Son Of The Soil

The rewarding story of a South Sudanese coffee entrepreneur who spent his childhood as a refugee braving bullets and snake bites. His company, 734 Coffee, is named after the geographical coordinates of the camp where he was raised. Uprooted by civil war, Manyang Reath Kher was invisible there, not anymore.

- By Ridhima Shukla

IN AKOBO VILLAGE IN THE HISTORIC Gambella region, the sun shone bright, the forest was green and the children laughed with gay abandon. The men reared cattle and the women tended to their kitchen gardens. The ponds had plenty of fish and the people were content. But their simple lives were about to be thrown into utter chaos.

The late 1980s saw the start of the brutal civil war in Sudan that burned villages and plunged the region into abject poverty. In the middle of this bloody carnage was Manyang Reath Kher, the three-year-old son of a cattle farmer who now recalls the chilling horrors of the conflict as we chat to him via Zoom. Today, he is a coffee entrepreneur educated in the United States (US) and on a mission to change lives in Africa.

Back then, he lived in Akobo, a village of no more than 300 people in South Sudan, with his parents and infant sister.

As the conflict surged, like many others, Kher’s father joined the resistance movement. His tiny village served as a stronghold for the rebels for over a year, providing them with relative safety and keeping them fed and alive.

But life for the families here was about to take a turn for the worse. As little Kher skipped in the forest and played with fish in the ponds, the military had seized power in the capital and the consequences of this political shift in the African nation drew closer home.