The firm of Cadbury Bros has rarely been out of the news. Until the 1960s it was a family business run largely by Quakers who had moved from making drinking cocoa to making iconic dairy milk chocolate bars. Thereafter it became a quoted stock exchange company booted like a football from owner to owner until by 2015 it was a part of Warren Buffet’s global empire along with Heinz beans and Kraft processed cheese. The financial changes were always controversial: at one time the chairman was a former Tory minister for war, and when Kraft made its hostile bid there was a national outcry in Britain which reverberated through the media for years. But controversy was by no means new. Cadburys were prominently in the news a hundred years before the Kraft uproar. The issue was who should be patronised as the growers of the essential cocoa beans. Should it be Latin America, where chocolate had been the food of kings since the middle ages, or the Caribbean where Britain had plantations worked by freed slaves, or the Gold Coast where Protestant missionaries were seeking new sources of income for their converts, or should Cadbury Bros buy cocoa from the once coffee-growing islands of Portuguese West Africa?
The debate over cocoa supplies has generated a huge scholarly literature. Henry Nevinson talked about ‘The Modern Slavery’ of Portugal in Harper’s magazine. By 1906 the Swiss missionary, Héli Chatelain, who had been campaigning against the slave trade for a decade, discreetly told his sponsors that the wide-scale sale of slaves from Angola to the cocoa islands was still in full flood, as reported by Nevinson. He said, moreover, that the most trustworthy witness to the slavery crisis was William Cadbury, in Birmingham, and his researcher on the ground, Joe Burtt. Chatelain was not discreet enough in his observations and in 1907 he was hounded out of Angola before the slavers could burn down his mission station. He was expelled on the trumped up charge that his wayside store, run on strictly teetotal lines, had failed to pay the local tax on rum, a commodity which other traders used to buy slaves. In 1908 Chatelain died in exile in Switzerland and Cadbury decided to visit Angola to see for himself how the family firm, over which he later came to preside, was sourcing its raw material. When Basil Davidson, the premier scholar-journalist of Africa, wrote a follow up to his 1954 analysis of ‘slavery’ in Angola he called his new book Black Mother and dedicated it to William Cadbury. Five years later a thesis on the earlier history of Angola was dedicated to Cadbury’s daughter.
The flood of academic books on turn-of-the-century slavery in Angola began with James Duffy on A Question of Slavery. These books often concentrated on the controversy which erupted when William Cadbury published, initially for private circulation only, his book on Labour in Portuguese West Africa. The great campaigners against colonial injustice and exploitation did not always see eye to eye and the Cadburys were accused of hypocrisy and of being slow to stop buying slave-grown cocoa beans. Books such as Lowell Satre, Chocolate on Trial and Catherine Higgs, Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery and Colonial Africa dwelt extensively on the controversy. W.G. Clarence-Smith put the question of cocoa into a wider context in Cocoa and Chocolate 1765–1914. He pointed out that even when production passed from the white-owned slave plantations to black peasant farmers cocoa did not benefit African growers in the way that tea had enriched Japanese gardeners. Meanwhile in Angola slavery was replaced by a not dissimilar system of forced labour in which conscription was used to supply alternative, but less lucrative, sources of colonial wealth such as dried fish, corn meal, sugar cane and wild rubber.
The turning point in the Portuguese cocoa trade occurred, coincidentally or otherwise, around the time of William Cadbury’s visit. It was a time of momentous change in Africa. Britain had recently conquered the Dutch mining republic of South Africa, Belgium decided to confiscate its king’s private fiefdom in Congo, the French defeated some of the Muslim rulers of West Africa and Portuguese anarchists assassinated their king and his heir apparent. Relations between Portugal and its ‘oldest ally’, effectively its neo-colonial economic overlord, had not recovered from the ultimatum of 1890 when Lord Salisbury ordered Portugal to hand most of the Zambezi basin over to the diamond tycoon and political brigand Cecil Rhodes, who renamed the territories after himself, the Rhodesias. It was into this world that William Cadbury stepped—along with his young interpreter. The diary of his travels is very sparse, and his published report is tailored for public consumption. But he also wrote extensive letters home to his wife and they give a living picture of life in Portuguese Africa in 1908 and 1909.
