When the Cocoa Trees Fell

Aboase, Ghana, 1992. Every cocoa tree in the village bears a fresh red cross, and the notice on the chapel board gives the farmers seven days before Operation Halt returns to clear what it calls encroachment. Maame Serwaa Kwarteng has eighteen years of receipts, a tin box of proof that her land is her own, and a husband who disappeared photographing a night convoy two years before. When the land clerk who kept the village's secrets is found hanging in his own drying shed, every finger on both hands broken, Serwaa and a captain of the Ghana Armed Forces begin pulling at a single thread: confiscated cocoa recorded as destroyed and quietly sold, forest boundaries redrawn around whichever farms are worth taking, and a chairman in a well-cut kaftan who signs nothing himself and is liked by everyone who meets him. Inspired by the real forest-enforcement campaigns of Ghana's early 1990s and drawn from the author's own eyewitness memory of them, When the Cocoa Trees Fell is a novel of paperwork and violence, of a widow who believes evidence is enough, and of a village that finds out, over one compressed and murderous week, exactly what that belief costs.