Chocolate Wars

by Deborah Cadbury

  But opposing the war was no light matter. Advertisers responded swiftly by removing their business from the Daily News, and losses soared. By the end of 1901, his business partner wanted out. George Cadbury faced a tough choice. He could sell his share and run the risk that the paper would be bought by those in favor of war. Or he could put up another £20,000 to buy the paper outright. Despite the rising losses, George Cadbury chose the latter.

  As sole proprietor, he appointed an editor who shared his views: Alfred George Gardiner, who would later write Cadbury’s biography. Under Gardiner’s editorship, the Daily News drew attention to the scandal of tens of thousands of Chinese coolies laboring in South African mines in subhuman conditions. With provocative headlines such as “Yellow Slavery,” the paper condemned the Tory government for condoning slavery and supporting wealthy British interests.

  Gardiner and his team also highlighted the urgent need for labor reforms at home. The Daily News was tireless in its exposure of inhumane labor conditions in Britain. The paper funded an exhibition in London that revealed the appalling exploitation of those working in sweated labor. They found women making shirts in their homes for less than a penny an hour, repairing sacks for two shillings a week, and chain-making for six shillings a week, often working more than twelve hours a day. George Cadbury became president of the newly formed Anti-Sweating League and was supported by the indefatigable efforts of his oldest son, Edward. Edward wrote two books summarizing the findings: Sweating, which highlighted the need for a minimum working wage, was published in 1907; and Women’s Work and Wages followed in 1908. The Daily News also campaigned for unemployment benefits and old age pensions. Edward and his father helped to create the National Old Age Pensions League to champion the cause of state support for the elderly. It appeared that the dream of creating a chocolate factory to promote social reform and justice was finally coming to fruition.

  George Cadbury’s attitudes and beliefs were increasingly in step with the new Labor Movement. He agreed with the trade union movement. The campaigns for improved labor conditions, shorter working hours, and better provisions for workers such as sickness benefits: these were steps he had already taken in Bournville. But there were very few Labor MPs. “We want a hundred working men in Parliament,” George declared. “Only then will the condition of the people become a living issue.”

  Cadbury’s opinions put him in conflict with the Daily News’s chief executive, the journalist Thomas Ritzema, who had strict puritanical views. Not content to promote pacifism and labor causes, the moralistic Ritzema cancelled the racing pages and betting tips and opposed any advertisements for alcohol. Circulation plummeted further. The paper began to be seen as needlessly moral and censorious. The great philanthropist was finding his venture into public life increasingly troubled. Soon the Daily News was costing him up to £30,000 each year. His fortune, cultivated with such parsimony and exactitude, was being drained. Worse was to come.

  For a Quaker whose public virtue was much reported and whose own paper thundered about the wrongdoings of others, it proved to be a particularly nasty revelation. George Cadbury began to hear appalling reports of a slave trade in Africa. Slavery was rife in the very plantations where he was buying most of his cocoa: São Tomé. This was a moral blow more severe than any business setback.

  CHAPTER 12

  A Serpentine and Malevolent Cocoa Magnate

  The first warning of slavery came when George Cadbury’s nephew, thirty-four-year-old William Cadbury, sailed across the Atlantic to visit one of the company’s small cocoa plantations in the West Indies. As a leading buyer for Cadbury, he had bought two small estates in Trinidad four years earlier to research improvements in cultivation. William thrived on the outdoor life and eagerly anticipated his annual research trip to the West Indies, where it always felt like summer. But this year, as he toured the shady avenues of trees appreciating the order and beauty of the place, William learned of troubling news.

  The growers in Trinidad told him of a rumor they had heard about cocoa plantations thousands of miles away on the other side of the Atlantic. It concerned São Tomé and Principe in the Gulf of Guinea, the two islands that were the first to cultivate cocoa in Africa. The Trinidad growers believed that some of the workers on these West African islands were slaves.

  William was worried: In 1900 Cadbury bought 45 percent of its beans from São Tomé and Principe. He knew very little about the islands except that the beans cultivated there were superior to any others in Africa, and production was prolific.