Travel to Africa was on a 3000 ton Hull steamer carrying a Portuguese doctor and a vice-consul from São Tomé who both spoke some English and were kind to British travellers—including the sad telegraph operator being sent out to Moçâmedes in the deep desert of south Angola. Interesting Portuguese meals, each with a silver stand of tooth-picks, were the main subject of report, with biscuits and fruit at six in the morning, a breakfast of fish, omelettes and coffee at ten, followed four hours later by a lunch of sardines and cheese, afternoon tea, and then a full-blown dinner at six in the afternoon before the nine o’clock nightcap. The Birmingham industrialist missed having orange marmalade for breakfast but reassured the captain that he could make do with quince cheese, called marmelo, instead. Upper class passengers included a Portuguese Indian and his wife and several army officers. Subordinates travelled below deck and spent their time playing cards while those above indulged in chess, skittles and quoits. Many of the travellers were planters and Cadbury found them ‘very pleasant’ as he worked hard to learn Portuguese and comically shook hands with them before every meal. They compared their own estates with those Cadbury had visited in the West Indies. The cargo included a huge lighter on the front deck, a vessel to be used for ferrying cocoa sacks from shore to ship. The ship also carried three fine mules for plantation work, and several pet parrots. The rest of the livestock, oxen, sheep, ducks and rabbits were destined for the pot en route to the rocky Cape Verde island of St Vincent, a way station with its British coaling pier and the South American telegraph relay post staffed by eighty men.
On the island of Príncipe the rain had delayed the north-bound mail steamer from loading cocoa and so letters home could be sent. The times and dates of incoming and outgoing mail steamers were a constant source of concern. Portuguese passengers celebrated their arrival on the smaller of the two cocoa islands with a feast of dried cod, potatoes, garlic and cabbage, flooded with olive oil, followed by stewed rabbit. Cadbury was courteously welcomed by the managers of each of the great estates and travelled across the beautiful green island on a railway trolley pulled by mules. The planters explained that the great problem of Príncipe, in contrast to São Tomé, had been sleeping sickness which had decimated ill-fed Africans ever since the tsetse fly had been introduced on sailing vessels a hundred years before. Although labourers from Angola periodically brought the disease back again, the planters clothed them in cotton jerkins which were as sticky as fly-paper and claimed they had thus captured 200,000 flies. Although much feared, the flies were kept out of white plantation houses and one manager even had his white wife and baby daughter living on the estate, far removed from the half dozen other white women living in town. ‘You can imagine the pluck needed’, said Cadbury, ‘to live and work against such odds and our kind hosts, and the doctor with whom we dined, were splendid examples of quiet, strong, men doing good work in an out of the way corner of the world’. In the town the English telegraph office had a very fine residence which served afternoon tea but refused to host the controversial visitors who were known to be investigating allegations of slavery. A savvy Lisbon merchant, by contrast, had sent instructions that Cadbury was to be given the apartment above his main store in the town and was to be generously dined, though not wined since he was a practicing Quaker, by the local manager, who was reported to be a ‘capital fellow’. The visitors were supplied with Pears soap, tooth-paste, letter-paper, sealing wax, newspapers, cigars and mosquito nets. As dawn rose the little wooden town echoed with dogs, clocks and cockerels. On Sunday afternoon a white band master led his black musicians on to the town square for the entertainment of all those who had no conventional family life, having wisely left their wives at home in Europe. The band was so proficient that, in spite of being described as a mere ‘nigger orchestra’, it had won a prize at the Paris world fair.
