Bitter Chocolate

by Carol Off

  In an archive at the library of the University of Birmingham lie the Cadbury family’s collected papers. The archive shows not only that the company had a subscription to the Anti-Slavery Society’s Reporter, but also that individual members of the family subscribed to it. If the Cadburys read the periodicals, they would have seen the same articles and anecdotes that Nevinson had, where contributors described conditions on the Portuguese islands to be as bad—or worse—than in Leopold’s Congo.

  The only conclusion Nevinson could make is that the Cadburys chose to turn a blind eye. Even though it was the Portuguese, not the English Quakers, who ran the wretched islands and the trade in cocoa beans, the manufacturers who bought the beans benefited from a system that kept the prices of their raw materials minimal through cruel exploitation. But the first record indicating that the Cadburys raised the issue with their board of directors was in 1901. In January of that year, the Reporter had published an account from a missionary that must have stunned all chocolate-making abolitionists: “I have never seen such slave gangs bound west as pass us day after day since crossing the Quanza, and the many dead bodies left on the side of the road tell the sad tale—knocked on the head to end their misery or hamstrung and left.” The Cadburys would have known about the abuses for years before Nevinson came calling.

  William Cadbury tried to downplay the reports when he wrote to another Quaker activist: “[One] looks at these matters in a different light when it affects one’s own interests but I do feel there is a vast difference between the cultivation of cocoa and gold or diamond mining [in reference to reports of the time concerning British abuse in African mining].”

  According to archival records, the Cadbury family was getting almost half of its cocoa from the islands, as were all the other Quaker cocoa companies, including Rowntree and Fry, with the remainder coming from British colonies in the Caribbean. The companies had numerous meetings among themselves at the turn of the century to discuss whether they should boycott the Portuguese islands. But they inevitably concluded that a boycott wouldn’t have much effect on anything except their own bottom line.

  True to their word, the Cadburys did find their own investigative researcher. Joseph Burtt was a businessman in his early forties, handsome, keen and dedicated to the principles of the anti-slavery movement. He might have been the right man, but in a colossal act of foot dragging, the Cadburys insisted that Burtt conduct his inquiries in Portuguese, a language he knew nothing of. So they sent him to Lisbon to learn it.

  While there, he and the Cadburys held meetings with Portuguese officials, who attempted to reassure the chocolate-makers that reports of labour abuse were highly exaggerated. The Portuguese fell back on old arguments used by King Leopold to justify his own actions in the Congo. It wasn’t really slavery, they said, but employment. The Africans were not captives but willing partners in what they called the serviçal system. They were engaged to work for some years as wage earners and then allowed to return home. If they stayed on the islands for the rest of their lives, well, that’s because they were better off in São Tomé than in Angola, where there was nothing for them to do. One shouldn’t judge labour conditions in Africa by European standards.

  The Cadburys clearly wanted to believe such lies and Burtt, when he wasn’t struggling with grammar lessons, was anxious to please his chocolate-making masters. The problem for all of them was that the evidence of slavery was stacked so high. The Anti-Slavery Society’s Reporter documented over and over again that the Angolans wouldn’t be in shackles if they were willing labourers; they wouldn’t be dying at an appalling rate if they were part of any normal workforce. And the records show that no one ever returned home from the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe. With his assignment from Harper’s Monthly Magazine and some funds in his vest pocket, Nevinson arrived in Angola to launch his investigation in December 1904. He spent the next six months following the slave route from its source all the way to the island of São Tomé. He learned that the Portuguese had already sent tens of thousands of Africans to the Angolan ports of Luanda and Benguela, where they were bundled onto ships and brought to the islands to work. The road leading to the ports was littered with the bleached bones and corpses of those who never made it. Nevison came upon small groups of natives being transported by gun-toting guards, and he heard the crack of the whips and slap of the paddles used to punish those who attempted to escape.

  Nevinson identified the sham of the serviçal tribunal system. The Angolans were required to swear before a judge that they were going to the islands of their own free will. Nevinson could see that the natives had no choice—their responses to questions weren’t even recorded. Everyone Nevinson talked to made it clear that the passage to São Tomé was a one-way trip. He later wrote in Harper’s of the sleight of hand that turned “slave” into “serviçal”: “The climax of the farce has now been reached. The deed of pitiless hypocrisy has been consummated. The requirement of legalized slavery have been satisfied … They went into the tribunal as slaves, they have come out as ‘contract labourers.’”

  What disgusted Nevinson almost as much as the cruelty was the derision white people demonstrated towards the Africans. He watched an Angolan woman with a newborn baby attempt to mount an unsteady gangplank to a ship bound for São Tomé. She lost some of her belongings when they fell into the water, and stumbled several times before she finally struggled into her place with the other slaves. As pitiable as the scene was to Nevinson, he realized that the spectacle was merely amusing to other European passengers on board. The boat served as both a cargo vessel and a passenger ferry, so Nevinson was able to observe the scene from the upper deck, along with a large crowd of first-class passengers: “I have heard many terrible sounds,” he later wrote, “but never anything so hellish as the outbursts of laughter with which the ladies and gentlemen of the first class watched the slave woman’s struggle up the deck.”

