Critical Pedagogy and Coffee: Bartholomew Jones on Education, Music, and his Documentary 'Cxffeeblack to Africa'

The educator, barista, rapper, and co-founder of Cxffeeblack discusses his new project and much more.

Bartholomew Jones (center). Courtesy of Cxffeeblack.

Bartholomew Jones is just back from one US leg of the Cxffeeblack World Tour, and is about to head out again to screen his documentary at coffee shops along both coasts. The next leg takes the Cxffeeblack team to the east coast with stops in New York City and Louisville before heading west to Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles.

Cxffeeblack to Africa, a melange of personal vlog, documentary, and music video follows the Memphis-based company as they travel to Ethiopia to visit the Guji zone and the farmers who produce their famous Guji Mane coffee.

The only way to see the doc is at one of these live screenings, as Jones says they don’t currently have plans to release the film online. “For us, it's been an experience of building community together,” Jones tells me. “The relationships we've made over the screenings, they're lifelong relationships and those things don't happen by just sending someone a YouTube link.”

Check out the trailer, and then enjoy my conversation with Jones about the documentary but also about educating via pour overs, critical pedagogy, and why he started with the soundtrack.

[This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length]

Can you give me a little background on how you got into coffee, and how Cxffeeblack got started?

I was always the only black person at whatever coffee shop I was at. Nobody was ever mean, there wasn't any harrowing experience, it was just a curious thing for me, more so. Like I would try to bring friends but they kind of saw it as a very Eurocentric experience. And the more that I would learn about the places where the coffee was coming from, the more I realized that I saw very few of those kinds of people at the shop. And so that made me wonder why.

Then I learned about the history of coffee in Ethiopia, and I started doing events locally because I do music. It would be storytelling mixed with a decolonization class on coffee history mixed with a DJ set mixed with music performance mixed with a coffee cupping or a pourover class. It was really just me doing and showing what I loved about coffee with other people.

I'm a teacher by trade, and so if you're familiar with Paulo Freire and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed and critical pedagogy, I would use the same learning strategies that I was using in the classroom to work with a decolonized English curriculum. I would use those same learning strategies with coffee and with coffee history and coffee brewing.

I was taking those pedagogical bones and then adding coffee information and musical information, historical information about coffee's history, I was kind of building on that.

Eventually I started putting coffee bars in my music and that led to making coffee merch, and that led to doing a one time coffee drop of coffee from Guji with a roaster called Ethnos Coffee. And that led to him teaching my wife [Renata Henderson, Cxffeeblack co-founder] how to roast, along with Mayorga Organics, and now we’re doing coffee full time.

One of us had to learn to roast, and the more that we learned about it, here was an opportunity to be really intentional about honouring the African legacy of coffee as seen in Ethiopia. Black woman there are some of the planet's oldest roasters, and so my wife wanted to learn—and she’s killing it.

So did the idea for a documentary come from your interest in teaching?

Yeah, first we did a podcast—I’m actually getting ready to launch season three—but I was noticing that in my heart I’m always a teacher. I'm always trying to reach young black kids in the hood and they don't listen to podcasts, so we did two seasons of the podcast where all our engagement was nerds like me who are into podcast culture. So I was like, what would I do as a musician or as a rapper if I wanted to get more in touch with a younger community? I think I would build out something that's kind of more geared toward them pedagogically. So I was like, Okay, let me make some of this more engaging.

That led me to start just experimenting with different kinds of content, like we shot a concert where I was doing songs and making pour overs while I was rapping. And then we started doing more stuff on Tik Tok, and I just started to see if we could create a comprehensive experience for someone from A to B. So the first thing we did was we made a soundtrack.

Then once we made the soundtrack, we started editing the documentary and then put the songs underneath the documentary. We took a lot of multimedia elements, different forms of shots. You got like grainy Super Eight footage, we have some straight ahead personal camera shots, then we have these really beautiful, sit down interviews mixed with pictures and archival footage.

It’s interesting that the soundtrack came first, and the documentary built around that.

The first way I process data is generally musically, so I’ll write a song about something before I read a book about it. That's just how I process information. So I was trying to get the feeling and emotion out musically first, so we’ve gone on this trip, how do I want people to feel? Even before we left I was writing songs about how I imagined it would feel.

