by Carol Off
The movement soon caught on in Regina and Weyburn, Saskatchewan; then on to Winnipeg, St. John and Halifax. More than three thousand young people marched down Toronto’s Bloor Street after school and picketed a candy store on Lippincott Avenue. In Ottawa, they mobbed Parliament Hill and chanted that they would rather eat worms than eight-cent bars.
A forest of homemade protest signs sprouted up across the country. “Don’t be a Sucker! Don’t Buy 8-Cent Bars!” “Eight-Cent Chocolate Bars—Phooey,” “Candy’s Dandy but Eight Cents Isn’t Handy,” “Knuckle Down for Nickel Bars,” and the most emblematic of them all, “What This Country Needs Is a Good Five-Cent Candy Bar.”
The crusade quickly captured the imaginations of adults, who resented the price increases on all consumer goods but had thought it unpatriotic to complain. Now the movement had enormous support from the media and even politicians, all of whom were fed up with the rising cost of living.
Initially, the candy manufacturers tried to reason with the children. As Canadian chocolate bar sales dived by eighty per cent in a period of weeks, Rowntree, now a large multinational corporation with production in Canada, published open letters to its consumers, explaining things from its point of view. The open letters lamented the increased cost of cocoa beans purchased from faraway lands in equatorial Africa and Central America. There was also the ballooning price of cane sugar imported from the Caribbean, and finally the problem that post-war full employment meant the company needed to compete for labourers, unlike in the days of the Great Depression.
Rowntree published newspaper appeals that ended with its advertising slogan: “Rowntree’s Chocolate Bars Are a Nourishing and Pleasurable Form of Supplementary Food: Buy Some Today.” Chocolate company spin doctors hit the radio waves to talk to the boys and girls about the hard reality of market forces and the global pressures on commodity prices. But the children would have none of it. They had Big Chocolate on the ropes, and they weren’t going to relent.
But a confluence of interests suddenly turned against the strikers, effectively shutting the protest down and blackballing its juvenile leaders. Following several weeks of effective protest, the right-wing Toronto Evening Telegram wagged a paternalistic finger at the kids and their supporters, warning ominously that “candy [was] a dandy weapon.” Almost instantly priests, police officers, youth clubs, school principals and parents mobilized to stop what had suddenly been characterized as a threat to national security.
According to the community leaders, principally led by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who feared the children were delinquents threatening civic order, the protest was not so innocent. The boycott was a part of the Red Menace, cooked up in Moscow under Stalin’s direction. And it could not be tolerated. The strike was rebranded in the Telegraph the “Communist Crusade,” along with charges that subversives lurked in the shadows, manipulating the country’s youth. “Chocolate bars and world revolution may seem poles apart but to the devious Communist mind there’s a close relationship,” wrote the Telegram. “The indignant students parading their placards and demanding the five-cent candy bar have become another instrument in the grand strategy of the creation of chaos.
Winston Churchill had just declared that an “iron curtain” had descended over Europe. Cold War jitters would soon become hysteria around the world. Senator Joe McCarthy was revving up a potent conspiracy theory that would darken discourse in the United States for much of the 1950s. Ottawa had been the epicentre of an international uproar in 1945 with the sensational disclosures of the existence of a Soviet defector named Igor Gouzenko and also that the Soviets had an active network of espionage here and in the U.S.; the Communists were everywhere, stirring up dissent, even it seemed over eight-cent chocolate bars.
It didn’t help when it was discovered that there was, in fact, an active socialist influence in the “Communist Crusade” for candy justice. The National Federation of Labour Youth, affiliated with the Canadian Communist Party, helped organize many of the larger rallies while socialist youth groups were among the more vociferous protesters. But any objective reading of the contemporary newspaper accounts and CBC interviews of the time reveals the essential spontaneity of the movement. It was an honest expression of a childish desire to have some control in their small part of a complex chocolate universe.
Gradually, the hysteria subsided. The tone of the response to the children moderated but was no less stern.
