- Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery and Colonial Africa by Catherine Higgs
Ohio, 230 pp, £24.95, June 2012, ISBN 978 0 8214 2006 5
For
centuries, the region that now straddles northern Angola and the
western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo formed a political
and cultural whole. South of what the BaKongo knew as the Zaire river
lay the heartland of the Kingdom of Kongo, one of the most powerful
states of West-Central Africa. Kongo sat at the crossroads of trade
routes linking the forests of the interior with the arid coastal
areas near Luanda, in Angola, and the savannahs of the plateau
further north. These deep-rooted connections meant that slaving wars
in one area influenced the political stability of the rest of the
region. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, Kongo and Ndongo – the
kingdom at the heart of what is now Angola – fractured into warring
statelets whose main business was to bring slaves to the coast, thus
helping Atlantic slavery to reach ever further into Central Africa.
These countries remain interlocked, involved in geopolitical
struggles for coltan, diamonds, oil and timber.
When
Roger Casement visited a coffee plantation in northern Angola in
1902, he described the situation there in a report to the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office. He found that contract workers known in
Portuguese Angola as serviçais were
being brought in from the Congo Free State, sold to plantations, and
then forbidden to leave the estates that had ‘bought’ them.
The serviçais were
paid not in cash but vouchers, which they could only use at the
estate store to buy poor quality goods and rum. This ‘voucher-wage
labour’ was also common in the British-run nitrate mines of
northern Chile. Casement reported that the Angolan serviçais were
being treated as slaves, with high death rates resulting from a
shocking diet. Picked up by H.R. Fox Bourne, the secretary of the
Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS), Casement’s Angola report
was used to add weight to protests led by the activist-journalist
E.D. Morel against conditions in the Congo Free State, run as a
personal fiefdom by King Leopold II of Belgium. Casement was soon
sent to investigate the situation in Congo itself, leading him to
produce the report that would make him famous (before his championing
of the cause of Irish independence led to his execution for treason).
The abuses in Congo alarmed humanitarian groups such as the APS and
the Anti-Slavery Society: William Cadbury, a director of Cadbury’s
in Birmingham and a Quaker, like the rest of his family, was deeply
involved in these movements and could not countenance that his
company’s profits were supported by slavery: and yet supported by
slavery they were, as Catherine Higgs shows.
The paradox
for European imperialisms in Africa was that while the nature of
imperialism is to exploit the labour of the colonised, the
ideological foundation of empire was that only imperial rule could
end the evils of slavery and slave labour. The empire promised its
subjects a fair – or at least a fairer – system of labour. Free
wage labour would, it was thought, give the workers dignity and
result in the progress of the African continent. The wish for
Africans to understand the ‘dignity of labour’ may look ironic,
but it meant that British industrialists were keen to take action to
end their dependence on slavery, a dependence which by that time had
lasted nearly two centuries.
Higgs’s Chocolate
Islands relates
William Cadbury’s efforts to find out whether the cocoa his company
bought from Portuguese Africa was still produced by slaves. Higgs
tells us that Cadbury’s conscience had first been troubled when, in
1901, he read a catalogue from a cocoa estate on the small Portuguese
island of São Tomé, in the Gulf of Guinea. Among the items listed
for sale were cattle valued at £420 and ‘200 black labourers’.
He found this alarming because Cadbury’s imported more than half
its cocoa from São Tomé and its tiny neighbour Príncipe, so he
decided to set about investigating labour conditions on the islands.
Being, as he said, too busy to look into the matter himself, he
commissioned Joseph Burtt, a middle-aged utopian who had abandoned
banking to live in a commune in Gloucestershire, to go on his behalf.
The commune had begun to falter, and Burtt was casting around for a
purpose in life to match his idealism. The anti-slavery movement
fitted the bill, and he set sail for São Tomé in May 1905.
As Burtt was
to discover, slavery in Africa was impossible to disentangle from the
imperial system. The Kikongo, Kimbundu and Ovimbundu-speaking regions
of Angola and Congo had long been the major zones from which enslaved
Africans departed on the Middle Passage: according to the
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, from the 16th century onwards
almost half of the Africans shipped across the Atlantic came from
there. The high incidence of slave trafficking in Angola and Kongo
was a consequence of colonial wars waged by the Portuguese, with the
help of Brazilian troops and African allies, much as the Spanish used
Native Americans to fight in Mexico. These wars depopulated much of
Angola and Kongo, and led to the collapse of the Kingdom of Kongo
after the Portuguese victory at the Battle of Mbwila in 1665. Kongo’s
political system disintegrated and a series of civil wars followed in
which the capture of potential slaves was a priority. Angola and
Kongo remained major suppliers of slaves throughout the 18th century
and after.
