Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers (29 page)

From Luanda he took the steamer south to Lobito Bay, another infamous area for the slave trade. But still, he encountered no direct evidence: no gangs of boys “chained together, their hands shackled, and their necks held fast in forked sticks,” he wrote. Instead he was met with blank stares. People shrank from his inquiries. He sensed they were frightened of revealing what they knew. Nevinson suspected that anyone who dared speak out might meet with some mysterious misadventure; poison perhaps or some apparently random act of violence in the bush.

Nevinson and his small party trekked inland, deep into beautiful terrain, “a land of bare and rugged hills, deeply scarred by weather and full of wild and brilliant colours, the violet and orange that bare hills always give.” He was heading for the heart of Angola’s “Hungry Country,” his group wending its way along paths so narrow and sheer he compared them to a “goat-path in the Alps.” Still no slave caravan. Did the slavers have advance knowledge of his trip? Could they have changed their route?

But as he made the 450-mile journey inland, Nevinson began to spot worrying evidence. “The path is strewn with dead men’s bones,” he observed, “the skeletons of slaves who were unable to keep up with the march and so were murdered or left to die.” Deeper inland the bones were in such numbers that it “would take an army” to bury them all. Carelessly discarded in the bush, Nevinson saw the crude wooden shackles that were used to prevent escape. Typically a block
of wood had holes hacked in them in which the arms or legs of a slave—or sometimes two slaves together—could be held tight in place by a wooden pin. “I saw several hundred of them,” Nevinson recorded, “scattered up and down the path.”

There were more signs of brutality. He came across the body of a slave who had died recently. “When I tried to raise the head, the thick woolly hair came off in my hand,” Nevinson reported. To his horror this exposed “a deep gash made by the axe at the base of the skull just before it merges with the neck.” The blow had been so heavy that as he tried to lay the head gently down, it “broke off from the backbone and fell to one side.” It is perhaps hardly surprising that Nevinson grew increasingly fearful the deeper he penetrated into this violent land, where life had no value and could be destroyed in seconds with the butt of a rifle or the blow of an axe.

Nevertheless, Nevinson persevered. Near the town of Caiala, he came across a group of terrified boys hiding in the bushes, closely guarded by men with whips. “At the sight of me they all ran away,” he recorded, “the men driving the boys before them.” This fuelled his suspicion that the boys were slaves. “Men armed with
chicotes
[hide whips] do not hide a group of boys in the bush for nothing.” His party came across a larger group of forty-three people guarded by men with guns. One “beautiful woman of about twenty or little more” said she had been sold for twenty cartridges. She had left her home “four moons ago,” leaving behind her young baby “who was still suckling . . . when they took her away.” The guards described the group as “voluntary labourers.” In another village, Nevinson was told of a father who had recently committed suicide. He was out of his mind having just “pawned the last of his children,” to settle an extortionate debt with a Portuguese trader.

Gradually, with discreet inquiries, Nevinson gathered sufficient evidence to conclude that people in the interior were indeed being taken as slaves. Some were sold by their own people. They might be “charged with witchcraft,” he wrote, or “were wiping out an ancestral debt . . . sold by uncles in poverty . . . or paid as indemnity for village wars.” Local customs made the purchase of slaves easier, he observed, partly because of the “despotic power of tribal Chiefs,”
and because of “the peculiar law which gives the possession of the children to the wife’s brother . . . who can claim them for the payment of his own debt or the debt of his village.” All too often, however, he found slaves were simply seized by agents for the Portuguese in raids on the frontier or claimed to settle extortionate debts to colonial authorities.

As Nevinson pieced together the Portuguese labor system, he began to expose a cynical system of exploitation that left him simmering with rage. Although slavery had technically been abolished, free men were being turned into slaves with the full knowledge and cooperation of the colonial authorities. It was in coastal towns like Benguala that the “deed of pitiless hypocrisy” that apparently cleared the Portuguese authorities of wrongdoing took place. Here the terrified slaves seized in the interior were herded in gangs into the tribunal. Paraded before the Portuguese officials, “They are asked if they go willingly as laborers to São Tomé.” Many were too terrified to speak; those that did were ignored. Official papers were duly completed, which apparently “freed” them but in fact simply changed their status from slaves to “voluntary workers” who had agreed of their own free will to toil in the cocoa plantations of São Tomé for five years. This bonded labor was known locally as “servicais” but was nothing more than slavery.

