“The rule of this class is ‘Don’t yuck my yum,’” said Chipo Dendere, assistant professor of Africana studies, on the first day of AFR304/POL3302: The Politics of Chocolates and Other Foods this fall. “I have a 5-year-old, so I live by this rule.” She handed out pieces of a chocolate bar made with 88% cocoa to the class of juniors and seniors from a variety of majors, who thoughtfully tasted the squares. “I’d rather have a Kit Kat,” said one student.
In response, Dendere explained the difference between chocolate-flavored candy and actual chocolate: In the United States, a product labeled “chocolate” must be at least 10% cocoa. That standard varies around the world—in Belgium, for example, “milk chocolate” must contain at least 25% cocoa and “dark chocolate” at least 35%.
But Dendere’s popular course (it always has a waitlist) is about much more than spending Monday afternoons in a cozy room in Founders learning fun facts about the most popular sweet in the world and sampling varieties of chocolate. The course digs into heavy questions: Why is eating chocolate considered a gendered activity? Why is Europe famous for producing chocolate when the Global South grows the vast majority of the world’s cocoa (80% of which gets sent to the Global North)? What roles have colonialism and slavery played in the history of chocolate production?
Dendere says she has always studied very intense topics, like violence and voter exit (her book Death, Diversion, and Departure: Voter Exit and the Persistence of Authoritarianism in Zimbabwe will be published by Cambridge University Press in February 2026) and she had been thinking of teaching a natural resource class. “A typical natural resource class for African politics is a class on diamonds or gold or cotton, which feed[s] into the usual tropes of violence and corruption,” she says. “And then I thought, well, what is a natural resource that most people don’t associate with the African continent, but that’s actually really big?”
Cocoa was the answer. But Dendere quickly found out that researching the cocoa industry was complicated. Four major corporations control the vast majority of cacao, the plant used to make cocoa. Local Belgian officials have been known to take bribes to certify certain chocolatiers as “artisanal,” and local African officials have been known to take payoffs to certify certain farmers as “fair trade.” Many cacao farms use child labor.
“I was very naive in some way to think the worst of it would just be like, oh, the farmers get paid less and they don’t know where their product ends up,” Dendere says. Instead, she learned that researching the cocoa industry can be more dangerous than researching arms trafficking. For example, Guy-Andre Kieffer, an investigative journalist who was tracking the cocoa trade, went missing in 2004 while on a research trip in Ghana and hasn’t been seen since. Dendere, who is now writing a book about the politics of chocolate, had doors literally slammed in her face when researching chocolatiers in Bruges, Belgium. “I guess you can’t really escape violence,” Dendere says.
The topic’s dark side is part of what draws some students. Elise Wilson ’26, a political science major and history minor, says she has always been interested in public health injustices, especially ones related to the cocoa industry, which she heard about from her Ghanaian family while growing up.
“Because of my Ghanaian background, I had this idea that chocolate is native to West Africa, which is not true,” she says. Wilson was interested to learn about chocolate’s origins and spiritual roots in Mesoamerica, and that other foods eaten today in different parts of the world have also transformed completely from their origins. “This course has really opened my eyes to that perspective,” she adds. “I feel like I’m looking at everything now thinking, wow, this thing really had a completely different cultural and spiritual meaning in a different part of the world, as well as a different material use than what we see in chocolate today.”
In the course, Dendere addresses not just the history of chocolate but also the contemporary chocolate industry. To share that knowledge with the wider Wellesley community, this year at the end of October she launched the first Wellesley Week of Chocolate, a series of special lectures that featured Jeanne Donkoh, a chocolate maker, chocolatier, and the founder and owner of Bioko Treats in Ghana, and Beth Kirsch, founder of Beth’s Chocolate in Newton, Mass.
Donkoh also showed Dendere’s Politics of Chocolates students how to make dark chocolate bars, tying into Wellesley’s commitment to experiential learning. Wilson says she enjoyed talking with Donkoh during those sessions: “I wasn’t just reading articles from political scientists and whatnot, but I actually got to speak to someone who knows the culture and actually directly works in that industry too,” she says. “You got to really see the behind the scenes of how she created her business and how she competes with the large names that we see in the chocolate industry.” She also appreciated getting to taste cocoa and chocolate throughout the different stages of the process.
Each year Dendere looks for ways to expand the curriculum of the Politics of Chocolates, and next year she hopes to take her students to Ghana or Colombia to see cacao farming in action. “This class has changed my research trajectory in a way that I could not have foreseen and I would have never even imagined,” she says. “Before this class, I’d never been to Ghana. I’d never been to Nigeria. And I always thought I would go to study violence or political elections, but the first time I went there was to visit cacao farms.”
After teaching the course for four years and digging into research for her next book, Dendere has gained confidence in her knowledge about the topic, and she encourages her class to develop confidence as well: Each week, a pair of students presents on the readings and leads a lively discussion. “They realize, oh, we’re kind of experts in something that everybody uses all the time,” she says, “but nobody really knows anything about it.”