Cacao and clay – history that lives in our blood

Cacao was always sacred.

Not the latte. Not the powder in a capsule. But bitter, powerful, warming. A drink for rituals, for initiations, for the heart that wanted to feel. For the Maya, for the Aztec Empire, cacao was a bridge. Between human and divine. Between body and spirit. Between what is visible and what lives unseen.

Then the ships came.

And cacao shifted from sacred to commodity. From drink to profit. From ritual to exploitation.

African bodies were taken to the Americas, forced to work on plantations. Their hands, their backs, their breath — everything was used to keep the plantations running. Cacao, sugar, cotton: the triangular trade drew a line of pain between Africa and South America. The history of cacao is also the history of forced labour, of stolen lives, of names that were never written down.

And yet, despite all of that, cacao kept her soul. She still warms the heart. She still opens the mind. She still invites connection.

Bell Hooks wrote: “Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through the voices of women who loved me enough to tell me the truth about myself.”

That is why we do not drink cacao casually. We drink, and we remember. We taste the bitterness. We feel the heart. We feel the history in our hands, on our tongues, in our bodies.

As Maya Angelou said: “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”The lines of Africa, of South America, of all of us, are woven into cacao. Into the earth. Into the rhythm of breath, heartbeat, hands.

Cacao opens the heart.

Awareness opens history.

And together, in circles, we can honour both.