The Abolition
Act of 1807 ended the British slave trade, but the trade from Angola
to Brazil carried on until the 1850s, and slavery wasn’t abolished
in Brazil itself until 1888. When Burtt crossed the Ovimbundu
highlands from Benguela in southern Angola, following a long-standing
slave route that stretched east towards what had been the Lunda
empire, he discovered skeletons, decomposing corpses and abandoned
ankle-shackles. A century after Abolit-ion, slavery in Angola was
still widespread even if colonists – both Portuguese officials and
British investors – turned a blind eye to it.
Burtt’s
experiences demonstrate the informal spread of British imperial power
in 20th-century Africa. Angola was a Portuguese colony, but British
capital and missionaries were major presences there. Burtt frequently
stayed with missionaries and men such as John Norton-Griffiths, the
contractor of the Benguela railway, who beat his African workers so
readily that Burtt claimed he was ‘cordially hated by nearly all
his men’, all 1700 of them. Another well-known Englishman in
Benguela was famed for having floored an African drunk and then
kicked him in the face and stomach. In spite of all the high-flown
rhetoric about the dignity of labour, arbitrary violence was used to
enforce colonial labour norms: it was used to build railways and
ports that would bring progress to Africa, and expedite the transport
of raw materials to European factories.
After
Casement’s 1902 report on the serviçais in
his plantations, the Portuguese, as a gesture towards meeting British
concerns, passed a labour law stipulating that serviçaison
São Tomé and Principe should have five-year contracts, and that
half of their salaries should be held over to pay for their
repatriation to Angola when their contract expired. But when Burtt
visited in 1905 he found no evidence that any serviçais had
ever left the islands. Higgs draws on Burtt’s letters for her
evocative narrative of his visits to different plantations: though
impressed by the living conditions on some of them, Burtt found that
the serviçais were
not free to hire out their own labour. The 1903 law was a classic
example of a law só
para o Inglês ver –
just
for the English to see – as the Portuguese had called their 1836
law ‘abolishing’ the slave trade.
During
the two years he was away from Britain, Burtt wrote regularly to
William Cadbury. His letters show him gradually realising that
British capital was propping up the continuation of the slave trade.
The booming cocoa market and the profits made by Cadbury’s itself
were keeping the prices of serviçais sold
to São Tomé high. But the imperial British economy was also
underpinned by the gold rush in Johannesburg: many of the miners came
from Portuguese Mozambique and, as Burtt noted, forcing the
Portuguese to end the slave trade from Angola might lead them to
close the border between Mozambique and South Africa, with unwelcome
consequences for British finances. Those same migrations continue
today, and Higgs makes clear how stubbornly enduring the relationship
between labour, migration and capital in South-Eastern Africa has
been.
Burtt’s
unequivocal findings about the continuing use of slave labour on São
Tomé led Cadbury to make his own shorter journey of inquiry soon
afterwards, and the firm stopped buying cocoa from the islands in
1910. The anti-slavery campaign petered out during the First World
War and forced labour continued to be used in colonial Africa well
into the 20th century: as Basil Davidson discovered, it continued in
Angola in the 1950s, and recent research shows that it may have been
widespread as late as the independence wars of the 1960s.＊ The
Angolan colony was key to propping up the struggling economy of the
Salazar regime and after the coup in Lisbon in 1974 large numbers of
Portuguese migrants hastily departed, their flight memorably
described by Ryszard Kapuściński in Another
Day of Life.
The migrants, and the whole infrastructure of Portuguese Africa, were
dependent on forced labour in parts of Angola that most colonists
never saw.
As
for Cadbury’s, they started to buy their cocoa from the British
colony of the Gold Coast (which became Ghana in 1957), and still buy
most of their cocoa beans there. Labour practices were, and remain,
far from ideal. As Higgs notes, TV documentaries in the early 2000s
revealed that there was still widespread use of child labour in
Ghana, with slaves trafficked south from Mali and Burkina Faso. When
one worker was asked what he would say to consumers of this mythical
product, chocolate, which he had never seen, he replied: ‘They are
eating my flesh.’ Almost a century earlier, when Burtt asked an
American missionary about cocoa, his reply had been: ‘Cocoa is
blood.’ Higgs’s book is a reminder of the relevance of African
histories to contemporary questions. There are obvious parallels
between the serviçais and
the factory workers of 21st-century China, or the cleaners and
service providers of Dubai. Modern Western democracies may be founded
on ideologies of freedom, but they have yet to reconcile these
ideologies with what used to be known as the ‘labour question’.
The intellectual incoherence of late capitalism emerges nowhere more
starkly than in the paradox of the coercive labour regimes needed to
facilitate unlimited free consumption.
