Chocolate Islands

Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa

Catherine Higgs

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780821444221
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

In Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, Catherine Higgs traces the early-twentieth-century journey of the Englishman Joseph Burtt to the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe—the chocolate islands—through Angola and Mozambique, and finally to British Southern Africa. Burtt had been hired by the chocolate firm Cadbury Brothers Limited to determine if the cocoa it was buying from the islands had been harvested by slave laborers forcibly recruited from Angola, an allegation that became one of the grand scandals of the early colonial era. Burtt spent six months on São Tomé and Príncipe and a year in Angola. His five-month march across Angola in 1906 took him from innocence and credulity to outrage and activism and ultimately helped change labor recruiting practices in colonial Africa.

This beautifully written and engaging travel narrative draws on collections in Portugal, the United Kingdom, and Africa to explore British and Portuguese attitudes toward work, slavery, race, and imperialism. In a story still familiar a century after Burtt's sojourn, Chocolate Islands reveals the idealism, naivety, and racism that shaped attitudes toward Africa, even among those who sought to improve the conditions of its workers.

NOTES

PREFACE

1. On travel literature, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 5; Robert M. Burroughs, Travel Writing and Atrocities: Eyewitness Accounts of Colonialism in the Congo, Angola, and the Putumayo (New York: Routledge, 2011), 1–2, 4, 9, 17, 114, 117–19. On the impact of Burtt’s report, see Lowell Satre, Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics, and the Ethics of Business (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 93–95. On slavery in the twenty-first century, see Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Henry Woodd Nevinson Diaries, June 18, 1905, MS. Eng.misc.e.613/1, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK (hereafter Nevinson Diaries) (quote).

PROLOGUE

1. William A. Cadbury (hereafter WAC) to Joseph Burtt (hereafter JB), July 21, 1904, in the Cadbury Papers (hereafter CP), Cadbury Research Library, Special Collections, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom, CP 4/96; WAC to JB, August 27, 1904, CP 4/97; WAC to H. R. Fox Bourne, May 20, 1903, CP 4/41; Cadbury Brothers Ltd. (hereafter CB) to H. H. Johnston, September 29, 1904, CP 4/100; “Plaintiffs’ Board Minutes,” CP 133: 12–13; William A. Cadbury, Labour in Portuguese West Africa, 2nd ed. (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1910), 141.

2. “Joseph Burtt,” Friend, May 19, 1939, 408; JB to WAC, July 4, 1905, 26, “Copy of letters received from Joseph Burtt,” in the James Duffy Collection, African Collection, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn. (hereafter JDC).

3. John F. Crosfield, A History of the Cadbury Family (London: privately published, 1985), 2:385 (first quote); Charles Dellheim, “The Creation of a Company Culture: Cadburys, 1861–1931,” American Historical Review 92, no. 1 (February 1987): 17 (second and third quotes).

4. Crosfield, History of the Cadbury Family, 2:385.

5. Dellheim, “Creation of a Company Culture,” 14–17, 19–20, 21, 31 (quote); Eric Hopkins, Birmingham: The Making of the Second City, 1850–1939 (Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Tempus Publishing, 2001), 98–102; Crosfield, History of the Cadbury Family, 2:385.

6. Crosfield, History of the Cadbury Family, 2:385 (quotes), 386; Dellheim, “Creation of a Company Culture,” 21.

7. Ibid., 2:386; Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 1, Education of the Senses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 103, and vol. 2, The Tender Passion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3–5.

8. Dellheim, “Creation of a Company Culture,” 14–17, 19–20, 21.

9. By 1918, the Cadbury Brothers workforce was evenly divided between men and women; ibid., 14 (first quote), 21–23, 25, 34 (second quote); Gillian Wagner, The Chocolate Conscience (London: Chatto and Windus, 1987), 48.

10. Dellheim, “Creation of a Company Culture,” 26, 29. See also Richard Price, Labour in British Society: An Interpretative History (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 99; Wagner, Chocolate Conscience, 51; Iolo A. Williams, The Firm of Cadbury, 1831–1931 (London: Constable, 1931), 168–69, 216–37; Crosfield, History of the Cadbury Family, 2:385.

11. “Joseph Burtt,” 408; Nellie Shaw, Whiteway: A Colony on the Cotswolds (London: C. W. Daniel, 1935), 38; Joseph Burtt, foreword to Shaw, Whiteway, 5 (quote); Hopkins, Birmingham, 82.

12. Dennis Hardy, Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England (London: Longman, 1979), xi, 1 (first quote); Ebenezer Howard, Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, original edition with commentary by Peter Hall, Dennis Hardy, and Colin Ward (New York: Routledge, 2003), 130, 157 (second quote), 159, 217; Dellheim, “Creation of a Company Culture,” 35.

13. Shaw, Whiteway, 20, 21 (quote); Dennis Hardy, Utopian England: Community Experiments, 1900–1945 (London: E. and F. N. Spon, 2000), 175; Hardy, Alternative Communities, 11, 12, 175.

14. Hardy, Alternative Communities, 172–73; Hardy, Utopian England, 172, 173 (quote).

15. Shaw, Whiteway, 35, 37, 38–39, 40, 41, 43; Hardy, Utopian England, 175.

16. Shaw, Whiteway, 24 (second quote), 43–45, 48 (first quote), 68, 127, 128 (third quote); Hardy, Utopian England, 176 (fourth quote).

17. Burtt, foreword to Shaw, Whiteway, 5 (quotes).

18. Shaw, Whiteway, 56 (quote).

19. Ibid., 52 (quote), 53, 55–57, 64.

20. Ibid., 48 (first and second quotes), 49–50; Burtt, foreword, 6 (third through fifth quotes).

21. Shaw, Whiteway, 50 (first quote), 51–52, 67, 68, 69 (second quote; Shaw quoting the Stroud Journal, September 1, 1899), 70.