When it came to business the kind but elderly acting governor of Príncipe cautiously referred all Cadbury’s questions to the labour recruiting office. The peppery labour agent invited an important plantation owner to sit in on the Monday interview and then did his best to divert the conversation from its main topic, saying that in due course he would provide written information. The key question of repatriating migrant workers was one that some planters were willing to discuss but no government official would address. Cadbury was taken to an estate where women were sorting and drying cocoa beans in a manner that seemed to the visitor ‘as much like play as work’! The estate hospital was said to be as clean as any in Europe. This may have been because it had recently been visited by the Portuguese crown prince who was being shown the glories of empire. But although the Englishmen travelled for miles through the plantations they never saw a field worker. The island had no schools, semi-ruined churches with seventeenth-century blue tiles, and very few priests. Old communities of semi-indigenous families had colonial traditions which preserved a self-perpetuating system of literacy. The 20-inch Decauville estate tramways were built by the French, using German iron, since the island had no English trading house. Peak Frean chocolate biscuits were on sale but most other consumer goods came from Germany.
By 1 November Cadbury and Burtt had reached the main island of São Tomé and were hosted by a Mr Levy. Jewish colonisation had begun on the island from the 1480s and four centuries later, when the persecution of Jews had abated to the point where Portugal even considered hosting a ‘homeland’ for Jews in Africa, Jewish entrepreneurs were important on all the Portuguese colonial islands and indeed on the mainland of Angola. Instead of a ‘buggy’, a heavy ‘Victoria carriage’, with four mules, hauled the guests up muddy tracks to an estate where workers were given a generous allowance of 3 pounds of cooked rice a day and ‘allowed’ to scavenge for fruit in the woods. Cadbury wanted to study the death rate, which was distressingly high, and the birth rate, which was extremely low, each of which reinforced the constant need for new recruits from the mainland. The next estate, although managed by ‘a goodhearted master’ who employed sixty-five white staff, was worked by 900 ‘helpless’ black Angolans herded together in insanitary conditions with no latrines and limited washing facilities. Diseases spread readily after they had eaten ‘unwholesome’ scavenged food. The cold upland rain caused much suffering, though the log fires inside the smoky wooden barracks did keep the mosquitoes at bay. At 9 PM the plantation bell tolled for the flickering lights to be extinguished and then tolled again at 5 AM to summons everyone to roll call and send them off to work before the break of day. On one plantation the workers were allegedly given coffee with a dash of brandy before they began work. The meals were predominantly rice with some beans, dried fish and imported American beef. Cadbury thought that the island had few snakes and scorpions to endanger the bare-footed serviçaes. The most cheerful aspect of the estate consisted of a score or so of happy children, probably the illegitimate black off-spring of the white managers. The island had about 1,000 white foremen but none of the estates provided quarters for wives and the Edwardian industrialist did not dwell on alternative forms of quasi-marital partnerships.
Working life may have been long and harsh but when Cadbury was offered a fine horse to ride through the tropical vegetation below the 6000 foot mountains he became lyrical. His next visit was to a high and healthy model plantation whose manager had been given an earldom after hosting the crown prince. 40 square miles were worked by 2000 migrant workers who produced 50,000 bags of cocoa at a rate of 8 pounds of beans per prime ten-year-old tree. Some of the labourers had come from Mozambique and Cadbury deemed them to be ‘cleaner and more civilised’ than those from Angola, and he hoped they might help solve the critical shortage of labour on the island. Soon after he left this expectation was shattered when a major riot occurred among Mozambicans who had been told they had been hired on one-year contracts but were refused a passage home. Their wages were 12 shillings a month, but one third had been withheld to finance their return to Mozambique. Angolan workers, who had no expectation of ever returning home, earned less, up to 10 shillings for men and 6 for women. Pay day was the last Sunday of the month and on Sundays labourers on some estates only worked a half day and in the afternoon were paraded before visitors in clean cotton shifts. After the Sunday dinner the men engaged in wild dancing. The wages were, Cadbury supposed, the poorest agricultural pay in the whole world but he admired the supply of food, of clothing, and even the odd ounce of tobacco as a bonus. So enthusiastic was he that he suggested that one of his letters be shared with Rowntrees, another Quaker chocolate firm which bought Portuguese cocoa beans. He was particularly cheered that the men and women who operated the cocoa drying kilns sang while they worked but he did not mention that the temperature in the sheds could reach 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
For transport some short stretches of railway were steam-hauled and linked up to the ‘charming’ forest tracks used by mules. From the beaches surf boats manned by the communities of ‘Angolares’ who had been brought to the island 200 years before, carried cargo and passengers out to the coastal shipping. These old black settlers, 2000 or more of them, never worked on the cocoa estates but only on the 30-foot surf boats which they manned ‘like Venetian gondoliers’, their naked black backs glistening in the rain. In addition to the Angolares, São Tomé hired boatmen from Cabinda on the Congo mainland, and unlike the Angolans the boatmen had contracts which were honoured when the time came for them to go home. Two of them carried William Cadbury shoulder-high through the surf and paddled him out to the uncomfortable 180-ton cocoa launch which carried him to the next beach where he was warmly welcomed by a planter whom he had previously met on ship-board. A serious investigation of the slaving crisis felt almost like a semi-luxurious tropical holiday complete with romantic red sunsets and glorious moon-lit panoramas. Although some, if not most, planters were willing to discuss politics, when Cadbury got back to the island capital the ‘friendly’ governor was definitely not inclined to be helpful with the enquiry. And so he departed on the fifty-six hour voyage to Angola, arriving on 16 November 1908.
