Café Touba is a Senegalese coffee roasted together with djar, the dried fruit of Xylopia aethiopica, also called grains of Selim or Guinea pepper. The usual ratio is about 80 percent coffee to 20 percent spice, sometimes with cloves, and roasting them together fuses the spice oils into the beans before grinding. The drink is named for the holy city of Touba, whose name means felicity or blessedness, and it traces to 1902, when Sheikh Amadou Bamba Mbacké returned from exile in Gabon and introduced it to the Mouride Brotherhood.

For decades it remained a ceremonial drink, central to the Grand Magal of Touba pilgrimage. Then the 2009 financial crisis squeezed Senegalese household budgets, and a World Bank report tracked the rapid elimination of imported coffee from everyday diets. Families switched to the cheaper local brew, and one Dakar restaurant owner said even young children began drinking it at breakfast. The habit outlasted the crisis, crossed into Guinea-Bissau, and cut into instant coffee sales across West Africa.

• French colonial authorities exiled Bamba, a pacifist, because they feared his ability to unify people.
• The spice is grown locally in Touba in central Senegal.
• In Guinea-Bissau, Café Touba went from virtually unknown to the most popular drink in the country within a few years.
• Around 2010, Nestlé responded to falling Nescafé sales by launching Nescafé Ginger and Spice for the region.
• Spray dried instant powder cannot reproduce the co roasting that bonds the spice oils to the beans.