22. “Joseph Burtt,” 408; WAC to JB, July 21, 1904, CP 4/96; Crosfield, History of the Cadbury Family, 2:386.

23. Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (New York: Africana Publishing, 1975), 30, 31 (second quote); Lowell Satre, Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics, and the Ethics of Business (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 21; Dellheim, “Creation of a Company Culture,” 15 (first quote).

24. Travers Buxton to WAC, November 11, 1903, CP 4/63; WAC to Buxton, November 12, 1903, CP 4/64; Satre, Chocolate on Trial, 30.

CHAPTER 1: COCOA CONTROVERSY

1. “Plaintiffs’ Board Minutes,” CP 133: 1–2; Geoffrey I. Nwaka, “Cadburys and the Dilemma of Colonial Trade in Africa, 1901–1910,” Bulletin de l’Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire 42 (October 1980): 782 (quote), 783; Lowell Satre, Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics, and the Ethics of Business (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 18, 19, 234n17; Charles Dellheim, “The Creation of a Company Culture: Cadburys, 1861–1931,” American Historical Review 92, no. 1 (February 1987): 26–27, 34–35; William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765–1914 (London: Routledge, 2000), 238–39.

2. David Birmingham, A Concise History of Portugal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1 (first quote), 86; Richard J. Hammond, Portugal and Africa, 1815–1910: A Study in Uneconomic Imperialism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1966), 1 (second quote), 2–4; Gerald J. Bender, Angola under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), xix; Douglas L. Wheeler, Republican Portugal: A Political History, 1910–1926 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 41; A. H. de Oliveira Marques, História de Portugal, vol. 3, Das Revoluções Liberais aos Nossos Dias, 13th ed. (Lisbon: Editorial Presença, 1998), 194–95. On British prejudices toward the Portuguese, see Rosa Williams, “Migration and Miscegenation,” in Creole Societies in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, ed. Philip J. Havik and Malyn Newitt, Lusophone Studies 6 (Bristol, UK: University of Bristol, 2007), 161n2; Eugene E. Street, A Philosopher in Portugal (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903), 167–90; Malyn Newitt, “British Travellers’ Accounts of Portuguese Africa in the Nineteenth Century,” Revista de Estudos Anglo-Portugueses 11 (2002): 108–9, 117, 119, 122; and James Duffy, A Question of Slavery: Labour Policies in Portuguese Africa and the British Protest, 1850–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 135.

3. Birmingham, Concise History of Portugal, 62–64, 96, 103; Nuno Severiano Teixeira, “Between Africa and Europe: Portuguese Foreign Policy, 1890–2000,” in Contemporary Portugal: Politics, Society and Culture, ed. António Costa Pinto (Boulder, Colo.: Social Science Monographs, 2003), 86; João Pedro Marques, The Sounds of Silence: Nineteenth-Century Portugal and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, trans. Richard Wall (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), x–xi, xiv, 99, 101–3, 183–86; Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 119.

4. Kevin Grant, A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 27–29; Duffy, Question of Slavery, 126–28; Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (New York: Africana Publishing, 1975), 22, 88–89, 94, 118, 171–72, 173 (quote), 241–45; Miers, “Slavery to Freedom in Sub-Saharan Africa: Expectations and Reality,” in After Slavery: Emancipation and Its Discontents, ed. Howard Temperley (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 244–50; Teixeira, “Between Africa and Europe,” 87; Henri Médard, “Introduction,” in Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa, ed. Henri Médard and Shane Doyle (Oxford: James Currey, 2007), 7; Jan Georg Deutsch, Emancipation without Abolition in German East Africa c. 1884–1914 (Oxford: James Currey, 2006), 97–101, 107–8.

5. Teixeira, “Between Africa and Europe,” 86–88; Oliveira Marques, História de Portugal, 3:223. On the humiliation of the 1890 Ultimatum, see Alfredo Margarido, preface to O Império Português entre o Real e o Imaginário by Adelino Torres, Colecção Estudos sobre África 5 (Lisbon: Escher, 1991), 9; Malyn Newitt, A History of Mozambique (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 341 (quotes); William Gervase Clarence-Smith, The Third Portuguese Empire, 1825–1975: A Study in Economic Imperialism (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1985), 81; Eric Axelson, Portugal and the Scramble for Africa, 1875–1891 (Johannesburg, South Africa: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 1967), 223–33.

6. Teixeira, “Between Africa and Europe,” 88; Oliveira Marques, História de Portugal, 3:188–89, 195, 284; Valetim Alexandre, Velho Brasil, Novas Áfricas: Portugal e o Império (1808–1975) (Porto, Portugal: Edições Afrontamento, 2000), 220, 237, and “The Colonial Empire,” in Contemporary Portugal: Politics, Society and Culture, ed. António Costa Pinta (Boulder, Colo.: Social Science Monographs, 2003), 64. Gerald Bender has suggested that the Portuguese were in a constant state of resentment: “It is difficult to find a single decade during the five centuries of Portugal’s presence in Angola when a king or prime minister did not feel compelled to defend...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• Prologue Joseph Burtt and William Cadbury
• One Cocoa Controversy
• Two Chocolate Island
• Three Sleeping Sickness and Slavery
• Four Luanda and the Coast
• Five The Slave Route
• Six Mozambican Miners
• Seven Cadbury, Burtt, and Portuguese Africa
• Epilogue Cocoa and Slavery
• A Note on Currency
• A Note on Sources
• Abbreviations in the Notes
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index