Higgs - Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa

Catherine Higgs has combined careful academic research with the kind of skillful writing youd expect in a good historical novel.... The book is strikingly relevant to todays headlines. It is an excellent study for academics who want to know how to research at a professional level and then write well for the public, and it will strongly appeal to general readers.

Book News

Catherine Higgs writes about the chocolate islands with clarity and conviction, commanding the evidence while presenting an argument about the dignity of labor with an elegance of style. In terms of presentation, research and structure, the book is a tour de force.

David Birmingham, author of Portugal and Africa and Trade and Empire in the Atlantic, 1400 to 1600

Higgs takes us into the plantations of the chocolate islands and along the slave routes of southern Africa in this deeply researched and beautifully written investigation of slave, free, and coerced labor in early colonial Africa.

Robert Harms, author of The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade

Like Adam Hochschilds King Leopolds Ghost, Catherine Higgs takes us into another heart of darkness of colonial rule. Chocolate Islands is a compelling read examining how the British chocolate firm Cadbury Brothers investigated the use of slave labor in Portuguese colonies to produce cocoa. It raises challenging questions not only about how a business with a humanitarian streak dealt with the use of forced labor in the early twentieth century, but also about the labor practices of businesses in the twenty-first-century world.

Robert R. Edgar, editor of An African American in South Africa: The Travel Notes of Ralph J. Bunche

CHOCOLATE ISLANDS

William A. Cadbury, Joseph Burtt, and an unidentified African man in Luanda, January 1909. Photograph in the Cadbury Papers 308, Cadbury Research Library, Special Collections, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

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Printed in the United States of America

Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper

First paperback printing in 2013

ISBN 978-0-8214-2074-4

HARDCOVER 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 5 4 3 2

PAPERBACK 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Higgs, Catherine.

Chocolate islands : cocoa, slavery, and colonial Africa / Catherine Higgs.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8214-2006-5 (hc : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8214-4422-1 (electronic) 1. Forced laborSo Tom and PrncipeHistory. 2. SlaverySo Tom and PrncipeHistory. 3. CacaoHarvestingSo Tom and PrncipeHistory. 4. CacaoHarvestingMoral and ethical aspects. 5. Cacao growersSo Tom and PrncipeHistory. 6. PortugalColoniesAfricaAdministration. 7. Burtt, Joseph, 18621939TravelAfrica, West. 8. Cadbury, William A. (William Adlington), 18671957. 9. Cadbury BrothersHistory. I. Title.

HD4875.S36H55 2012

331.76337409670904dc23

2012009341

FOR KATHY JOINER MILBURN AND JEFF MILBURN

FIGURES

Frontispiece. William A. Cadbury, Joseph Burtt, and an unidentified

MAPS

This book is about an Englishmans journey through Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century, undertaken as European colonial powers were tightening their grip on the continent. The travelers name was Joseph Burtt. He had been hired by William A. Cadbury on behalf of the British chocolate firm Cadbury Brothers Limited to determinein response to an emerging international controversyif slaves had harvested the cocoa the company was purchasing from the Portuguese West African colony of So Tom and Prncipe.

Burtts voyage took him from innocence and credulity to outrage and activism. Between June 1905 and March 1907, he traveled to the islands of So Tom and Prncipe, then south along the coast to the large Portuguese colony of Angola, to Mozambique in Portuguese East Africa, and to the Transvaal Colony in British southern Africa. Through his eyes, we learn about the often complacent British and Portuguese attitudes toward work, slavery, race, and imperialism in the early twentieth century. He visited agricultural estatesroas on So Tom and Prncipe and fazendas in Angola. He talked to diplomats, journalists, and European and African businesspeople, and he traced the slave route through Angolas interior. He conferred with mine owners in the Transvaal and colonial officials in Mozambique, which supplied most of the labor for the Transvaals mines. He was not the first man to make such a trip; readers interested in the broader literature into which this narrative of his experiences fits may wish to read A Note on Sources at the end of this book.

Burtt wrote a stream of letters to Cadbury recording what he saw and whom he met. He was not a flawless observer, but this should not surprise us, living as we do in an age that has long abandoned the pretense of objectivity. What Burtt wrote prompted Cadbury Brothers Limited to seek alternate sources of cocoa. The report he prepared summarizing his observations was submitted to the British and the Portuguese governments, and it helped reform the recruitment and treatment of laborers. Joseph Burtt was no casual visitor to Africa: he traveled with a purpose, and what he saw and what he

I am grateful to the many librarians, archivists, colleagues, and friends who have made this book possible. Dorothy Woodson, curator of the African Collection at Yale University, gave me access to the collection of James Duffys papers donated by his widow in 2000. They restored to the archival record the set of letters Joseph Burtt wrote to William Cadbury from Africa between 1905 and 1907. Copies of the letters have been deposited in the Cadbury Research Library, Special Collections, at the University of Birmingham, where Helen Fisher and Philippa Bassett assisted me. Sarah Foden gave me access to the small archive still maintained by Cadbury Information Services (now part of Kraft Foods). Two summer Professional Development Awards from the University of Tennessee funded my 2002 visit to Birmingham (I thank Isabel Hackett for her kind hospitality) and my 2003 visit to So Tom. I am grateful to Augusto Nascimento for introducing me to the staff at the Arquivo Histrico de So Tom and Prncipe and helping me negotiate the archive at a moment when I was just learning Portuguese. Nascimento and Eugnia Rodrigues (both of the Instituto de Investigao Cientfica Tropical [IICT]) also graciously hosted me in Lisbon. A 2004 grant from the Luso-American Foundation funded a summer of research at the Biblioteca Nacional in Lisbon. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Helena Grego and Cristina Matias of the Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, who in 2006 kindly helped me track down numerous references. My debt to Gerhard Seibert of the Centro de Estudos Africanos (ISCTE-IUL) is considerable. Among many favors over the years, he read this manuscript and introduced me to the great-grandson of Francisco Mantero, who shares his name. I thank Kate Burlingham for her research assistance at the Arquivo Histrico Nacional de Angola, as well as the librarians and archivists at the Rhodes House Library at Oxford University; the Biblioteca Nacional, the Arquivo Histrico Ultramarino, and the Arquivo Histrico Diplomtico in Lisbon; and the Arquivo Histrico de Moambique in Maputo.