Afri Cola

If you were a “cool” teenager in the 90`s you hung out in coffee shops. It was a different time, before the great Starbucks takeover when these locals were the homes of true weirdos. You couldn't just pop off in your local suburb; you had to go the often seedy artsy parts of town. I'm sure if I were to go back in time to 1996 and head to Topic coffee it wouldn't seem nearly as insane as it did to a 16 year old. It was dirty, dimly lit and it seemed like John Cale was always playing. It was filled with the kind of people I wanted to surround myself in, and I felt like I was finally home. There was one problem though; I didn't like coffee. I loved the culture of the place, but I just couldn't get into the drink of choice. Sure at Perkins and Dennys I would get it, but I would also add so much sugar that it could turn a walrus diabetic. I could tell that that would be frowned upon at this establishment, and you know I had to keep the cool air about me. I mean cut-off dress pants with combat boots and a painted army coat only took me so far. My solution was that I would occasionally order an iced coffee (it never seemed as harsh), but most ofhte time I would drink Afri Cola. It always seemed exotic to me with the name and weirdly shaped bottle. Topic was the only place that I had ever come across it during my short time on this planet and since it wasn't a standard Coke or Pepsi I felt that the patrons wouldn't look down on me for drinking it. In reality most of them were probably nodding off on heroin or some other opiate. Oh if my mother knew where her little boy spent her nights.

So now you have the back-story of my love affair with Afri Cola. Shortly after Topic moved, and it didn't have the same esthetic. Coffee culture started to rise and more cafes opened and eventually what I thought would be my savior closed down for good. With it went my supply of Afri Cola. Occasionally throughout the years I would stumble upon it in some small store in another city, but I never had a steady supply. You can understand my joy when I came cross a decent display of it in a grocery store in Frankfurt, Germany. I bought the biggest bottle I could find and it was like going home again. I went home to a hole in the wall that was home to all of the disenfranchised of Buffalo; the punks, the weirdos, the junkies, the transgendered and many more.

Afri Cola has a special taste in the cola world. It's not like Coke, Pepsi or the unimpressive store brands. It's clearly a cola but it doesn't fit into those molds, just like the patrons of Topic didn't fit into the molds of the normal world. If I had to compare it to another cola I would say that it was closest to RC Cola. Keep in mind it is no clone, it is it's own soda and I miss it dearly.