NMH Magazine : Fall 2005

The Way to Sweet Unity

David Robinson ’70, son of baseball legend Jackie Robinson, has forged a life deep in the Tanzanian bush, far from suburban Connecticut where he grew up. A coffee grower and social activist, he’s trying to make things better for coffee farmers in Africa, and in the process, create a model of progressive economic development.

One morning last year, David Robinson ’70 woke up early on Sweet Unity Farms, his 280-acre patch of land deep in the southern highlands of Tanzania. At that peaceful hour, he stood outside the mud-brick farmhouse and prepared a cup of instant coffee, a somewhat tragic irony given that he was looking out on row after row of trees bearing some of the best Arabica coffee beans in the world.

Robinson had arrived at the farm the previous night, and as he stirred his coffee (the good stuff would be roasted much later, in Brooklyn), he remembered that he had been greeted in the village with the news that a lion had been spotted nearby. “But then I remembered that it was a spirit lion, sent by somebody in the village as a hex on an enemy. So I think, I wasn’t even here. It couldn’t have been sent for me, right? And then I think, What the hell am I doing here, thinking about spirit lions?”

It’s a reasonable confusion for a man who straddles two worlds—routinely traveling between the farm, which has no water and only enough solar electricity to power a few lightbulbs and a radio, and an office in a midtown Manhattan skyscraper. To get to Sweet Unity Farms, which lies in the agriculturally rich Mbozi District, you first take a 12-hour bus ride from Dar es Salaam, on the coast, to the small town of Mbeya, near the Zambian border. The next morning you jump on a packed minivan, or dalla-dalla, for a careening hour-and-a-half ride to a dusty intersection called Mlowo. From there, you hire a Land Rover or pickup for the skull-jouncing trip to yet another, even smaller crossroads. Then you walk for three hours—past grass-roofed huts, grazing cattle, and neat plots of peanuts, corn, and coffee.

It’s a long trip from almost anywhere. It’s far from the sleek confines of Danny Meyer’s Union Square Café in downtown Manhattan, where Sweet Unity Farms coffee is sipped by customers almost certainly not preoccupied by lions, spirit or otherwise. It’s far from the leafy, lily-white streets of suburban Connecticut, where Robinson grew up. And it’s far from the Brooklyn blocks where Ebbets Field once stood and where David’s father, Jackie, changed the course of American history more than half a century ago.

The most immediate answer to his question—What the hell is he doing here?—has to do with those rows of spindly green trees. Coffee is one of the world’s most ubiquitous and problematic commodities; among legal natural resources, it has an annual trade value second only to oil. The world drinks some 2.25 billion cups of coffee a day, with the US accounting for a fifth of that. And yet—from Central America to Brazil to Indonesia to Africa—the actual producers of coffee consistently rank among the poorest in the world.

The last ten years of globalization and trade liberalization have only made things worse. For years, coffee prices had been kept stable by international compacts known as the “green-bean agreements.” In the mid-’90s these agreements collapsed, allowing prices to plummet from a two-decade average of $1.29 per pound to a low in 2001 of 46 cents. Meanwhile it’s all but impossible to grow good coffee for less than a dollar a pound.

What David Robinson is doing in Africa is attempting to use his unique position to make things better. He’s formed a cooperative of approximately 300 small coffee farms which, rather than selling its raw coffee to multinational buyers in Tanzania, is marketing it directly in the United States. Against enormous odds, he’s trying to create a model of progressive economic development that both links his two worlds and carries on his father’s legacy.

Even without Jackie Robinson’s well-recounted trials and triumphs, the Robinson-family story is a great American saga—one that parallels, nearly step for step, the progress of African Americans in the 20th century. Jack Roosevelt Robinson, the son of sharecroppers, was born in Cairo, Georgia, in 1919. When he was still an infant, his mother, Mallie, joined the great migration out of the South, settling her family in the growing middle-class black community of Pasadena, California.

