Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa

by Catherine Higgs

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.

Genres: Africa, History, Nonfiction, Sao Tome and Principe

236 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2012

Reviews

[Tinea]

This book is useful in that is a historical document contributing a specific piece of the story of an overall poorly documented time and place (at least in English): enslavement in Portuguese colonies after its partial legal abolition, and the work of investigators and activists to bring attention to (but not end) the practice in the early 1900s. The author, writing a hundred years later, chose to present this history in the dated format of a travelogue focused on the adventures, foibles, and travel-related suffering of a myopic white narrator. Essentially the book presents a hundred pages of telling the story of a flawed hero and his halfhearted, pulled punches advocacy while dedicating only dozens to the story and analysis of what he attempted to document.

Higgs troubles the narrator by deconstructing the liberal, paternalist white supremacy and naivete of his views, presenting cringe-worthy quotes that truly make the reader dislike and doubt him. Great. Yet the book is still about him, centering at all times this man's perspective. Throughout the book, it's this man's quotes taking up space instead of those of contemporaries investigating the same issues with better and more independent reporting and language skills. Higgs tells us about the narrator's extremely limited frame: he is a non-expert, lukewarm Quaker labor activist financed by an interested chocolate magnate, whose access to information is mediated at all times through his choice to be hosted and shown around by white colonial powerholders with whom he feels comfortable, mostly plantation owners and colonial officials, and all with financial and personal interests in shaping the narrative. Higgs is up front about these limits, but still chose to write a book about Burtt instead of about slavery in Sao Tome and Principe and Angola. She references plenty of other, more direct sources she could have chosen to draw from, including British contemporaries who quoted directly from free Angolans and enslaved workers. We hear Burtt's opinions of these writers but not their writing. Likewise, Higgs could have included primary sources like present-day Angolan voices or presented research that directly represented Angolan or Tomean perspectives. Instead, this book reads like the travelogues of the 1800s that modern historians are often forced to pull from--critically-- because other written sources aren't available.

The book is flawed but unfortunately, from my own very limited investigation, it's one of the few on this narrow issue available, so readers, too, may be forced to draw on it, but do so critically. The cognitive dissonance of reading this nonstop repetition of liberal white supremacist dehumanization of Black people in Portuguese colonies right after reading the actual words of Amilcar Cabral and the Liberation strategies of anticolonial movements in former Portugese colonies is, frankly, hard to process. See for example: No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky: The Liberation of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, 1963-74

[Carmen]

This book is about an Englishman's journey through Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century, undertaken as European colonial powers were tightening their grip on the continent. The traveler's name was Joseph Burtt. He had been hired by William A. Cadbury on behalf of the British chocolate firm Cadbury Brothers Limited to determine-in response to an emerging international controversy-if slaves had harvested the cocoa the company was purchasing from the Portuguese West African colony of Sao Tome and Principe.
Burtt's voyage took him from innocence and credulity to outrage and activism.

[Marieke]

I felt frustrated the entire time I was reading this. I never quite figured out if the problem was with me or the book. Regardless, I can say with certainty that I do feel disappointed in the book on two counts: 1) I read this book because it was selected as our group read for São Tomé and Principe at my Africa group; unfortunately it did not convey very much about life there. 2) this is a non-fiction book--but does that mean there shouldn't be character development? I feel like the author really missed a chance to make this book engaging. I had trouble keeping everyone and their positions straight and felt like I knew nothing about them. Because this is a history about an important social issue in a fraught time, this was problematic for me and detracted from my reading experience.

However, as a book about labor issues and international trade, I think it has something to offer. It's readable if not engaging and sheds light on events in a place few people these days are likely aware of. It has also piqued my interest in knowing more about the trade in cocoa. I could give the book 3 stars because it's really not a bad book and I did really enjoy the "Note on Sources," but if I'm going to be honest, this book was just okay for me. And that's not really a bad thing. I can't help it if 2 stars seems harsh :(

[Daniel Morgan]

This is a fascinating - if grim - book about coerced labor in Portuguese Africa. This focuses narrowly on a several-year period in the early 1900s when British manufacturer Cadbury was investigating labor ethics. The book details the travels, opinions, personages, and varied concerns and perspectives of the people involved. Additionally there are many images and photographs to put a human face on the cacao planations - and on the lives of the exploited workers.

[Sharon]

The stars and planets lined up in perfect order to bring this amazing history book to me, an avid Africa reader, at exactly the right time. The older I get the more I love to read non-fiction--no time for the made-up stuff. I belong to book group Tour d'Afrique that reads books about the countries in A-Z order. I was woefully ignorant of Principe (begins with P) and the Portuguese colonial possessions Sao Tome, Angola and Mozambique. Although the book is an academic account of Cadbury Company's efforts to disassociate itself from slave labor on cocoa plantations in 1905, I found it smooth reading. To top it off, the comprehensive bibliography and references will keep me digging deeper for years.

The moral dilemmas of the Quaker chocolate manufacture mirror our current involvement with overseas laborers working for American companies. Out of sight, it's probably not right. So the good Quakers sent a guy over to Africa to check out working conditions on the cocoa plantations and beyond. Mr. George Cadbury chose Joseph Burtt, a Quaker dreamer who reminds me of many modern-day characters. With good intentions to detect slavery under a new name, Joseph encounters a rat's nest of obstacles, the same obstacles that modern investigative reporters encounter in the today's foreign lands where investors are making money from faraway humans. Employers make things look good when they know you're coming.

As an Englishman, Burtt meets with government officials and plantation owners to get his information. They put him up. They rent porters for him. The Portuguese colonialists depend on Burtt to make them look good. Ultimately, Burtt can't accurately share his findings, because everyone wants to edit his story. Ain't the just the way it goes? Later in life, he becomes an anti-slavery activist and forfeits his reputation as a pliable waffler to being regarded as a kook.

