“Coffee’s a $465 billion industry, and it’s the most traded good for third-world countries after oil and is the most drunk liquid on the planet after water,” says Bartholomew Jones, co-owner of the coffee company Cxffeeblack. “Amidst all of those things, the people who discovered coffee, which are people in Africa, receive less than 1 percent of that revenue.”
Seeing this gap, Jones and his co-owner and wife Renata Henderson wanted to go back to the “root.” “We believe that if we honor the root of the coffee, that’s how we solve the problem surrounding preserving the fruit of coffee,” says Jones. “We learned about the history of coffee that was very different than our experience with coffee growing up and what we had been told about it. And so there was this opportunity for coffee to be this thing that builds communities together, not just for productivity, but rather as a tool to become more connected and curious as people. … Coffee was supposed to be a seed of peace, and it was meant to establish peace, and so that was something that we’re really inspired by and felt like it was a different perspective on coffee that I think a lot of people need to know.”
In 2023, Cxffeeblack embarked on the Cxffeeblack Barista Exchange Program, which brought four African-American aspiring “coffee nerds” on a two-week origin trip to Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Kenya to learn about pre-colonial Black coffee culture. Now it’s in phase two of the program, which means bringing four African baristas to the States to share about their respective coffee cultures. The baristas are Beamlak Melesse Bekele (Ethiopian), Elise Dushimimana (Rwandan), Smayah Uwajeneza (Rwandan), Charles Lukonge (Ugandan), and Mario Alberto (Afro-Colombian).
“We get to welcome our brothers and sisters from across the seas, to come and commune with us and learn our history,” says Henderson. “We were separated at origin, so we call it a family reunion. We get to be reunited with our brothers and sisters that we were taken from, and so it’s a really impactful process, just because we’re able to learn history and skills and the rest, but it’s healing in a different way.”
This phase of the exchange program includes brew ups and collaborative coffee conversations in Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta, and Raleigh-Durham. This week, Memphis can look forward to a screening of Part 1 of the Cxffeeblack docuseries “Cxffee Makes You Black,” a coffee brewing demonstration, and Q&A about the indigenous history and science of coffee at the Museum of Science & History on Thursday. (The docuseries will continue with this phase of the exchange program.) Then, on Saturday, Jones will deliver a TED Talk called “Could You Change the World by Drinking Your Coffee Black?”