Seeing athletics as a way to improve his lot, Jackie became a stellar all-around athlete. Like millions of other black Americans, he served in the army during World War II. Though he would become famous for “having the guts not to fight back,” in Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey’s famous phrase, he was court-martialed after an altercation with an officer who had asked him to sit in the back of a public bus. (He was cleared of all charges.) Later he would travel to Birmingham to give a speech with Martin Luther King Jr. And in between he racked up a Hall of Fame career in the face of vicious verbal assaults, death threats, and almost unimaginable pressure.

Jackie and Rachel Robinson already had two children—Sharon and Jackie junior—when David was born in 1952. Five years later Jackie left baseball and accepted the job of vice president at Chock full o’Nuts. The family moved from the upper-middle-class black suburb of St. Albans—where their neighbors had included Count Basie, Leontyne Price, and Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella—to a big house surrounded by woods in the mostly white community of Stamford, Connecticut.

On the surface, the move provided a suburban idyll of the Robinson children. And of the three children, David, gregarious and easygoing, seemed to have the smoothest adjustment to life in white society. He put on a blazer and khakis to attend posh New Canaan Country School, where for eight years he was the only black student. David’s class pictures are strikingly reminiscent of his father’s early team photos—one dark face surrounded by pale ones.

There are more than 36 million people in Tanzania, and it often seems as though David Robinson knows every one of them. His family alone represents a fair-size constituency: Robinson has ten children, ranging in age from 41 to one year (three from his first marriage in the States; a daughter, Meta, born to a Namibian girlfriend in 1985; and six with his Tanzanian-born wife, Ruti). Another child, Jack, died of malaria at age six. Plus there is an extensive network of in-laws working on the farm.

At 53 Robinson is tall and powerful. A white, woolly beard creeps from below the collar of his khaki shirt to his cheekbones. His bright eyes are clearly inherited from his father, as are the large hands with a slight crook in the middle finger. Robinson has a habit of running them over his head when deep in thought. He looks every inch the African elder—a vaunted role he clearly relishes.

Robinson first came to Africa at 14 on a trip with his mother and was entranced. “It wasn’t any kind of major political analysis,” he says. “But subconsciously there had to be a joy at being on a black continent and seeing so many black people.”

The few other African Americans living in Dar es Salaam think Robinson is a bit nuts for living the way he does on his farm. At dinner Clark Arrington regales the small group of guests with a description of the epic trip needed to get to Sweet Unity Farms. Arrington, who is from Philadelphia and wears a mustache and black, thick-rimmed glasses, was a founding board member of Equal Exchange, one of the first fair-trade coffee companies in America. He currently works as the representative to Tanzania of the US government’s African Development Foundation (ADF) and recently helped secure a $210,000 loan for the farmers’ collective. Still, having been to Robinson’s farm once, he has zero interest in a return visit.

“It’s not just country,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s bush.”

Truth be told, many native Tanzanians think Robinson’s a bit nuts, too. Convincing Africans, many of whom have struggled mightily to get off the farm and to Dar, to return and take up the plow is one of Robinson’s biggest challenges. But Robinson believes strongly in Pan-Africanism, which posits that the best way to address the problems of both Africans and the African diaspora is to build cultural and especially economic ties between the two groups. And he’s committed to assimilating almost entirely into African culture.

Nowhere is this commitment more striking than in his traditional, arranged marriage. In 1990, having been in Tanzania for eight years, Robinson decided it was time to remarry. He found a family to adopt him into the Wanyamwezi tribe and went calling on families with daughters of marrying age. His resulting marriage to Ruti seems by all measures to be a loving and respectful relationship, and Robinson has declined to take further wives, unusual for a man of his stature. But there’s no denying that it’s a very un-Stamford arrangement.

