In recent years, consumption of café Touba has been increasing as the drink is spreading to cities of all faiths, both in and outside Senegal. The World Bank wrote that a progressive elimination of imported coffee seems common in poorer areas of Senegal as a result of the global recession of 2009: a Senegalese a restaurant owner stated, "We weren't used to consume [sic] the Tuba Coffee for breakfast, but since the crisis people drink it a lot, also children." Commercial export outside Senegal, while small, is present. In Guinea-Bissau, café Touba has become the country's most popular drink, even though it was relatively unknown several years ago. Consumption of café Touba increased to the point that sales of instant coffee, most notably Nescafé, decreased in West Africa. To more directly compete with café Touba, Nestlé launched a product that contains spices, called Nescafé Ginger & Spice
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Café Touba (Arabic Ṭūbā "Felicity") is a coffee beverage that is a popular traditional drink of Senegal.
Café Touba is a coffee drink that is flavored with grains of selim (known as Guinea pepper or diar in the Wolof language) and sometimes cloves. The addition of Guinea pepper (the dried fruit of Xylopia aethiopica) is the important factor differentiating café Touba from plain coffee. The Guinea pepper, imported to Senegal from Côte d'Ivoire or Gabon, and other spices are mixed and roasted with coffee beans, then ground into powder. The drink is prepared using a filter, similar to drip coffee. Café Touba is named for the holy city of Touba, Senegal. The drink is traditionally consumed by the Islamic Mouride brotherhood as it came to Senegal when the brotherhood's founder, Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba Mbacké, returned from exile in Gabon in 1902. The drink is served during ceremonies, commemorations, and during the Magal of Toub |
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now probably I understand why their skin is so chocolate dark - they start drinking coffee since they little boys and girls... :o)
Video to watch... How to make Cafe Touba. A specific coffee bean roasting method, mixed with a spice called "jar" (wolof) or "xylophia Aethiopica", named after the religious City of Touba in Sénégal. This is a real stuff not a coca-kola... |
This is what eatyourworld website says:
What: Between the ubiquitous roving Nescafe vendors and innumerable café Touba stands, it’s safe to call Senegal a coffee-drinking culture, but unfortunately none of the coffee is terribly good (and even if it were, you could hardly tell underneath all the sugar). Nescafe gets the job done, of course—and buying a tiny plastic cup of sweet, mixed-to-order instant coffee from a mobile cart is always a novel pleasure—but café Touba is at least more interesting, and at times pretty tasty. It’s coffee with a kick, in which the coffee beans are ground with djar, an African black pepper said to have stomach-settling and aphrodisiacal qualities, and served with a lot of sugar (no milk), yielding a sweet and spicy, intense, almost medicinal cup of joe. We heard the beans used for café Touba tend to be low-quality Côte d’Ivoire imports, as the taste is easily masked by the sugar and the pepper’s spicy pungency. This would explain why quality varied widely wherever we tasted the stuff—sometimes it’s fresh and lively; sometimes it’s downright hard to choke down. You never know what you’ll get, so it’s worth trying it a few times.
When: No exact hours, but Touba stands are usually open in the morning through to the afternoon.
Order: Café Touba (50 CFA). This was an intense one, very sweet and very spicy. It’s a good idea to have a bottle of water on hand for your first cup! Alternatively: Try any stand, anywhere, though we will admit we found the café Touba better outside Dakar. (Our favorite Touba came from the seaside village of Popenguine, about an hour south of the capital.) |
Café Touba was purportedly invented by a venerated mystic named Cheikh Amadou Bamba, who founded the Mouride Brotherhood, a branch of Sufi Islam and the only Islamic brotherhood to be founded by a Senegalese—and the city of Touba as its holy site—in the 1880s. Also known as Saint Touba, Bamba is said to have mixed the coffee and spices together for medicinal purposes, and served it to his followers. (It’s possible he started doing this in Gabon, where the French exiled him around the turn of the 20th century, but then brought the idea back with him to Senegal.)
Good to know: Chances are, you won’t have to go far in Dakar to see a likeness of Bamba, who—thanks to the one surviving photo of the man—is always depicted wearing a long headscarf swept in front of and partially hiding his face.
Where: These Touba stands are really a dime a dozen around Dakar. Pictured is the standard pink-cup offering from a turquoise-painted stand near where we stayed off Rue 10 in Amitie, just north of Youssou N’Dour’s famed club Thiossane. It’s located near Rue A on Rue 10’s service road. |
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