How Coca-Cola Got Its Name

Goal: After this lesson you can explain how kola knowledge became Coca-Cola and what biopiracy means. Subject: Social Studies | Run time: about 7 minutes

Quick recall

Last time we walked the pre-dawn cup and the kola road. Two quick questions. One: what is the Achuar pre-dawn guayusa ceremony, drunk together before the sun is up? The Wayus Aramu (Lewis et al., 2003). Two: name one role kola played in West African trade beyond being a snack. Currency, ceremony, diplomacy, or medicine (Pendergrast, 2013).

Why this matters

These economies of relationship did not just fade on their own. They were broken, on purpose, and from the pieces a famous American product took its name. The story of how that happened has a name of its own: biopiracy.

The idea

The disruption came with colonial rule. In the Amazon, colonial missionaries worked to suppress guayusa ceremonies from the 1500s through the 1800s, which broke the chain that passed traditional knowledge from one generation to the next (Pendergrast, 2013). In West Africa, colonial control reshaped the old reciprocity trade into a cash economy, replacing exchange built on long-term relationship with simple buying and selling (Pendergrast, 2013). Then, in 1886, a pharmacist named John Pemberton created Coca-Cola using kola extract (Pendergrast, 2013). The "Cola" in the name comes straight from the kola nut. The drink turned West African traditional knowledge into a commercial product, and it did so without the consent of the communities who had held that knowledge for centuries (Pendergrast, 2013). The plant's value, built over generations of West African use, flowed into a company that gave nothing back to where the knowledge came from. That pattern has a shape, and it repeats. Traditional knowledge becomes a corporate product. The product earns money. And the returns flow right past the originating community, the very people whose knowledge made the product possible (Pendergrast, 2013). A community can spend hundreds of years learning what a plant does and how to use it, and then watch an outside company package that learning and keep the profit. For a long time there was not even a word for this. The word arrived in 1993, when the term biopiracy was coined to name the unauthorized commercialization of traditional knowledge (Pendergrast, 2013). Naming a thing is the first step toward doing something about it. Once people could call it biopiracy, they could argue that it was wrong, and they could start to ask how to stop it.

Picture it

Picture a glass bottle on a shelf, the most recognized product label in the world, and trace the "Cola" in its name back across the ocean to a West African market where, generations earlier, two people sealed an agreement by sharing a bitter nut. The bottle carries the name. The community that gave it meaning is nowhere on the label, and nothing on that label sends value home.

Remember this

The fact to carry out: colonial rule suppressed guayusa ceremonies and turned West African trade into cash, then in 1886 Coca-Cola took its name and its kick from kola without consent, a pattern named biopiracy in 1993, where traditional knowledge becomes a product and the returns flow past the originating community (Pendergrast, 2013).

Quick check

Quick check. What does biopiracy mean? Commercializing traditional knowledge without the consent of the community it came from, so the returns flow past that community (Pendergrast, 2013).

Key Takeaways

Colonial missionaries suppressed guayusa ceremonies from the 1500s to the 1800s, breaking the chain that passed knowledge between generations (Pendergrast, 2013).
Colonial control turned the West African kola reciprocity trade into a cash economy (Pendergrast, 2013).
In 1886 John Pemberton created Coca-Cola using kola extract, commercializing traditional knowledge without consent (Pendergrast, 2013).
Biopiracy is the pattern where traditional knowledge becomes a corporate product and the returns flow past the originating community; the term was coined in 1993 (Pendergrast, 2013).

Sources

Pendergrast, M. (2013). For God, country, and Coca-Cola: The definitive history of the great American soft drink (3rd ed.). Basic Books.