On the endless bus ride from Dar es Salaam to Mbeya, Robinson sits stoically. He makes the trip about once a month and will spend the entire harvest season in Mbozi. This time he’s traveling with a US postal service sack filled with solar panels. Bringing cheap solar energy to the village is one of the ways in which branding and selling coffee in the United States improves the lives of the members of his cooperative—along with setting up a system of farm credits, building a school, establishing a pharmacy, founding a multimedia entertainment-and-education center, and bringing in pure water.

All of these initiatives require shockingly small amounts of money, but money is a constant problem. Although Robinson has not sought official Fairtrade certification (it’s a way of “draining off” the sympathy of liberal buyers, he says) and prefers the term “direct trade,” the concepts are much the same. Both are essentially exercises in public relations. It’s the “story”—of sustainable agriculture, decent labor practices, and, in Robinson’s case, a unique family heritage—that adds value to the product.  (Though Sweet Unity’s sales materials include references to the “tradition of Jackie Robinson,” Robinson refuses to use his father’s image on the coffee’s packaging.)

Telling the story—to gourmet buyers, “green” investors, and socially conscious businesses—requires a dedicated sales-and-marketing force in the States. When he started Sweet Unity Farms, Robinson had a US partner to handle this end of the business. But the partner went bankrupt, and for the past ten years, except for one or two associates working on a volunteer basis, the job has been his.

At the same time, just as it wasn’t enough for Jackie Robinson to simply be the first black major leaguer—he also had to be a fantastic ballplayer—Sweet Unity Farms coffee has to be competitive in both quality and price.

“Everybody’s got a conscience,” Robinson says, “But they also have calculators.”

  To keep pace, Robinson crisscrosses the globe, pitching CEOs in gleaming, air-conditioned American offices and then dashing home to repair hand-cranked pulping machines.

Things aren’t all grim: Robinson has made inroads with Cendant, a travel-and-real-estate giant that controls millions of cups of coffee drunk by Americans each day. On the gourmet side, his coffee is available at Union Square Café and at Fairway Markets in New York and through the Sweet Unity Farms website.

After New Canaan Country  School, Robinson left home    to attending boarding school      at Northfield Mount Hermon.        There was unrest in the Robinson household. Jackie junior had volunteered to serve in Vietnam and returned home with an addiction to heroin. In 1968 he was arrested for gun and drug possession and ordered into rehab.

Away at school, David found himself among black classmates for the first time. It was the late ’60s, and in keeping with the era, he joined the black student union. Similar movements were sweeping the nation, as Martin Luther King Jr.’s integrationist philosophy began to give way to the more militant, identity-based politics of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. As he moved through NMH and on to Stanford University, David became more and more political—influenced in part by the writings of Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s intellectual socialist leader.

The summer after David’s freshman year at Stanford, Jackie junior was killed in a car accident while driving David’s 1969 MG Midget. With his mother and father devastated, it was David who went to identify the body. “His strength was magnificent,” Jackie wrote in his autobiography, I Never Had It Made. Several months later, David took the insurance money from the car and went back to Africa.

When Robinson returned to Africa, he went hitching across the eastern half of the continent. He spent a month in Dares Salaam, which, at the height of the Pan-African movement, was home to a large number of expatriate African Americans drawn by Nyerere’s progressive politics. After nine months, Robinson found himself in a traveler’s hut in Kenya. Someone had left a copy of Newsweek there and he picked it up. On the cover was news of the Attica prison riots.

“It was the realization that my brother could have been in Attica—that my brothers were in Attica—that had me thinking I had not resolved my life or work issues in America. That had me thinking, It’s time to get back home.”

It was ten years before Robinson returned to Tanzania. Back home, Jackie’s health was deteriorating—the result of advancing diabetes and, perhaps, a lifetime of stress. David worked for his father as a driver, and then as a writer and photographer for a film company. On October 24, 1972, Jackie Robinson died at the age of 53. The funeral in Harlem was packed with 2,500 people, and mourners lined the route of the blocks-long motorcade to Cypress Hills National Cemetery in Brooklyn.

