The Contact Tree

Sixty trees were sick. Four thousand three hundred came down. Every step in the chain was correct.

In October 2025 a Cocoa Board officer walks Maame Afua Serwaa's farm at Ntoaso, tree by tree over four days, and marks two hundred and sixty one of them with a paint tin.

Sixty have swollen shoot, a virus identified in Ghana in 1936 for which there is no cure and never has been. One hundred and ninety are perfectly healthy and stand within nine metres of a tree that is not. By February the whole farm is on the ground, and the compensation is one thousand cedis a hectare.

Everything done to her is lawful. The science is right. The determination is right and the officer who makes it can prove it, out loud, in nineteen minutes. The rate is published. The contractor pays for his water and tells his men the pawpaw is to stand. The form Serwaa signs is headed with the word consent, and the woman who hands it to her says, without being asked, that consent changes nothing except whether it happens with her or to her.

Seventy nine years earlier, in a room with a leaking roof on the Gold Coast, a twenty nine year old agricultural assistant is asked to produce that rate. He knows the correct basis is the income a farmer is deprived of. He also knows that no record exists anywhere in the Colony of the yield of a single farm, because cocoa is bought by weight received and by the name of the person delivering, and not by the land it came off. So he uses the only quantity he can measure to a standard he would defend, which is ground, and he writes down in print, in his own name, that it is the wrong basis, and recommends it as an interim measure.

The word interim has been load-bearing for seventy nine years.

Nobody in this novel lies. Nobody steals. No document is hidden and no file is missing. A household is ruined on schedule and in the correct order, and the place where it went wrong is not a person. It is a unit of measurement.

The Contact Tree stands alone. It is set against real and current events, and the Author's Note sets out exactly which parts are documented and which one is invented.