A small amount of cocoa beans are grown in Africa, but these are not native to Africa and do not account for a noticable percentage of world chocolate production. Cocoa beans from different parts of the world do taste slightly different and produce slightly different chocolate. I have not experienced this first hand, however, nor do I make any claim to being able to tell where the beans came from in the chocolates I eat.
Cocoa beans grow in pods that sprout off of the trunk and branches of cocoa trees.
The pods start out green and turn orange when they're ripe. When the pods are ripe, harvesters travel through the cocoa orchards with machetes and hack the pods gently off of the trees. Cocoa trees produce flowers all the time, so a mature cocoa tree will have flowers as well as pods in various stages of growth. Harvesting the pods happens all year. The pods are taken to a processing house, where they are split open and the cocoa beans are removed.