David Robinson got married. He adopted his wife’s two children, and the couple had another daughter of their own. The family moved to 136th Street in Harlem and, with two partners, Robinson cofounded an alternative-housing company, United Harlem Growth, dedicated to reclaiming the neighborhood.

But he had also returned from Africa in a state of turmoil. His daughter Susan’s classmates called him GI Joe for the army fatigues he always wore. He fought frequently, both with members of the Harlem community and with the police. After a childhood spent compromising with white culture, Robinson says, “I wasn’t so much in a ‘bend’ mode. And a black male in America really has to be in a bend mode or plan to go to jail or the graveyard.”

Above all, the decade in Harlem was a lesson in lost opportunities. “We could have acquired eighty percent of Harlem at the rate of five hundred dollars a brownstone,” he says. “But we weren’t psychologically prepared. We were hard-core, but we were too hard-core.”

With Africa constantly on his mind, he swore not to let the continent’s vast resources slip away as easily. In 1982, amid divorce proceedings, Robinson made plans to go to Tanzania again, this time for good.

A coffee-plantation is a thing   that gets hold of you and    does not let you go,” wrote      Isak Dinesen in Out of         Africa. The living          quarters at Sweet Unity Farms—four low mud structures arranged around a packed-dirt courtyard—overlook rolling green hills lined with trees. In a corner of the compound lies the tidy grave of David and Ruti’s son Jack. You can almost see relief wash over Robinson as he breathes deeply and we climb the final hill to his home.

Dinesen also wrote, “Coffee growing is a long job.” Robinson first arrived in Mbozi in 1989, after years spent in Dar es Salaam selling everything from fish to refrigerators to Ethiopian jewelry. He requested land from the village council in exchange for his help in bringing in a better price for the local coffee. Just to see the 280 forested acres they offered, he had to climb the highest nearby tree. “I think the village odds on our sticking out the first year were like one thousand to one,” he says.

Robinson and his eldest son, Howard, spent two years clearing the area by hand and ox, then four years waiting for the first plantings to sprout. The first beans appeared in 1994. The next year, men with machetes and trucks pulled up to the local warehouse and stole half the crop. Now Robinson and his partners spend the harvest season patrolling with shotguns and pistols.

Under the farmhouse’s lone lightbulb, we sit down for a spare meal of ugali (stiff corn porridge) and stewed peanut greens. Though he’s just arrived, Robinson’s thoughts are already a hemisphere away. He’s looking ahead to a series of meetings in New York with venture capitalists who specialize in matching entrepreneurs with socially conscious investors. To make it through the harvest and serve his current customers, Robinson figures he’ll need a half-million dollars, and fast.

Three weeks later, back in Manhattan, Robinson sits over sushi in a midtown restaurant and says the outlook is guardedly sunny. The first installment of the ADF loan has reached Tanzania and is being put to use buying fertilizer. On the negative side, the meetings about raising money in the States have produced little result.

But, once again, Robinson has found another bit of rope. On April 13 of this year, 58 seasons after Jackie made his first appearance in Dodgers blue, the Robinson family name returns to major league baseball—this time on the beverage menu at Dodger Stadium, one of five ballparks that will serve Sweet Unity Farms coffee this season.

Last year Rachel Robinson called her son on his birthday. “Happy fifty-third,” she said.

“Mom, I’m fifty-four,” David replied.

“No,” said Rachel. “You’re fifty-three.”

And so David Robinson was granted an extra year.

Robinson told me this story while walking through rows of trees, their thin branches beginning to sag under the weight of bright-red berries destined to end their lives as a bridge to the other side of the world.

“I always thought it was funny that my father’s motto was ‘Wait till next year,’” Robinson said. “And that’s always been the reality of my life. Well, I’m fifty-three again. Maybe next year is finally here.”  

__________________________________
For more information about Sweet Unity Farms, go to www.sweetunityfarmscoffee.com.

Top of Page