OUR HISTORY
OUR BEGINNINGS:
JIGORO INVESTMENTS CAMEROON
Abbia Cocoa was started with seed money from Jigoro Investments, NFP, a not-for-profit 501(c)3 dedicated to sustainable, ethical investments in Cameroon and other under-developed sub-Saharan countries.
In addition to supporting the construction of fermentation boxes, drying racks and storage houses, much of Jigoro’s focus for the past year has been on logistics: to build a parallel infrastructure to allow quality beans to be produced and shipped from the heart of industrialized cocoa production.
ABBIA:
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
Abbia was a popular gambling game played in Cameroon for centuries through the mid-1950s. The chips were made from nuts of the native Elan tree. Men engraved images on the small nuts to represent aspects of their daily lives and used them as betting chips. Each engraved nut represents an object, land, human, or spiritual event. The gambling game would often last an entire night. When German colonists arrived in the late 19th century, they forbade the game due to its excessive, and sometimes tragic, results. More information can be found here.
Engraved chips dating from the visits of early Portuguese explorers in the 1700s have been found. The Abbia game is one of the few artifacts that remain of Cameroon’s indigenous culture and represents an essential aspect of local history.