One of the underlying themes of this book is that farmers in the rural tropical world are commonly not the docile, subservient or angry peasants' portrayed in many textbooks and official publications, but rather men and women with a proper and controlled contempt for external authority – a contempt which they often delight in concealing under a veneer of acquiescence. So I start this book with a Preamble relating to a particular case in which the clever farmers completely outwitted the gullible bureaucrats in the latter's political game.

The bureaucrats were officials of the notorious Gold Coast Cocoa Purchasing Company (CPC), an essentially political body which had been established by Nkrumah in 1952 for the purposes of gradually ousting all existing expatriate licensed buying agents for cocoa, as well as the highly successful Co-operative Marketing Association (based on local cocoa-buying co-operative societies) which was later to handle even more cocoa for export than the United Africa Company – only to be subsequently rewarded by liquidation. Being effectively a political arm of government, though disguised as the Cocoa Marketing Board's own licensed buying agentr the CPC was able to offer lavish blandishments to farmers who would support them.