In May 1947 the Telegram wrote, “No one is more anxious than this newspaper to see the return of the five cent chocolate bar; in fact, the return of the five-cent soft drink and the nickel cigar. They are all eminently typical symbols of that strange way of life we call democracy. There is, in fact, little evidence that such commodities are available for the equivalent price in Moscow.” But the item concludes that there are more important values at stake. Children in a democracy just have to understand the real cost of candy, which presumably is to support capitalism.
In 1947, Canadian children were told that the democracy their fathers and grandfathers had just fought to secure included the privilege of paying the market price for their chocolate. The children lost what, from the start was probably a hopeless battle. The price went up in spite of their actions. It wasn’t fair, but they went on buying chocolate bars.
The story of chocolate has a lot to do with what is fair. Bartolomé de las Casas, Henry Woodd Nevinson, Guy-André Kieffer, Marx Aristide, and many others, were driven by an intuitive sense of fairness. Each man in his time was offended by what he saw in the cocoa groves of equatorial colonies and post-colonies. They provoked the disapproval of the powerful to make their controversial points. Fairness or its grown-up sibling, justice, demanded a better deal for the people who produced the raw material for luxuries like chocolate. But they were ignored or vanquished by powers greater than their moral recititude. They were up against elites and the ethical insensitivity of the marketplace. The greatest impediment of all was the moral ambiguity of a consuming public that has always been quick to decry injustice, but also determined to enjoy the fruits of the earth at the lowest prices possible. The right to do so is still considered, by many consumers, to be only fair.
After the candy crusade, prices rose steadily to where they are today. An eight-cent chocolate bar is now as unimaginable as gasoline at forty cents a gallon. And yet, with a few exceptions, the people who toil to produce the raw material for chocolate bars remain excluded from the benefits of higher prices and unprecedented demand.
In the spring, when the snow melts and the detritus of an entire winter is left clinging to the fences and shrubs of my Toronto neighbourhood, the most ubiquitous garbage is the chocolate bar wrapper. Hundreds of the brightly coloured paper and foil packages tangle themselves in bare bushes, looking like tinsel clinging to dead Christmas trees thrown out with the January trash. Mars Bars, Snickers, Mr. Big, Kit Kat, Almond Joy, Mounds, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and Caramilk decorate the dull spring cityscape with their cheerful promises of sensory delight.
I watch the young people as they leave a nearby 7-Eleven convenience store clutching bars of chocolate, soon to be devoured in seconds. Each one costs a dollar, a small sum for most teenagers in our world of privilege. In supermarkets, mothers hand candy bars to restless children to buy their silence during shopping expeditions. Chocolate milk, chocolate cake, ice cream, Halloween treats and cocoa cookies are all abundant and cheap. Teams of youth canvass city neighbourhoods selling boxes of chocolate-covered almonds to raise funds for school trips and sports equipment. All of this seems fair and reasonable. Chocolate has become a universal luxury, blindly crossing ethnic, religious and national divisions—a reasonably priced frivolity for everyone, except those who’ve never heard of it or can’t afford to buy it. Ironically, that unenviable group includes the people who produce its most essential ingredient.
The young Malian boys I met who went off to find work and adventure in Côte d’Ivoire and spent a part of their lives in forced labour growing cocoa, learn
ed the hard way about the true price of a chocolate bar, even though they’ve never seen one. Now they know it was a price that included the incalculable cost of the enslavement of hundreds of children like themselves, kids who would have never known and will never know what chocolate tastes like; now they know that the true history of chocolate was written in blood and sweat of countless generations of people more or less like them. For as far as anyone can see into the future, there is little likelihood that this ancient and enduring injustice will be corrected.
SOURCE NOTES
Introduction: In the Garden of Good and Evil
The interviews here were conducted in May and June 2005 in the centre and southwest of Côte d’Ivoire. There is ample information on the Internet about the chemical benefits of chocolate, though we should be aware that many of the research findings that extol the virtues of chocolate, true or not, are funded by the chocolate companies. See the New York Times Magazine article “Eat Chocolate, Live Longer?” by Jon Gertner from October 10, 2004, for a good debunking of some chocolate health claims.