In Luanda harbour the steam ship Cazengo was about to sail north and so Cadbury was rowed out to her to see for himself the conscripted serviçaes it was carrying to São Tomé. He made no comment to his wife on their circumstances and wrote instead about his poor hotel bed and the ‘niggers’ who chattered all night in the street and prevented him from sleeping after his arduous row out to the ship in blistering sunshine. The American mission, which Chatelain had helped to establish twenty years before on behalf of the eccentric ‘Bishop’ Taylor, was now affiliated to the Methodist church and, taking pity on Cadbury, gave him a cool and airy room on the hill above the town. The mission administered a dozen inland stations and ran a city school where the children sang Methodist hymns from a Portuguese hymnal published in Chicago. The British coaling station put an office at Cadbury’s disposal and supplied him with a backlog of newspapers. At government house the governor, Paiva Couceiro, was a young man recently recovered from a riding accident which had been so severe that no one had dared initially to tell him that the king and prince of Portugal had been assassinated. He apparently had an Irish mother and was deemed to be one of Angola’s most dynamic military rulers. As in São Tomé, however, this governor was absolutely unwilling to give Cadbury any help, though he did permit him to travel around Angola and make his own enquiries. Meanwhile, colonial life carried on and Cadbury enthusiastically took part in a cricket match organised by a cable-laying vessel which called at Luanda, and challenged the chief engineer to a round of golf on the sand-spit of Luanda Island. Burtt also played tennis in the cool of the late afternoons. Life was expensive, however, and when entertaining the few British residents of Luanda at dinner in the hotel they were shocked to be charged three dollars for a Portuguese pudding made with sixty eggs. One of their guests was the British consul, H.G. Mackie, who was allegedly translating a history of the Angolan wars into English.
After a frustrating delay Cadbury took the Royal Trans-Africa Railway Company train inland from Luanda through stands of baobab trees, picnicking on board and noting the fifty ‘boys’ with filed teeth who had been recruited from the far north to complete the building of the railway as far as Malange. After a night stop at a rail-side inn they entered a tse-tse-infested forest where once thriving villages had been deserted owing to the recent pandemic of sleeping sickness. Cadbury remarked presciently that since the railway was losing £3000 to £4000 a year it was unlikely that capital would be raised to extend the line beyond Malange. His destination was the Monte Bello plantation, an estate reached by canopied hammock carried on springy palm ribs by two ‘boys’. Cadbury was a very heavy man, however, and one of the porters sprained his ankle in a termite hole, so the passenger decided to walk up the path admiring the throngs of butterflies. Walking was something that Portuguese planters rarely did, though Héli Chatelain, who regularly traversed the district as a missionary in the 1880s, often walked to spare his porters. The estate had been built by the English import-export house of Newton and Carnegie, which had employed 300 slaves, but after the crash in coffee prices it had been sold for a pittance ten years before Cadbury’s visit. The 200 workers still on the estate were allowed Sunday off to work their own vegetable plots. They were not people who had been ‘hunted’, in Cadbury’s words, from the surrounding villages of free men and women, nor were they recruited from communities which supplied workers to the railway. Instead plantation labourers were ‘bought’ from much further afield at the cost of £18 a head. Cadbury said that they were, in his opinion, slaves but still he found the plantation beautiful with its stands of cinnamon, rubber, coffee, nutmeg, cocoa and sugar cane. The new owner received him with lavish Portuguese hospitality and when the day came to leave he put a whole roast suckling pig in the ‘chop box’ for a picnic on the train back to Luanda. As they left the owner set off for Cazengo, further up the line, to give evidence at the trial of men who had been remanded in gaol for three years after allegedly killing a white man. On their own downward journey they stopped for a wayside lunch with a German mining prospector whose English wife belonged to the Waddington family which was related to both Burtt and to Cadbury himself. She told them that it was eighteen months since she had spoken to another white woman, though Cadbury surmised that even she had been only half white. They quixotically discussed Quaker genealogies, and notably the Pumphrey sugar family, in this remote corner of Africa.