“The climax of the farce has now been reached,” Nevinson fumed. “The requirements of legalized slavery have been satisfied. The government has ‘redeemed’ the slaves that its own Agents have so diligently and profitably collected. They went into the Tribunal as slaves, they have come out as contracted labourers. No one in heaven or earth can see the smallest difference.” But he raged, the “blackest of crimes” has been committed, apparently under the full protection of the law.

Although Nevinson took care to conceal the purpose of his visit, he was convinced he had been poisoned during his stay in Benguala and was suffering from “violent pain and frequent collapse.” Nonetheless, he crawled onto the steamer to follow the slaves’ journey to São Tomé. He was able to observe them from the upper deck: They were bedecked in “flashy loincloths to give them a moments pleasure,” a
contemptuous token of their new status as “voluntary” labor. But the
servicais
were not deceived. They knew São Tomé was
okalunga
—hell on earth.

Nevinson estimated there were 30,000 “voluntary” slaves on São Tomé and another 3,000 on Principe. Their conditions were harsh; the work unrelenting. On average one adult in five died each year, “their dead bodies lashed to poles and carried out to be flung away in the forest.”

After his six-month investigation, Nevinson published his account in
Harper’s Monthly Magazine
in August 1905. It made for harrowing reading. That same year, the Portuguese islands briefly became the world’s top cocoa producers, but the cruelty and misery behind the figures was becoming all too transparent. This was not, said Nevinson, “the old fashioned export of human beings . . . as a reputable and staple industry.” This he acknowledged had disappeared. Nonetheless, “The whole question of African slavery is still before us,” he concluded. It had merely gone underground; disguised, modified, and legalized, but still a loss of liberty. To Nevinson, the enduring horror of it all was “part of the great contest of capitalism.”

Cadbury and other Quaker chocolate firms were put on the spot. Their own research had yet to make headway. William Cadbury had met with directors of the other Quaker chocolate firms, and they had appointed an investigator, Joseph Burtt, who was due to leave for Africa. Despite Nevinson’s revelations in
Harper’s
, the young and idealistic Burtt was keen to press on. He was convinced a second independent report was necessary before they could challenge the Portuguese authorities. Traders in Lisbon flatly denied Nevinson’s account. Was it possible, Burtt reasoned, that Nevinson misjudged the situation, perhaps because he spoke no Portuguese or because of “the nervous and overwrought condition of his mind?” Burtt thought this could explain why Nevinson feared he was at risk of murder. Such “a delusion,” he said, was common to those “who have been overdone in Africa.”

It was not long, however, before Burtt too was “overdone” in Africa. After six months in São Tomé and Principe, he fell seriously ill with tropical disease. His fever was so high he could not walk and
had to be transported in a hammock for part of the journey. A doctor was sent from England to help him travel across Angola and on to the Transvaal to investigate labor in the gold mines, but their progress was slow.

In his letters to William Cadbury in 1906, Burtt essentially confirmed Nevinson’s findings. It was an undercover operation, he said, that involved deceit and corruption at every level of the Portuguese administration. “No imported labourer in São Tomé has ever been returned to the mainland of Africa,” he confirmed. “Children who are born on the estates are the absolute property of the owners.” In the villages in Angola, where slaves were seized, there was such dread concerning the fate of any missing person, that his “family go through a service of the dead on his behalf.” It was quite clear that the slave trade was every bit as horrific as Nevinson had recounted.

William Cadbury returned to Lisbon to put pressure on the authorities. Once again, he was faced with denials or requests for more time to implement reforms. In response, George Cadbury Sr., Arnold Rowntree, and other cocoa directors appealed to the British Foreign Office to confront the Portuguese government.