Chapter One: Death by Chocolate
The most authoritative history of chocolate is The True History of Chocolate by Sophie and Michael Coe, the source of much of the history in this section. Additional material came from the research of Boston University scholars Patricia A. McAnany and Satoru Murata, From Chocolate Pots to Maya Gold: Belizean Cacao Farmers through the Ages, of which I was generously given a working copy; Henry Kamen’s book Philip of Spain; Jim Tuck’s History of Mexico: Affirmative Action and Hernán Cortés; Anthony Pagden’s translation of Hernán Cortés’s Letters from Mexico; C.A. Burland’s Montezuma: Lord of the Aztecs; and Richard Lee Marks’s Cortés: The Great Adventurer and the Fate of Aztec Mexico.
Chapter Two: Liquid Gold
The sources cited for Chapter One were used again here, as well as the authoritative A History of the Modern World by R.R. Palmer and Joel Colton. Adam Hochschild’s book Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves was a source of information on the slave trade, as was Peter Macinnis’s book Bittersweet: The Story of Sugar.
Chapter Three: Cocoa on Trial
Material for this chapter came from Honderd Jaar (Hundred Years), a centennial book published in 1928 on the hundredth anniversary of the firm J.C. Van Houten and Son, parts of which were superbly translated for me by my CBC colleague Jet Belgraver. The Anti-Slavery Reporter is available at the University of Birmingham Special Collections, along with the Cadbury Brothers archive, from which much material came. More material on the Rowntree family and its company came from the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York, U.K. Lowell J. Satre’s book Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics and the Ethics of Business was an important source for this chapter, especially for the dramatic trial anecdotes and for information about Henry Woodd Nevinson, of whom little is written. Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa has the extraordinary story of Edmund Dene Morel and his battle with the monarch of Belgium.
Chapter Four: The Geopolitics of a Hershey’s Kiss
Material about Milton Snavely Hershey and his company came from the Hershey archive and from oral history in Hershey, Pennsylvania, as well as from residents of Hershey who had personal knowledge of the history. More material about both Hershey and the Mars empire came from Joel Glenn Brenner’s book The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars; Crisis in Candyland: Melting the Chocolate Shell of the Mars Family Empire by Jan Pottker; Hershey: Milton S. Hershey’s Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire and Utopian Dreams by Michael D’Antonio; Milton Hershey: Chocolate King, Town Builder by Charnan Simon; and Chocolate by Hershey: A Story about Milton S. Hershey by Betty Burford.
Chapter Five: No Sweetness Here
In addition to travel and research in Côte d’Ivoire, I consulted Peter Schwab’s book Africa: A Continent Self-Destructs; Joseph E. Stiglitz’s Globalization and Its Discontents; Africans and Their History by Joseph E. Harris; Hungry for Trade: How the Poor Pay for Free Trade by John Madeley; and La guerre du cacao: Histoire secrète d’un embargo by Jean-Louis Gombeaud, Corinne Moutout and Stephen Smith. Additional material came from Africa Report articles from the 1970s about problems with the African Miracle; The Economist articles on Côte d’Ivoire from the 1960s and 1970s; United Nations Conference on Trade and Development reports; World Bank reports from the 1980s: Structural Readjustment for Côte d’Ivoire; “Employment Problems and Policies in the Ivory Coast” from the International Labor Review of December 1971; the 1961 edition of Political Africa: A Who’s Who of Personalities and Parties; and the 1961 review Political Parties and National Integration in Tropical Africa, edited by James S. Coleman and Carl G. Rosberg, Jr. For material about Ghana (Gold Coast) and its beginnings in cocoa, I consulted the 1966 Journal of Economic History.