  By chance, later that spring, the Cadburys were notified of a plantation for sale on São Tomé. As William read the sales brochure, to his alarm he saw a list of assets that included “two hundred black labourers worth £3,555.” “The suggestion behind this statement was obvious and disturbing,” he wrote. The workers were referred to as part of the property. He took the matter to the Cadbury board. According to the minutes for April 30, 1901: “This seems to confirm other indirect reports that slavery . . . exists on these Cocoa estates.” The board asked William Cadbury to investigate.

  The two islands were under Portuguese control, and slavery had notionally been abolished in Portuguese colonies during the 1870s. The abrupt end to the slave trade in São Tomé had come in 1875, when 6,000 desperate laborers simply walked out of the plantations and entered the capital demanding that they be treated like freed men. So how was it possible that a plantation owner could continue this grotesque practice? William Cadbury turned to Travers Buxton, the secretary of the British Anti-Slavery Society, for advice.

  William learned the Anti-Slavery Society had received a number of accounts from missionaries and explorers in the years since 1875. In 1891, a Swiss missionary, Heli Chatelain, reported seeing slaves during his travels in Angola who were destined for São Tomé. “Some of them looked healthy,” wrote Chatelain. “The majority showed signs of bad fare; some . . . were starved to skeletons.” A French traveller in 1900 also observed slave gangs in Angola. “All this trade is done with the protection of the Portuguese government,” he claimed in the Anti-Slavery Reporter. In 1902 William was introduced to a Scottish missionary, Matthew Stober, who had recently returned from central Angola. Stober was another to claim he had witnessed the slave trade firsthand.

  How was this possible when slavery was banned? William Cadbury was sufficiently troubled that he set out in 1903 to Lisbon, Portugal, to meet with the local authorities and plantation owners for himself. Matthew Stober, a fluent Portuguese speaker, accompanied him. He wanted the missionary to describe the horrors he had witnessed directly to the plantation owners and establish the truth. In a letter to Joseph Storrs Fry II in Bristol, who was also buying São Tomé cocoa, William set out his concerns. He wanted to enlist the support of the other leading cocoa buyers to bring the practice to an end.

  As Cadbury and Stober made their way by train and carriage across France and Spain towards Lisbon, they had plenty of time to ponder the predicament. Quakers had pioneered campaigns against slavery for three centuries. How was it possible for leading Quaker employers to apparently be involved in a barbaric trade that supposedly did not exist?

  From the earliest days of the Quaker movement, Friends believed in the sanctity of human life and the significance of every individual in the eyes of God. In the seventeenth century, the founder of Quakerism, George Fox, travelled to the Caribbean and America to speak out against the cruel trade that reduced men to little more than cattle to be bought and sold. After Fox’s death, the Society of Friends continued to denounce slavery. This “Hellish practice,” stormed Benjamin Lay in 1736, is a “filthy sin . . . the greatest sin in the world.”

  Revulsion at the slave trade triggered a high-profile Quaker campaign for reform in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In England, Quakers were not permitted to stand as MPs themselves, but this did not stop them taking the first antislavery petition to the British parliament in June 1783. The politician and philanthropist William Wilberforc
e was horrified at what he learned of the depraved trade and took up their cause, becoming one of Britain’s most prominent abolitionists. In 1787, when the Abolition Society was formed, the majority of its founders were Quakers. One method they used to expose the cruelties of the trade was by publicizing drawings of slave ships that showed slaves crammed into the transports shoulder to shoulder. Their campaign gained momentum and helped to pave the way for the British Slave Trade Act of 1807, which made it illegal to capture and transport slaves across the British Empire.

  But enacting a law did not bring an end to the highly profitable trade. The Royal Navy intercepted more than 1,600 slave ships between 1808 and 1860 and liberated 150,000 slaves found on board. Any captain caught carrying slaves faced a fine of £100. It was not uncommon for slaves to be thrown overboard to avoid discovery. Quakers continued to campaign and created the Anti-Slavery Society in 1823. They wanted not only to stop the slave trade but also to free all existing slaves. Their work culminated in the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which paved the way for the gradual emancipation of all slaves across the British Empire. The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society then took their campaign to other countries.