Did you write any songs while you were in Ethiopia?

Yeah, yeah, there’s this song called King of the Guji, which is built around a chorus by Sela who’s the marketing manager for Sookoo Coffee, they do most of the facilitation in Guji. We’re driving around Guji, I’m making a beat on my iPad, and they’re teaching me a ton of Ethiopian words and Oromo words and I’m showing them how to freestyle.

So Sela is saying, “King of the Guji, yeah, that’s on my life, yeah,” and so we took that and flipped it into the chorus. And that's one of my favourite moments on the soundtrack, because it just shows the culture. I don't know how to explain it besides that, but it's such a real moment.

We talk about coffee as a sample, so in hip hop you know sampling is when you take an older song, you kind of re imagine it, you chop it up. And then you generally rap over it, right. And what are people rapping about? Most of the time, they're rapping out a better life in the future for themselves or for their community.

And so I kind of see it as this Afro futuristic experience to take coffee from one of the oldest regions of coffee growing space in Ethiopia, which is Oromia, and to reimagine the branding around it and the storytelling around it to show a new story of connecting folks from the African diaspora through coffee. And so I think that's what we want to do with our coffee is to sample from our history to reimagine our future. And that song is like an audio version of what we want to do with coffee.

What was the reaction to the documentary in Africa? You screened it on your return trip, right?

Yeah we played it in Rwanda and we played it in Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, we got to play it for the Prime Minister's brother—he’s a coffee farmer—and a bunch of other farmers as well as some of the folks from different entities who we work with. And the feedback was really phenomenal, everybody was really blown away by the quality of it. [laughs] I don’t think they knew that we were going to execute, because we came over and it’s just me and I hired this videography company to come with me, and it’s just one person. It’s just these guys with mics and they’re asking people a bunch of questions.

Overall, people were really excited about the story, the message, and I think people really gave us great feedback on what they want to see us do next. We're pitching a docuseries, so if you're reading this and you're somebody who wants to invest in great art, hit me up.

In Rwanda there was such a big turnout, there were so many folks like Smayah [Uwajeneza] the 2018 East African Aeropress Champion, the former head of coffee export for the government was there, several cafe owners, a bunch of baristas we follow online.

As we were talking about some of the more macro issues in the industry—the idea of increasing local consumption is not a new idea, but the reason for the consumption and connecting that to the lack of equity that's currently existing in the current supply chain, I think the folks we met were really empowered. Not empowered like we gave them power, but it was like we were reclaiming power together and they were really excited about the opportunity.

What do you want the documentary to achieve?

People ask us all the time, Why don't you just put it on YouTube and move on? And, you know, I'm a teacher. So I could email my students the PowerPoint for the day, and then just ask them to email me their work back. But I feel like the type of education we're doing is not just about checking a box about some information you gained, but it's about communal meaning making.

And so each community we've screened it with has had their own interpretation of what it means to them, and what kind of goals and aspirations it gives them for the future. We end the documentary with a question, and answering that question is a communal experience because, what does it mean to make coffee black again? That's the question I'm still answering.

I want to be with the communities to learn from them. But also because when you watch it together, we had so much information that couldn't fit in the documentary and so this gives way more opportunity to give context, to answer questions, to share more and dive deeper.

It almost feels like you’ve gone full circle, like you started out doing these educational events with coffee and now with your screenings you’re sort of doing that again.

Yes! And I feel like there's a truth in doing something with people. When you make that moment of sharing coffee’s history and talking about its connection to the slave trade, and talking about the process of making a pour over itself, the actual crushing and straining and boiling, the metaphors and opportunities to make allusions and make meaning together is so much deeper than just shooting somebody a link or hopping on a Zoom call.

We've done one virtual screening, and it was terrible. It wasn't terrible, but we just watched it and then I was like, any questions? There were some questions. And then people hung up. I'm sure for the people who saw it they were really grateful, and we got a lot of great comments. But for me, we could have gone so much deeper if we were in person.

My dad was a preacher, so I think the idea of having church and talking about deep, spiritual, important things together, sincerely, is something that’s necessary. So that's kind of what we're doing, you know, it's kind of like a revival tour.