  Nevinson eventually got to São Tomé, and it didn’t take him long to learn why no African workers returned to Angola. Many died of disease and abuse. Doctors and missionaries on the island believed that vast numbers of them passed away from sheer despair.

  Harper’s published Nevinson’s articles in a series that ran from August through February. In 1906, he released his research material in a groundbreaking book called, simply, A Modern Slavery. Nothing would be the same again in the world of “democratic” chocolate.

  The British chocolate companies were furious with Nevinson. They argued that the Harper’s articles were completely over the top and that the journalist had sensationalized conditions in Angola. What’s more, the whole series of articles was insulting to the Portuguese, who were key trading partners of Britain. But anti-slavery activists immediately demanded a boycott of cocoa from São Tomé and even Morel thought the articles were compelling, much to the chagrin of his friend and financial patron, William Cadbury.

  For the crusading Cadburys with their idyllic settlement on the banks of the Bourn and their campaign for labour reform in British factories, a boycott of Portuguese beans would have been consistent with their corporate values. But the Cadburys faltered. They convinced themselves that Nevinson had exaggerated the situation and that their own investigation through Joseph Burtt would reveal the truth. Whether this was just the public face of a private crisis is a matter of speculation. The Cadbury’s would keep purchasing São Tomé cocoa and using their influence to persuade the Portuguese to make improvements. In fact, they rationalized that they could have more of an impact on the Portuguese by maintaining trade than by boycotting beans.

  Predictably, their powers of persuasion didn’t work. So William and his uncle George Cadbury turned to their contacts in the British government for help. This was the land of hope and glory. Surely the government shared their Quaker desire for human rights.

  Britain was in a difficult position. The Foreign Office was quite aware of the labour abuse on São Tomé and Príncipe since the anti-slavery activists had been publish
ing reports, and the government had its own intelligence sources, which corroborated the public record. Politically and morally, Britain disapproved. But civil servants in the Foreign Office were there to serve the interests of the Empire and to protect Britain’s status as the economic powerhouse of the world. The moral debates about indentured servitude on Portugal’s islands could be threatening to those interests, especially against a backdrop of highly lucrative commerce.

  British companies had huge holdings in Africa, including diamond and gold mines in South Africa and Rhodesia. All labour intensive. All cost sensitive. To minimize manpower expenses while avoiding the stigma of slavery, British interests in Africa imported “coolies” from China to work in their diamond pits and mines. The coolies were shipped to the Transvaal with numbers tattooed on their chests and few, if any, ever returned to China. When the newspapers attacked the coolie system as just another way to get around laws against slave labour, British mining industrialists were compelled to find other sources of cheap or free labour. Enter the Portuguese.

  In addition to Angola on the west coast of Africa, Portugal was also in control of Mozambique on the east coast, a country that conveniently bordered both South Africa and Rhodesia. Unknown to the general public or the cocoa companies at the time, throughout the first decade of the twentieth century the British government was in protracted negotiations with the Portuguese to have African labourers transferred from Mozambique to the mines of the Transvaal. The British assumed that this transaction could be pulled off without attracting too much attention. But the negotiations were slow and the Portuguese obstinate.

  American historian Lowell Satre has recently investigated Cadbury’s cocoa sources and found a cover-up in the British foreign office of the early twentieth century. He unearthed documents that reveal a profound interest on the part of British civil servants to keep a lid on the cocoa-slavery debate because of the negotiations they were conducting with the Portuguese for a cheap labour supply from Mozambique. “To a great extent,” says Satre, “the gold mines of the Transvaal were equivalent to the rocas of São Tomé. Greed and profit dictated both Portuguese labour policy in São Tomé and British labour policy in Johannesburg. Cadbury Bros. was little more than a sideshow to the transactions in South Africa.”

  But the Cadburys had their own complicating sideshow. In addition to being chocolate-makers, they were also newspaper proprietors. George Cadbury had several papers in the Birmingham area, and in 1901 he purchased the Daily News in London to provide an editorial platform for Liberal political views. The paper led the campaign against the Conservative government for allowing Chinese coolies to work in slavery conditions in southern Africa. Cadbury-directed editorials lambasted the government for allowing “slavery by another name” and demanded that the abusive labour practice stop immediately. But the paper was strangely silent on the subject of São Tomé even as other periodicals began to follow Nevinson’s lead and write of the atrocities in Angola. Conservative voices in Britain’s fiercely competitive and highly partisan media accused the Cadburys of hypocrisy.

  In letters to other cocoa-makers, as well as to his Quaker associates and his friend Edmund Morel, William Cadbury urged restraint to the point of deception on the issue of slavery in São Tomé. Play it down, he cautioned, claiming he was assured by high sources in the Foreign Office that the British government was pressuring the Portuguese to mend their ways. Let the Foreign Office do its work without high-minded harassment, Cadbury advised his inner circle.