  As Quakers, many of William Cadbury’s forebears, including his great uncles, Joel Cadbury and Benjamin Head Cadbury, the older brothers of his grandfather, John, had been active antislavery campaigners. Joel Cadbury, who immigrated to Philadelphia, told his family about appalling incidents of slavery that he witnessed in America. On one occasion, during a business trip in 1842 to New Orleans, he saw a large crowd gathered around a shed and realized that slaves were being sold inside. As he entered, he saw a black woman on sale. Other slaves, herded into position like animals, waited their turn. Almost naked, the woman was made to stand while the auctioneer pointed out her selling points. She was a mere exhibit—described as healthy and fit for anything. When sold she would become the owner’s property, to do with as he wished. Joel was so sickened he had to leave. His wife, Caroline, echoed his concerns and later became treasurer of the Shelter for Coloured Orphans. The English Quakers of Pennsylvania were among the first in America to campaign for the abolition of slavery, a campaign that gradually spread across America.

  In Birmingham, William Cadbury’s great uncle, Benjamin Head Cadbury, had worked tirelessly for the antislavery movement. After the American Civil War, he continued his work for the Society of Freed People of the Southern States. He collected warm winter clothing for women and children, arranging sewing circles and organizing the transport of essentials such as bedding and shoes from Liverpool to America. William’s uncle, George Sr., also joined the Anti-Slavery Society and contributed funds along with other family members. With strong and lasting family ties to antislavery movements, it was hard for William to understand how they may have been unwitting beneficiaries of a secret slave trade.

  In Lisbon, he and Matthew Stober hit an impasse. They met ruthless characters such as the Marquis de Valle Flor, the wealthiest São Tomé trader who was rumored to subject his slaves to appalling treatment and to stockpile cocoa to control the price. He was one of many plantation owners who flatly denied having any slaves. There were others who refused to speak to them, or if they did, objected to British inquiries into Portuguese affairs. After all, they reasoned, what about Cecil Rhodes’s treatment of Africans in the mines? Or the British Army’s mass slaughter of Boer families during the war? How dare the British preach to the Portuguese about morality in their colonies?

  Cadbury and Stober soon determined that British cocoa imports were of only modest significance to the Portuguese, accounting for not more than 5 percent of their exports from São Tomé. If British firms stopped buying, they would lose any leverage they held over the Portuguese, and William Cadbury feared the slavery would continue. Meetings with Portuguese ministers proved more promising. The minister for colonies, Manuel Gorjao, conceded there was an issue and assured his English visitors that the new Portuguese Labor Decree of 1903 would settle the matter. The decree required workers in São Tomé to be paid a minimum wage, started a modest repatriation fund, and implemented measures to stop illegal recruitment.

  Once back in England, William Cadbury won the support of all leading Quaker chocolate manufacturers. Rowntree of York and Stollwerck in Cologne, Germany, joined Fry and Cadbury in their opposition to slavery, and a debate began as to the best way to tackle the problem. A boycott of São Tomé cocoa, the Rowntrees wrote, “would mean a serious pecuniary loss to those manufacturers who entered upon it.” Joseph Storrs Fry II replied that nothing should stop them from “countenancing a great wrong.” As a first step, the cocoa firms agreed to hire an investigator to travel to the islands and confirm the facts.

  Optimistic that he was making progress in securing a coordinated response from buyers and that the Portuguese authorities would change their practices, William Cadbury reported to the Cadbury board in 1903 that “things were going to mend.”

  ANGOLA, DECEMBER 1904

  Independent of the cocoa firms’ investigation, a young English journalist, Henry Nevinson, arrived at the port of Luanda on the Atlantic coast. He had been hired by Harper’s Monthly Magazine to make the treacherous journey to the interiors of Angola and investigate the rumors of slavery.

  Luanda had once been a key trading center, but as Nevinson walked through the dusty streets, there was little hint of slavery. Everything spoke of departed riches: forts in ruins, rusted guns, and decaying grandeur mingled with “a century of rubbish.” It was, he wrote, a bankrupt city, “with one drain, fit to poison a multitudinous sea.”