On October 26, 1906, William and George Cadbury Sr. secured a private meeting with the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey. They told him that the English cocoa makers were united in their desire to act together and were keen to ensure “that any step we take will be in harmony with any premeditated action of the British Government and be of real use in helping to solve the great African labour problem.” Grey promised to help and “was very kind and courteous,” George noted. In November, however, he received a letter from the Foreign Office urging his discretion on the matter. Grey wanted the Cadburys “to refrain from calling public attention to the question” until he had a chance to read Burtt’s report and “to speak to the Portuguese minister himself on the subject.” The Cadburys had to contain their impatience.

Unknown to the Cadburys, the Quakerly concern to end slavery immediately was entangled in a far bigger web. Even though the Foreign Office had promised to put pressure on the Portuguese, there were other British interests at stake that affected negotiations—
notably labor problems in the mines in South Africa. The British government was trying to strike a deal with the Portuguese to employ workers from Mozambique in their gold mines in the Transvaal. They were therefore in no hurry to antagonize the Portuguese authorities. The Foreign Office was stalling for time.

Burtt returned to England in the spring of 1907 and reported his findings to the leading cocoa manufacturers. Records show that on May 2, he convinced the Rowntree board “beyond all doubt” that the workers on São Tomé were held in “a condition of practical slavery,” and that “cruel and villainous” methods were used to procure the labor. On June 27, leading directors of the Quaker chocolate firms met to discuss the problem. Seated at the table were Seebohm Rowntree, the author of
Poverty
; his cousin Arnold Rowntree; Edward Cadbury, who had just exposed appalling working practices in Britain in
Sweating
and
Women’s Work and Wages
; his cousin, William Cadbury; Roderick Fry; and Francis Fry. They debated whether the Foreign Office could be trusted to resolve the issue. Was there any way the British could stop the slavery once and for all? Should the cocoa manufacturers organize a boycott—a move that William and others argued against, claiming that it would achieve nothing but “the comfortable assurance that we have wiped our hands of all responsibility in the matter.” At heated meetings on June 27 and again on July 4, they decided to give the Foreign Office more time and try to use their buying power as leverage.

Meanwhile everything that the Quaker brand of chocolate stood for—the promised land of justice and welfare for all—was beginning to be called into question in the British press. Rumors began to circulate that the idyllic Bournville village with its happy workers producing a delicious chocolate bar rested on the unspeakable misery of African slaves. As for George Cadbury, the chocolate “uncle” who created homes for cripples, was it possible that he was in fact nothing more than a “serpentine and malevolent cocoa magnate?”

While the cocoa magnates of England were preoccupied with Quaker idealism and social reform, the slumbering American market was waking up to a chocolate tycoon of its own.

Hershey had returned to the Pennsylvania haunts of his childhood. Exploring the region around Derry Church by horse and wagon, he found an isolated farming community still lost in the last century, lacking the trophies of modernity such as gas and electricity. While his family and critics were astonished at the idea of building on a massive scale in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, Hershey could only see the potential. It was good dairy country. His milk chocolate factory would be surrounded by farms that could supply all the fresh milk he needed.

In 1903, Hershey arranged a survey of 4,000 acres and bought parcels of land wherever possible, starting with 1,200 acres. A local architect, C. Emlen Urban, was hired to start work on the designs. The factory alone would provide six acres of floor space filled with the very latest equipment with the capacity to make 100,000 pounds of chocolate each day. It was an extraordinary gamble, but there was no room for caution or uncertainty in Hershey’s thinking. His father’s advice still echoed in his mind: “If you want to make money, you must do things in a large way.” This would be no regional concern such as
his rivals were engaged in. Hershey was going to sell his chocolate across America from coast to coast. His chocolate would be more accessible, too; he would sell it at bus stops, in train stations, and from street vendors and cafes as well as sweetshops and grocers. And with mass production, he aimed to lower the price so everyone could afford it. Hershey’s would be chocolate for the people.