Chocolate Wars by Deborah Cadbury

Author:Deborah Cadbury
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2010-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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