After returning to Luanda Cadbury headed south on a twenty-year-old coastal steamer built in Greenock to reach the great harbour of Lobito where Union Castle ships now called to reliably collect mail. Major Cunningham told him all about the new railway heading for the Transvaal, which now stretched 200 of its proposed 2000 kilometres into the interior. Already copper from the ancient Katanga mines was being brought to the railhead and Cunningham said he had paid his team of porters 300 oxen to carry his mineral trove. He shipped out 400 tons of copper and 200 of tin on a British cargo ship. A much-travelled Danish elephant hunter in Lobito claimed that he had been trading in local ivory for twenty years. Further south, at the desert harbour of Moçâmedes, Cadbury reported that ‘in the town itself slavery pure and simple is the general order of things, especially for domestic service’. The town was employed curing dried fish for the São Tomé cocoa plantations. The death rate among conscripts from the highland was notoriously high and out in the sand a forlorn cemetery was surrounded by a mud wall to prevent jackals from digging up the corpses. The remote town hosted an important Atlantic cable station staffed by nine men and one woman from England. The Portuguese expatriates kept Cadbury awake at night because, since gambling was outlawed, they did not start playing cards in the hotel lounge until gone midnight and only finished at four in the morning, often surreptitiously accompanied by the chief of police who happened to be the brother of the governor. The travellers then headed back north on the steam ship Malange hoping to visit the notorious slaving harbour at Novo Redondo, at which they had been prevented from calling on their way south. Obstruction continued, however: with the ship anchored three miles off shore, Cadbury was advised that there was no hotel at which he could lodge in the town and no private household willing to receive him. In the end the recruiting agent agreed to meet him for breakfast and to answer any questions about labour migration. Embarrassment in the little town of kraals surrounded by fields of sugar cane turned out to have been caused when the agent arranged to ship a cargo of serviçaes to São Tomé on the Malange, little thinking that Cadbury would be returning north so soon. Cadbury was thus able to observe, and photograph, the loading of conscripted deck passengers.
