential as a connector, we should engage in communal activities that transform not just how we see coffee, but how we live with each other.

Imagine incorporating buna ceremonies led by people rooted in these traditions to practise peacebuilding through coffee. This shift would move our focus from the sensory quality of the drink to the quality of our relationships—an essential change that psychotherapist Esther Perel reminds us sits at the core of a meaningful life.

However, the story of coffee as we know it is largely dominated by tales of trade and consumption—waves and trends devoid of human stories. We hear about coffee’s commercial journey but know little of the people who cultivate it or the festivals that celebrate it. Ethiopian coffee culture extends far beyond the tale of Kaldi and his goats; it encompasses a rich social universe where coffee binds communities, promotes reconciliation, and highlights what we’ve lost in our market-centric view. Reimagining coffee as a unifying force rather than a divisive one may not only be healing but might also serve as an act of democratic reclamation, and the lessons as to how we might do so are there in Ethiopian coffee festivals.

Lessons from Ethiopia on connection and resilience

In the global north, coffee festivals in cities like Amsterdam and Prague celebrate the beverage through competitions, tastings, and workshops—showcasing the ‘best’ coffees, the most skilled baristas, and refined tastes. At these events, coffee becomes a spectacle, with competition taking centre stage. The product is admired, analysed, and awarded—a means to celebrate individual achievement rather than shared experience.

In contrast, Ethiopian coffee culture is deeply embedded in community and rhythms of daily life. Coffee plays a central role in family gatherings, mourning rituals, and religious celebrations like Meskel, Timket, and Fasika. The coffee ceremony, known as ‘buna’, focuses on nurturing kinship and continuity. Instead of separating participants into different categories—like, tasters, baristas, and judges—or pitting them against one another, buna gatherings prioritize connection and equal participation. They transmit cultural knowledge and promote a vision of equality, where coffee unites people rather than ranking them.

This relational aspect of coffee extends beyond celebration; it has served as a quiet yet powerful form of resistance. Under the Derg regime, for example, the coffee ceremony became a way—one of very few ways, in fact, the regime choosing not to infiltrate or surveil these ceremonies—to preserve community amid repressive measures. Mothers and elders would gather over coffee, creating a social sanctuary for families while youth evaded conscription. In this context, coffee transcended cultural ritual to become a thread of resilience, weaving together people and stories when other bonds were under threat.

Today, Ethiopian coffee ceremonies continue to heal and connect, even within diaspora communities. Initiatives like ‘Kaffa Interventions’, blend Ethiopian coffee rituals with Western therapeutic practices, providing those in grief a way to gather and find solace collectively. Once again, coffee creates a space not of consumption but of connection, reminding us that this ritual is rooted in relational practices that cross borders and alleviate the isolation of exile.

In light of these Ethiopian traditions, how might we reimagine coffee culture in the Global North? Could we shift from individualism to embrace the ceremony’s focus on cooperation and connection? Graeber’s call for ‘indigenous critique’ reminds us that indigenous peoples have significantly influenced democratic ideals, including equality and self-determination. By reclaiming coffee as a communal experience, we can honour not only the sensory qualities of the drink but also quality of our relationships, establishing coffee as a medium for real connection where competition falls away, and community rises in its place.

Decolonizing coffee and the Cxffeeblack philosophy

We should recognize and embrace coffee’s role in community building rather than deny it. This perspective allows us to view coffee as a relational entity rather than a strictly commercial one. Coffee’s significance is multifaceted and context-dependent, not simply an abstract commodity defined solely by price and grade. The notion of decolonizing aims to uncover and dismantle historical structures of marginalization. More radically, it questions the fundamental ideas of rationality, individuality, and capitalism to create a new, better future. The Western colonial perspective compartmentalizes economics, culture, politics, science, and religion into separate categories, imposing hierarchies that prioritize economics over culture perpetuating exclusionary structures rooted in the history of the slave trade.