Chapter Six: The Disposables
Most of the material for this chapter came from first-person interviews with Abdoulaye Macko and Salia Kante; with people working at Save the Children Canada and the Malian NGOs Mali Enjeu and Guamina; with the BBC’s Humphrey Hawksley; and with representatives of the government of Côte d’Ivoire. Additional material came from newspaper accounts, BBC reports, UNICEF reports and U.S. State Department reports.
Chapter Seven: Dirty Chocolate
Material for this chapter came from travel in West Africa and interviews with the principal players in Canada, the United States and Europe, including the NGOs; the labour organizations; politicians; the chocolate companies by way of their umbrella organization, the Chocolate Manufacturers Association; and the confectionery Manufacturers Association of Canada and their public relations people. Other sources used for this chapter include reports by Anti-Slavery International, in particular the exhaustive 2004 study called The Cocoa Industry in West Africa: A History of Exploitation, which has much useful field study information; a series of detailed reports by Anita Sheth of Save the Children Canada; reports by the International Institute of Tropical agriculture, which performed the survey; and the Harkin-Engel Protocol.
Chapter Eight: Chocolate Soldiers
This chapter was developed almost entirely from interviews with cocoa farmers and their workers, both in Côte d’Ivoire and in Mali, plus interviews with political players in Côte d’Ivoire, including Roger Gnohite and Charles Blé Goudé, and with NGOs, both on and off the record. Additional secondary source material came from reports of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group.
Chapter Nine: Class Action Cocoa
Material for this chapter came from travel and interviews in Côte d’Ivoire and Mali, and from interviews with principal players in the Protocol, including the NGOs, labour leaders, Winrock International, the World Cocoa Foundation and the International Labor Rights Fund, supplemented with material from all of their websites.
Chapter Ten: The Man Who Knew Too Much
This chapter was built almost entirely from interviews conducted in Côte d’Ivoire, Canada and France with the friends, family, colleagues and enemies of Guy-André Kieffer, most of whom are named in the text. A number of them chose to be interviewed anonymously because they feared for their safety.
Chapter Eleven: Stolen Fruit
This chapter was crafted from interviews in Côte d’Ivoire with the principal players of the cocoa filière, plus members of the cocoa cooperatives and farmers. Many of them cannot be named for their safety. On-the-ground research was also done in Fulton, New York.
Chapter Twelve: Bittersweet Victory
Material for this chapter came from on-the-ground travels in Belize, interviews with farmers and their association, and interviews with Green & Black’s, Global Exchange and other experts on fair trade, plus extensive archival documents on Hummingbird Hershey and its operations in the Toledo district.
Epilogue: In All Fairness
Travesty Productions’ film The Five Cent War
is the best source of the story of the children’s chocolate strike. Additional material for this chapter came from archives at the Toronto Reference Library.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THIS BOOK COULD NOT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN, OR HAVE BEEN as informed as I believe it is, without the efforts of Maggie MacIntyre, my researcher and editorial assistant. Maggie travelled to Great Britain, France, the United States and Belize for this project, using her extraordinary range of talents to suss out the stories and facts, whether they were to be found with a reluctant interview subject or in a labyrinthine library archive. My first debt of gratitude is to her.
Ange Aboa was a tireless, amusing and very informed escort for my travels in Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana. Koffi Benoît did all the driving for many hard weeks over deplorable roads, but he still had the energy and wit to negotiate lower “fees” with the police and soldiers who extorted money from us almost on an hourly basis. Ange and Koffi made a difficult, often-dangerous trip enjoyable.
I was also happy to have the reassurance of Benoît Gauthier, first secretary of political and cultural affairs for the Canadian Embassy in Abidjan, who kept a bead on me during all my movements in the country, and then kept me informed about the changing landscape of Côte d’Ivoire.
I will never forget the company of Youchaou Traoré, who travelled with me in Mali, translating and explaining things patiently. His breadth of knowledge and depth of personal experience is only exceeded by his warmth and charm. Youchaou’s family took me in, fed me and entertained me graciously. Special thanks to Salia Kante for his honesty and integrity and for his endless struggle to help children.