To travel back south to Benguela Cadbury booked a passage on the proud 6000 ton Lusitania, currently on a trip to East Africa carrying passengers but not cargo. One of the passengers was a Portuguese baron who owned one of the biggest slave-buying agencies at Benguela. He bought slaves at between 12 and 16 pounds sterling and sold them on at not less than 20 pounds. Cadbury found it hard to be civil to this patronising man who smelt of scent and had recently been on holiday to Paris. On landing at Benguela the governor was alleged to be ‘ill’ and the labour agent had been instructed to shut down all business until the visitors left. The last shipment of slaves had been sent out on 10 October 1908 to ensure that it should arrive in São Tomé before Cadbury was expected there. When investigating the trail to the interior it was found to be still strewn with the bones of slaves who had died on their way down to the coast. For some traders and missionaries the railway facilitated the crossing of the barren coast and its escarpments but the great caravans still walked. Trekking inland for a few hours on the great trail to Bihé, Cadbury met 250 traders coming to the coast, mostly carrying rubber and beeswax, and was overtaken by 150 porters heading inland with bales of cotton textiles. The porters, many of whom might have been slaves, and some of whom were children, carried loads ranging from 20 to 80 pounds. The headman, wearing a hat and coat, carried nothing but everyone else was festooned with water calabashes, knives, guns, kegs of spirits, cooking pots, bags of meal and even a folding canvass chair for the boss. The white tourist caused great anxiety to the caravans and when Cadbury tried to photograph porters they sometimes fled in panic. The route was lined with funerary cairns, topped with little flags or rum bottles, remembering those who had died by the wayside. Some had been slaves in heavy wooden shackles which were discarded in the bush when they died or taken off to give the impression that they were ‘free’ when they reached the harbour. Cadbury picked up a few shackles but most of them had been gleaned by scavengers seeking scarce firewood which they could sell in a town surrounded by barren countryside. He would have liked to travel further into the ‘veldt’ to meet local villagers but he soon had to return to the stuffy, mosquito-ridden little harbour town. On Christmas day Cadbury boarded the Ambaca for one more week in Luanda and felt rather ungracious in refusing the three varieties of wine on the passengers’ guest table but said that the bottles of imported Portuguese mineral water were excellent.
Luanda was described as a ‘grand but somewhat mournful city’ in which many of the fine old buildings on the main street were standing empty. It had no drainage system so that in hot weather the smell was dreadful; the street scavengers did not keep the streets clean, and at low tide the mud-flats around the bay were noxious. Burtt escaped from the heat and the smell by spending his last few days in Angola on a hunting trip south of Luanda Island, hoping to shoot a shy antelope at dawn or track a night-prowling leopard. Cadbury escaped the heat by spending his nights up the hill at the Methodist mission. One of the missionaries was writing the biography of an ex-slave who worked for him and which Cadbury hoped he would publish. Until then he had not realised what a risk the mission had taken by befriending him. The government was already suspicious of the mission’s condemnation of the on-going trade in serviçaes but now the mission was really afraid that by receiving Cadbury as a guest it might have endangered all its works. Cadbury himself did not think that the Americans were at great personal risk but he felt bad to be leaving them with uncertainty hanging over them. He spent his last days in the hotel sorting out the mass of notes which he had collected for his report. He was able to get on with this ‘tedious work’ when a bank holiday was declared on the occasion of the governor’s birthday, and he worked on when the cargo ship Nigeria, on which he was booked for the next leg north, was four days late. The British consul in Luanda, who had been dismayed that the Foreign Office in London had never publicised his own reports on the labour situation in Angola, much looked forward to the publication of Cadbury’s assessment of the on-going traffic. Once on board a British ship Cadbury at last felt at ease with liberty, peace and comfort. He enjoyed the freedom, unknown in Portuguese high society, to walk about in his shirt sleeves and enjoy fresh butter and jam.
On the journey home the ship by-passed French Libreville but called at German Duala before reaching British Calabar. There Cadbury discovered among his correspondence why so many doors had been closed to him in Angola. A meeting at Caxton Hall in London on 4 December 1908 had obviously discussed the modern slave trade and had generated a new bitterness of feeling which he had not initially encountered among Portuguese hosts, whom he had always treated with frank openness and friendship. He now realised that when reports of the London meeting reached Luanda the director of the Angolan customs house had wanted to have him expelled from the country forthwith, much as Chatelain had been expelled two years earlier. On his way home Cadbury called for a couple of weeks at the Gold Coast and discussed the state of the peasant cocoa economy. Production there had the advantage that the coast had a dry season in which beans could be prepared for export without the need for the expensive drying kilns used on São Tomé. Hostile Portuguese accused Cadbury, the industrial spy, of wanting to patriotically shift his cocoa supply from Portuguese Africa to British Africa. As an alternative some critics even accused him of wanting to bankrupt the São Tomé plantation system so that British investors could buy up the cocoa land cheaply. Thus it was that Cadbury returned to Bourneville and stepped into the hornet’s nest of controversy and litigation which generated the plethora of academic literature.