I felt fortunate to follow Burtt on his tour of the slave trade routes east through Angola and Mozambique. What a fascinating experience learning how labor was bought and sold in 1906, the history of it, the devilish labor recruiting system. The tax burden of workers demanded by colonialists and by chiefs--new news for this reader. The author points out that Angolan families would hold a funeral for their kin who went off to work a "five-year contract" on Principe or Sao Tome. Although The Chocolate Island focuses on Quakers, European industrialists, colonialists and the cocoa business, the the reader comes to understand a sliver of the African laborer's life.

All readers might not be as enthralled as I about The Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery and Colonial Africa. Nevertheless, I hope people try it and look for the parallels and current repercussions of making money and meddling in a faraway land. It's not over.

[Richard]

well written and an easy read, but some how devoid of significant information. how can you write a book on slavery in the cocoa plantations and not really say anything about the life of the slaves? old fashioned, colonial history. focused on the colonialism and nut the colonized, on the political movers, but not those effected by the men in power

[Rhonda Hankins]

In the early 1900s William Cadbury, a Quaker who was ostensibly anti-slavery, hired someone to go to Sao Tome and Principe and investigate labor conditions on the islands that provided 55% of cocoa to the family chocolate company. This book goes into detail about that investigation and the report that resulted. The unequivocal conclusion is that slave labor was used to produce the cocoa crops. Cadbury advocated for change to the "labor conditions" but resisted boycotting these islands. Always the dilemma: profit or morals. Profit in this case won out as it so often does.

For me this book was a total education about something I knew nothing about. I'm grateful to this book for creating an awareness of slave conditions that continue in the production of cocoa to this day.

Mentioned in the last chapter is the World Cocoa Foundation, https://www.worldcocoafoundation.org/ & we all might want to pay attention to their recommendations and initiatives so that we can enjoy our chocolate and so that the cocoa farmers can enjoy their lives.

We can do better. We must do better.

[Karen]

Chocolate Islands traces the journey of Joseph Burtt, an Englishman, hired by the Cadbury brothers to determine if the cocoa plantations were using slaves to harvest and process the cocoa beans. Burtt traveled to Sao Tome, Principe, Angola, with a short trip to Mozambique and South Africa. Burtt did determine that workers were forcibly recruited to work, and that they were coming from Angola.

This book was very well researched and found it to be interesting.

[Jvantijn]

This is an excellent history of a complicated time. It is a scholary but readable treatment. I read a scholarly works on a regular basis, but this is not my specific field of expertise. I learned all sorts of nuances about labor practices on Chocolate plantations and the fine lines between slavery and labor. It is also an interesting view into the actual working of a colonial system.

[Hana]

São Tomé and Príncipe—the chocolate islands—through Angola and Mozambique, and finally to British Southern Africa Group read with Great African Reads.

[Arno Rohwedder]

Well worth a read if you're going to Sao Tome, or very interested in colonial era chocolate production.

[Beverly]

Thoughts coming shortly

[Meli]

This was an unusually addictive read for me for this genre. I picked it up because I was traveling in Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe and South Africa for work. In Mozambique and Angola, an impression I took of the country is that the topics discussed in this book have been overshadowed or lost to obscurity in the national memory due to the more recent and traumatic civil wars and political regimes. In South Africa, it seems a similar effect has taken place due to the apartheid regime that still stains the national memory, but this is more muted due to the larger, more vocal and visible civil society space and the profound connections that current inequalities have to the practices of the colonial years.

As a result, I had a general knowledge about the extractive and colonial experiences in these countries, but wanted a deeper understanding. Mozambique and Angola were especially interesting to me, first as someone from another country colonized by Portugal (Brazil), where similar practices were used (e.g. in colonial administration and in sugarcane cropping), where the bulk of the people enslaved from Angola were sent, and what was once considered the gem of the Portuguese empire. Also, during my trips in Southern Africa, I observed how the population of Angola and Mozambique more closely resembles that of Brazil due to centuries of miscegination encourages under colonial rule, while in areas formerly colonized by the British (such as in Kenya), separation was strictly enforced and the effect is visible today. The author's writings in the book don't directly address these topics, but they receive treatment in a secondary way.

It was fascinating to read about the lines and methods used by colonial officeials to prop their delusions about what constitutes adequate working conditions and what consititutes slavery. Of course, there is flagrant racism all throughout. Although parts of the book sometimes were convoluted and a bit hodgepodge, the complex political machinations were well laid out, for example. For example, the author clearly explains the interplay of different agendas: the ways in which the British chocolate makers whistleblew on Portuguese cocoa producers, how Portugal retorted by calling out Britain's own labor practices in the gold mines of South Africa (as if these cancel out), and Britain's duplicitous, supposedly humanitarian motives, in order to 'remove' Portugal's colonies. As an aside, Portuguese officials' supposed belief in their god-given right to extract a profit brought to mind Trump and cronies' current outcry at Brazil "undercutting" its right to profit from the people via the free Pix mobile money app. Through the series of events, we also learn how the biggest heavyhitters in cocoa production shifted from Sao Tome, as was the case before, to the West African producers we know of today.

Higgs undertook an immense labour of research for this book; most of the information comes from exchanged letters and other archival sources. And of course, in many locations, modern day cocoa production has just taken new shape, from chattel slavery to indentured labour, and the topic remains relevant today.

[Kevin Pedersen]

It's a compelling topic with an interesting conclusion, as evidence of slavery in the chocolate plantations used by Cadbury is presented and then buried and turned into a big political fight. Certainly it's an important subject, with some good philosophical digressions. Unfortunately the narration is kind of dry and the book never really finds a voice.