  Did William Cadbury and his Quaker colleagues really believe the Foreign Office was fixing things, or was it just convenient to believe the official line from Whitehall? As individuals, the Cadburys were highly conscientious, genuinely moral, socially engaged. But they also had a business to run and thousands of employees dependent on their actions. They even had a higher goal: pioneering a new philosophy of business. To risk their economic prospects would be to jeopardize the larger mission. They were cultivating other lines of supply, but it would take time before they could divorce themselves from the unsavoury Portuguese slave-drivers. And maybe, given time, the Portuguese would come around under pressure from the Foreign Office. Perhaps they could keep the story from doing any more damage until they could secure another source of cocoa.

  But the anti-slavery activists just wouldn’t let up, and the Cadburys presented an easy target. The conservative newspapers had a field day watching them struggle on the horns of their moral dilemma. The Cadburys fell back on the justification that they were conducting their own investigation. In fact, Joseph Burtt, the keen and affable researcher who now spoke a smattering of Portuguese, had departed for Africa just as Nevinson was returning, in June 1905. The two investigators actually crossed paths in Africa, Nevinson departing while Burtt was arriving. Nevinson thought Burtt was a decent enough chap but entirely too impressionable and “about the youngest man of 43” he’d ever met. Nevinson concluded that Burtt was out to whitewash the slave system—even before he’d seen it—as the best possible arrangement for poor Africans: “Thinks the plantations greatly increase human happiness and so on,” Nevinson wrote in his diary.

  While the Cadburys urged patience and dismissed Nevinson as a blowhard, Burtt spent two years travelling and didn’t return to England until 1907. His report took months to write. Once it was completed, the Cadburys kept it from public view until near the end of 1908. Seven years had passed since they’d acknowledged to their board that there was a problem in the cocoa groves of São Tomé and Príncipe, and it was twenty years since the stories of abuse started to fill the pages of the Reporter. Even people who supported William Cadbury wondered why it took so long. Clearly, some of the delay can be blamed on the machinations of the Foreign Office since diplomatic contact with Portugal was complicated by political instability, a plague of coups and assassinations in Lisbon. But Britain had problems of its own, and it’s safe to assume that the Portuguese missed few opportunities to remind the British of their own moral lapses in southern Africa.

  Even though Joseph Burtt had received most of his information in Africa from Portuguese slave traders and cocoa farm owners who had wined and dined the wide-eyed writer during his visit, Burtt still managed to write a damning report. Perhaps the abuse was so widespread and so flagrant that even someone eager to please the Cadburys couldn’t avoid being moved to outrage. Burtt’s tone was measured, and his voice lacked the passion of the fiery Nevinson, but his bottom line was the same. He told the Cadburys that Nevinson had been right about everything—except perhaps he had not gone far enough. No matter what the Portuguese wanted to call their system, it was simply slavery by another name.

  The conservative British press had been hammering at the Cadburys all along. Now, with Burtt’s report, the Tory papers could smell the blood of Liberals and reformers, expecially the moralistic Quakers. The Conservatives weren’t so much offended by the evidence of slavery as by the hypocrisy of the other side. The Standard led the charge against the chocolate kings with a damning editorial: “It’s not called slavery; but ‘contract labour’ they name it now … But in most of its essentials it is that monstrous trade in human flesh and blood against which the Quaker and radical ancestors of Mr. Cadbury thundered in the better days of England.”

  The Cadbury family was outraged by the bluntness of the accusation, coming as it did on the heels of a dozen less pointed attacks. They had threatened and coerced newspapers to print apologies and retractions in the past, but this time they decided they would sue the Standard. But the Cadburys needed to have one crucial bit of business in place before they could subject their reputation to the scrutiny of the courts.

  In 1909, just before the libel trial, William Cadbury declared that he was going off to see the operation in São Tomé for himself. His uncle George urged friends and other newspapers not to report on the Portuguese labour issue for the time being lest it endanger William during his travels. William Cadbury had all the access the Portuguese would allow, which w
asn’t much. But on this same voyage, he made a side trip, which was, quite possibly, the real reason for his journey. He went to the Gold Coast (now Ghana) to investigate cocoa export possibilities there. The first cocoa plants had arrived in the Gold Coast about twenty years earlier and, by the time of Cadbury’s visit, the country had the growing capacity to replace São Tomé. The Gold Coast was also a British colony, where the cocoa companies and the British government could conceivably have considerable influence over labour practices. What’s more, the Africans themselves were the farmers. All in all, it was a perfect solution to his problem. The Gold Coast would become the source of Cadbury’s—and Britain’s beans.

  When Cadbury returned to England, the Quaker cocoa companies finally agreed to launch a boycott against São Tomé cocoa. The timing was perfect. They had an alternative supply of cocoa. It was the eve of the libel trial they hoped would shut the Tories up, once and for all. The boycott, they assumed, would strengthen their case against the newspaper.

  The trial began on November 29, 1909, and it soon became as much a test of Cadbury’s ethics as defamation by the Standard. In his book Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics and the Ethics of Business, Lowell Satre documents an extraordinary display of legal theatrics. It was a dramatic contest between two of the most accomplished and brilliant lawyers of the time: Edward Carson representing the Standard, and Rufus Isaacs representing Cadbury Brothers Limited.