Bitter Chocolate (9 page)

But for all the social justice in their words and factories, there was a disturbing blind spot in how these idealistic capitalists saw their businesses. They managed what was near at hand with impeccable regard for human dignity. But it was a different story beyond the horizon of their social conscience, in those dark and distant places where the raw material for their business came from. The humane working conditions enjoyed by their employees, the “Absolutely pure and therefore Best” products purchased by their customers, the consistent strength of their profit figures—all depended on the efforts of people who worked for next to nothing, had hardly any control over their destinies and lived and died as slaves.

Theoretically, the slave trade had ended by the middle of the nineteenth century. Laws outlawing slavery were in force all over industrialized Europe. Abolitionists from Washington to London had triumphed. But somehow, on the margins of civilized society, people still lived in slavery, the reality of their circumstances obscured by wilful blindness and by euphemism. All the good intentions of King Charles of Spain, and later Philip, couldn't save the Maya and the Aztecs from murderous exploitation. The extraordinary priest Bartolomé de Las Casas spent a lifetime trying to do something about it, and in the end he failed. But in the nineteenth century, the voice of moral outrage would come not from a priest but from an entirely new phenomenon: the crusading investigative reporter.

The Englishman Henry Woodd Nevinson was part of a new breed of journalist who emerged in the late nineteenth century, writers
who combined a moralistic zeal with a flare for storytelling. They trekked around the world, exposing the sins of empire through their reporting. Nevinson's parents were evangelical Christians, but he was more inclined to conduct a secular battle for the rights of the working class, here and now, than to await the promises of heaven. He spent time with Henrietta and Samuel Barnett, the celebrated poverty activists who had installed a university settlement in London's East End to provide education to the underprivileged; he also joined Britain's first socialist party.

Nevinson was a scholar of Greek and Latin and taught history in various schools throughout London while writing books about the plight of the poor. He hiked and cycled all over England and sometimes spent days walking while contemplating the human condition. But Nevinson longed to travel in uncharted places, to see the world and to write about it.

In the late 1890s, he got his chance. A liberal English newspaper called the
Daily Chronicle
dispatched Nevinson to cover the Greek uprising against the Ottomans on the island of Crete. He was hardly over the experience when, in 1899, he was off to report on the Spanish-American war. Then it was the Boer War in South Africa. Such events were of great interest to an intellectual Anglo socialist who eschewed the imperial chauvinism of his own native country. By the time he was covering events in Macedonia, Nevinson had established himself as a formidable journalist with a penchant for exposing the social injustices of a rapidly changing world, a spokesman for the downtrodden. At forty-eight, he was working for the
Daily Chronicle
, writing books, hiking furiously and generally enjoying himself when he got the most important assignment of his career.

The respected American magazine
Harper's Monthly
—which over the years counted among its contributors Horatio Alger, Mark Twain, Henry James and Jack London—was always on the lookout for writers anywhere in the world willing to go to “adventuresome” places and bring back a piece of the action for its
readers. The editors at
Harper's
asked Nevinson to come up with a story proposal for them, and he did.

As with many social activists of the age, Nevinson was captivated by the reports then emerging from the Congo about a new manifestation of slavery that was on a scale to match the worst excesses of the eighteenth century. During triangular trade, European and British merchants regarded Africa as a massive labour pool for their colonies in the New World. But King Leopold II of Belgium saw the value of Africa to his Empire a bit differently. He laid claim to vast areas of the Congo, declaring it a free state but in reality, launching one of the most devious campaigns of wealth extraction in human history, as he enslaved native people to facilitate his ruthless harvest of ivory and rubber. Africans who refused to work for the Belgians were routinely beaten to death. Whole villages of people were murdered. To reluctant workers, Leopold's agents displayed buckets of the severed hands of others who had resisted. Despite widespread international laws against such exploitation, Leopold got away with murder on an epic scale. In fact, the world celebrated the Belgian king as a humanitarian, subscribing to Leopold's claims that he was introducing the savage natives of the Congo to the redeeming ways of European civilization. No one knew (or admitted to knowing) what the Belgian monarch was really up to until it was exposed by an enterprising writer.

Edmund Morel discovered the horrific abuse while working for a Liverpool shipping company, and he began to keep a detailed record of what he learned. Though it would destroy his career in shipping and eventually land him in prison, Morel painstakingly documented the Belgian atrocities in the Congo, many of them reported by Belgian bureaucrats. The Congo was a commercial success story in a place few people ever visited. With the king in charge, the likelihood of whistle-blowers seemed just as remote as the place itself. If not for the crusading journalism of Morel the world might never have discovered the
full breadth of a scheme that claimed the lives of as many as ten million Africans.

Leopold, like many greedy potentates before him, had discovered the value of euphemism in obscuring the true nature of his imperial behaviour. To escape the legal implications of slavery, he simply called it something else. His involuntary workforce in the Congo was “indentured,” and his colonial bureaucrats claimed that the African labourers worked willingly for wages—there was no coercion. Leopold had actually convinced other European governments that his mission in Africa was charitable and that he was providing job opportunities for the Congolese. The fact that the Africans arrived at work in chains at gunpoint somehow didn't register.