  From Luanda he took the steamer south to Lobito Bay, another infamous area for the slave trade. But still, he encountered no direct evidence: no gangs of boys “chained together, their hands shackled, and their necks held fast in forked sticks,” he wrote. Instead he was met with blank stares. People shrank from his inquiries. He sensed they were frightened of revealing what they knew. Nevinson suspected that anyone who dared speak out might meet with some mysterious misadventure; poison perhaps or some apparently random act of violence in the bush.

  Nevinson and his small party trekked inland, deep into beautiful terrain, “a land of bare and rugged hills, deeply scarred by weather and full of wild and brilliant colours, the violet and orange that bare hills always give.” He was heading for the heart of Angola’s “Hungry Country,” his group wending its way along paths so narrow and sheer he compared them to a “goat-path in the Alps.” Still no slave caravan. Did the slavers have advance knowledge of his trip? Could they have changed their route?

  But as he made the 450-mile journey inland, Nevinson began to spot worrying evidence. “The path is strewn with dead men’s bones,” he observed, “the skeletons of slaves who were unable to keep up with the march and so were murdered or left to die.” Deeper inland the bones were in such numbers that it “would take an army” to bury them all. Carelessly discarded in the bush, Nevinson saw the crude wooden shackles that were used to prevent escape. Typically a block of wood had holes hacked in them in which the arms or legs of a slave—or sometimes two slaves together—could be held tight in place by a wooden pin. “I saw several hundred of them,” Nevinson recorded, “scattered up and down the path.”

  There were more signs of brutality. He came across the body of a slave who had died recently. “When I tried to raise the head, the thick woolly hair came off in my hand,” Nevinson reported. To his horror this exposed “a deep gash made by the axe at the base of the skull just before it merges with the neck.” The blow had been so heavy that as he tried to lay the head gently down, it “broke off from the backbone and fell to one side.” It is perhaps hardly surprising that Nevinson grew increasingly fearful the deeper he penetrated into this violent land, where life had no value and could be destroyed in seconds with the butt of a rifle or the blow of an axe.

  Nevertheless, Nevinson persevered. Near the town of Caiala, he came across a group of terrified boys hiding in the bushes, closely guarded by men
with whips. “At the sight of me they all ran away,” he recorded, “the men driving the boys before them.” This fuelled his suspicion that the boys were slaves. “Men armed with chicotes [hide whips] do not hide a group of boys in the bush for nothing.” His party came across a larger group of forty-three people guarded by men with guns. One “beautiful woman of about twenty or little more” said she had been sold for twenty cartridges. She had left her home “four moons ago,” leaving behind her young baby “who was still suckling . . . when they took her away.” The guards described the group as “voluntary labourers.” In another village, Nevinson was told of a father who had recently committed suicide. He was out of his mind having just “pawned the last of his children,” to settle an extortionate debt with a Portuguese trader.

  Gradually, with discreet inquiries, Nevinson gathered sufficient evidence to conclude that people in the interior were indeed being taken as slaves. Some were sold by their own people. They might be “charged with witchcraft,” he wrote, or “were wiping out an ancestral debt . . . sold by uncles in poverty . . . or paid as indemnity for village wars.” Local customs made the purchase of slaves easier, he observed, partly because of the “despotic power of tribal Chiefs,” and because of “the peculiar law which gives the possession of the children to the wife’s brother . . . who can claim them for the payment of his own debt or the debt of his village.” All too often, however, he found slaves were simply seized by agents for the Portuguese in raids on the frontier or claimed to settle extortionate debts to colonial authorities.

  As Nevinson pieced together the Portuguese labor system, he began to expose a cynical system of exploitation that left him simmering with rage. Although slavery had technically been abolished, free men were being turned into slaves with the full knowledge and cooperation of the colonial authorities. It was in coastal towns like Benguala that the “deed of pitiless hypocrisy” that apparently cleared the Portuguese authorities of wrongdoing took place. Here the terrified slaves seized in the interior were herded in gangs into the tribunal. Paraded before the Portuguese officials, “They are asked if they go willingly as laborers to São Tomé.” Many were too terrified to speak; those that did were ignored. Official papers were duly completed, which apparently “freed” them but in fact simply changed their status from slaves to “voluntary workers” who had agreed of their own free will to toil in the cocoa plantations of São Tomé for five years. This bonded labor was known locally as “servicais” but was nothing more than slavery.