As Bartholomew Jones, who, along with his wife Renata Henderson, founded Cxffeeblack in Memphis, Tennessee, put it, what excites him the most is not just talking about coffee, but narratives of people at the source. He emphasizes the importance of providing these people with the opportunity to express their ideas and creative works about coffee—what it is, what it means, and what it could mean. The voices of farmers are crucial to the cultural fabric of coffee, as they create art within their communities, whether through photography, music, song, dance or other forms. Their creative expressions serve as powerful evidence of what is possible and what is currently missing. This includes exploring fermentation processes or discovery wild varietals and species in their natural environments —not just as a means to bolster sustainability, but to affirm what coffee should have sustained all along.

We need to sell coffee as authentically as art, originating from a pure place. Otherwise, we risk overlooking its human value and falling into transactional relationships. While money is important, the focus should be on recognizing shared values and exchanging unique contributions to obtain something that individuals cannot produce on their own. This should be the essence of trade. However, producing communities have often been denied the opportunity to articulate what actually holds value to them within the context of coffee. As a result, trade remains inauthentic, lacking genuine human engagement.

The Cxffeeblack model partners with producers to share what they deem valuable, allowing people to agree upon it and then trade accordingly. When black people engage with coffee, they often experience joy, yet the industry tends to supress this. Historically, the first coffee professionals celebrated the process with dancing, singing, and prayer before they brewed. We want our coffee shop to evoke the atmosphere of barbershop or hair salon, connecting us back to Africa and its roots.

The Cxffeeblack model (1) confronts the structures of the neo-colonial system by establishing an all-black supply chain; (2) challenges the foundational conceptual framework by linking coffee with community, spirituality, and political liberation; and (3) envisions a future distinct from the current colonial legacy system:

The Cxffeeblack Model: An Imperative to Honour the Root

1. Most coffee narratives begin when coffee meets Europe, but I am far more interested in what happened when the seed met humanity. What did the first indigenous peoples create around this crop to cultivate such a lasting bond between creature and creation? To uncover this, we must return to the roots, to Africa in 850 BCE, to the southern regions of the Horn, with the Oromo people of Ethiopia.

‘Everywhere there is coffee there must also be peace. May your house lack no Coffee, nor Peace.’

— Afaan Oromo Blessin

2. While we may not fit the traditional consumer profile for ‘sustainable’ brands, our journey to Honor Our Root in coffee has led us to collaborate with the planet’s oldest coffee farming communities, which practise indigenous organic methods. We connect these communities through an all-black supply chain to those facing rapid gentrification due to environmental racism and hyper-capitalism, thereby addressing economic and environmental sustainability challenges.

3. Cxffeeblack is dedicated to showcasing our commitment to a an authentic ‘Honor Your Root’ approach. We aim to reconnect people with the indigenous practices and ideologies that have been upheld by communities at origin for centuries, long before the term ‘sustainability’ was coined. We believe that the fight for planetary sustainability should be led by those whose displacement spurred the need for such efforts. Many farmers face penalties for lacking organic certification, despite the fact that coffee’s inception is rooted in nature. Additionally, many in the diaspora are criticized for having an unsophisticated palate and for not engaging in coffee’s modern refinement. The absence of sustainable practice in both coffee and society is not due to the indigenous people or their descendants, but rather the result of the greed of those who exploited its production.

4. We all share a common ancestry, and our humanity is inherently intertwined within a framework of mutuality. If we fail to Honor Our Root, we may find that in our moment of greatest need, there will be no fruit to return to. If we embrace blackness not as a lack of colour, but as the embodiment of all colours, what would it truly mean if we collectively committed to drinking our Cxffeeblack?

5. What if we envisioned a world where the guardians of coffee knowledge were those who nurtured it at its origin, rather than those who exploited it for profit? Drawing from the sacred sustainable practices of the Gadaa system of the Oromo people in Ethiopia, we have experienced a shift in our understanding of what consuming coffee requires of us. The Honor Your Root campaign presents an opportunity to shift the paradigm by sharing this newfound perspective, learned from our elders at the Root, with the broader coffee-consuming community. Imagine a world where coffee is sourced from the hands of its original stewards, rather than from those who have historically enslaved their labour? What new ideas, concepts, varietals, scientific advancements, or culinary explorations could emerge from such a lineage? What new discoveries could arise from truly Honoring Our Root?