Nevinson was fascinated and appalled when he read Morel's exposés but he learned that Leopold was not alone in his clever deceit. Nevinson heard about particularly egregious practices on the coast of equatorial Africa, where there was a seemingly innocuous trade in a product the very name of which conjured up the best of human impulses. It seemed that cocoa, by now Britain's most cherished confection, the raw material for the high-minded Quaker industrialists, was produced by slaves. The story, like the product, was delicious. This investigation was one Nevinson could get his teeth into, following in the famous footsteps of Morel. But as was the case for Morel, the story would consume Nevinson for the rest of his life, and would never be completely resolved.

By the mid-1800s, the cocoa trees of the Caribbean and the Spanish Americas were depleted and disease ridden: colonists had destroyed the
Theobroma
stock through over-production and poor management, just as they had ravaged the populations that had taught Europe about cocoa. But cocoa traders had learned
that the beans could grow anywhere within a twenty-kilometre belt north or south of the equator, provided the atmosphere was humid and the altitude was not excessive. The Dutch had already transplanted cocoa stock to their colonies in Indonesia. The Portuguese found the ideal terrain for their own plantations on two small islands under their control in the Gulf of Guinea, just off the coast of present-day Cameroon. For years they'd been transporting Africans to the Americas to work as slaves on cocoa farms. Now they'd take the cocoa trees to Africa. One thing wouldn't change: The Africans would continue to work the cocoa farms in appalling circumstances.

The islands of São Tomé and Príncipe had served as transfer stations for the earlier slave trade. Millions of hapless Africans had passed through warehouses on the tiny islands and had caught their last glimpses of their homeland from the gangplanks of ships in São Tomé's harbour. For a time, the islands had been cultivated for sugar, but that ended when the Caribbean plantations became the main source of the world's sweetener. The Portuguese continued to grow some coffee but had found no other purpose for the islands. As the world demand for cocoa increased and the plant stock in the New World diminished, the Portuguese finally realized they were in possession of a goldmine.

The first cocoa plants arrived on São Tomé in 1824, and within two decades, as Van Houten's machine revolutionized production—and boosted demand—the Portuguese expanded their plantations dramatically. Soon cocoa was flourishing on the island and then on neighbouring Príncipe. By the turn of the century, São Tomé was the leading producer of cocoa in the world, supplying the factories of Great Britain, the Netherlands and to a lesser extent the United States. There were few people native to the islands to perform the labour-intensive work of cocoa farming, but this was of little concern. The Portuguese had control of populous Angola.

Since the sixteenth century, the Portuguese had exported an estimated three million Angolans to the Americas. Now, with a huge international demand for chocolate candy, Angolans would serve Portuguese interests once more. Officially, the Angolans were being offered jobs and wages in the cocoa groves. They were told they were free to come and go and were promised proper compensation for their efforts. That was what it said on paper. São Tomé wasn't far away—not like the Americas. Presumably they'd work for a while, then return to where they came from. But, curiously, no one did.

Nevinson wanted to know why.

One of his best sources of information about Portuguese labour practices in Africa came from an enterprising newsletter put out by Britain's Anti-Slavery Society, called the
Reporter
. In its pages, Nevinson combed through myriad accounts of abuse dispatched by the field workers and missionaries who worked in Africa. What they described, in detailed letters and articles, was a systemic forced labour scheme supplying workers to the Portuguese coffee and cocoa plantations. Reports of appalling abuse begin to appear in the
Reporter
as early as the 1850s, and each decade the stories become more shocking.

In May 1883, a letter described “the shipments of Slaves” to the Portuguese islands where the author reports that three thousand workers had recently arrived. Technically, they were free to go home at any time, “however, as the offer is never made, nor the opportunity afforded,” said the source, “they become permanent indentured labourers.” More reports throughout 1885 contradicted claims by the Portuguese that the workers were treated humanely: “Why then torture them by squeezing their fingers in the copying press, cutting their parts and ears off, thrash them, men, women heavy in the course of nature, and children so unmercifully?” says the
Reporter's
dispatch. Other missionaries claimed the workers arrived on São Tomé with iron rings around their necks. How could the Africans be anything other than slaves?

What fascinated Nevinson more than the bulletins, which continued to pile up into the 1890s, was that the bland denials of the Portuguese were accepted by British authorities or, at least, regarded in the same light as the passionate accounts of missionaries to the Portuguese islands. These differing versions were accepted simply as two sides of the story. Why had no one done a proper investigation when the evidence was so thick and the narratives—covering a period of five decades—so consistent?

Before departing for Africa in 1904, Nevinson contacted the Cadburys. With their reputation as social activists, it would have been reasonable to assume they'd be as curious as he was about the disturbing reports from the islands off West Africa, where Nevinson was certain most of their cocoa originated. Surely they had heard and read the same disturbing accounts! Maybe they'd help him by providing names of contacts there. But Nevison found the Cadburys strangely coy about labour conditions on the Portuguese islands. George Cadbury, the paterfamilias, told Nevinson that the company had plans to do its own investigation and was actively seeking someone suitable to send to the islands. Nevinson was not their man.