An October 1908 letter to the editor in the Lisbon newspaper O Século neatly captured the Portuguese perspective on the English cocoa controversy: “The servants [workers] in S. Thomé,” the author opined, “are much happier than our peasants.”Footnote 1 At issue was whether slave labor was being used to cultivate cocoa on the Portuguese island colony of São Tomé and Príncipe, two small islands just north of the equator off the west coast of Africa. A major buyer of that cocoa was one of the world's premier chocolatiers, the English company Cadbury Brothers Limited. The accusations embarrassed the Cadburys and incensed Portuguese official and public opinion. European colonizers had long promoted the trade in tropical products, including cocoa, as a way to end slavery in Africa, and the case raised the issue of how effectively that policy worked on the ground. Critics accused Portugal of perpetuating slavery and slave trading decades after both had been outlawed. For many Portuguese, the accusations were an affront to their international integrity, and they viewed British outrage at Portuguese labor practices as hypocritical, given Britain's imperfect record on labor in its African colonies.
Were the Africans contracted to labor on the cocoa plantations of São Tomé and Príncipe happier than the peasants of Portugal? The immediate answer, all philosophical discussions and economic metrics about the meaning of happiness aside, is an emphatic “no.” The islands' laborers, the great majority of whom were from the Portuguese colony of Angola, were bound by renewable five-year contracts, and, despite repatriation funds designed to pay their return passage and guarantee a portion of their earned wages, they rarely returned home. They did hard, repetitive labor in a hot, humid climate, and they suffered a high death rate. By any standards we might set, they could not have been happy.Footnote 2
Still, the assertion of our anonymous letter writer raises an interesting set of questions. Were the Cadburys, who had built a “factory in a garden” and sought to integrate their workers as fully as possible into the company's culture, setting a standard for the treatment of labor that many of their fellow British business owners did not meet?Footnote 3 Were Portuguese defenders of the labor conditions in their African empire effectively oblivious to the conditions of African labor because their point of comparison was the Portuguese peasantry? Finally, can we garner a sense of what São Tomé's contracted laborers thought of their working conditions?
In other words, to what extent can the crisis over “slave cocoa,” as British commentators called it, and the “English cocoa controversy,” as the Portuguese saw it, be explained by perceptions about work? From the British perspective, the issue was mobility. Workers not free to leave their jobs were slaves. They could not be happy. For the Portuguese, the issue was not mobility, but working conditions. African contract workers in São Tomé and Príncipe were content, the Portuguese argued, because they were paid and provided with food, housing, clothing, and medical care. The African workers also retained the legal right to leave at the end of their contracts.
Portugal, Britain, and Cocoa
Early in 1901, a rumor reached Cadbury Brothers from planters in Trinidad that slaves were harvesting cocoa in São Tomé and Príncipe.Footnote 4 In April, William Cadbury, a director of the company, was reading a sales catalog from a São Toméan cocoa estate, or roça, when he found an entry listing acres under cultivation, along with tools, cattle, and workers. The equating of cattle with laborers made him suspect that São Tomé's workers were being forced to labor. The firm imported slightly more than 55 percent of its cocoa, then considered among the finest available, from the islands.Footnote 5 The Cadburys were Quakers—members of the Religious Society of Friends. Quakers had been active in the nineteenth century movement to abolish slavery, and Cadbury Brothers would not buy cocoa harvested by slaves in the early twentieth century. This conviction would inform William Cadbury's nearly decade-long odyssey, on behalf of the firm, to London and Lisbon, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Angola, and into discussions with government officials, cocoa planters, crusading journalists, and antislavery activists, all in an attempt to secure assurances that African cocoa workers were freely contracted and free to leave their employment.
William Cadbury's investigation played out against the complex relationship between Portugal and its oldest ally—Britain, which boasted the stronger economy and military. The 1703 Methuen Treaty had opened Portuguese markets to English textiles; in return, England welcomed imports of Portuguese wines. In 1810, Britain gained access to Brazil, which remained a Portuguese colony through 1822.Footnote 6 In 1807, Britain would lead the way in abolishing the Atlantic slave trade; only in 1836—under pressure from Britain—would Portugal end its own trans-Atlantic slave trade. In 1858, Portugal abolished slavery in its colonies but then made the renamed libertos (freedmen) work twenty more years for their former masters, struggling, as did Britain and France in their still small African holdings, with how to compel local populations to work.Footnote 7
When the Earl of Mayo visited São Tomé and Príncipe in 1882, he concluded that slavery continued, if not in name, then in practice. His traveling companion, the British diplomat Sir Harry Johnston, was more magnanimous. The islands, he thought, “might be considered an ideal paradise for the Negroes, and those of S. Thomé might be considered the happiest in the world.”Footnote 8 It is an argument, however implausible, that is familiar to historians of the antebellum American South, as the legal scholar Don Herzog notes.Footnote 9 In 1907, a Portuguese journal would reprint the lecture Johnston gave to the London Geographical Society after he returned from his trip with Mayo, leaving it undated. The 1908 letter to O Século had antecedents; it was not an outlier, but representative of Portuguese views.
Portugal's position remained weak at the conference convened in Berlin in late 1884 and early 1885, where representatives of Europe's major powers met to divide up the African continent, to better exploit its resources. Delegates acknowledged—at Britain's request—the need to eliminate the vestiges of slavery and slave trading but “balked at the administrative requirements of administering such a policy,” though they would try again in Brussels in 1889.Footnote 10 Portugal asserted its historic right to territories first settled at the height of its imperial expansion in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: Angola on the west coast and Mozambique on the east. Portugal then struggled—in the absence of sufficient funds or colonial bureaucrats—to meet the standard established at Berlin for “effective occupation” of the land it claimed. When the Portuguese proposed a plan to link their two large colonies and stationed troops in the Zambezi valley between Angola and Mozambique, Britain successfully demanded their removal. Subsequent Portuguese attitudes toward Britain must be seen in the context of this 1890 ultimatum. From that point forward, “Portuguese colonialism became national,” and its “foreign policy developed on two parallel, but clearly interdependent, fronts: the European, centered on the alliance with Britain, and the colonial, centered on the African empire.”Footnote 11 For Portugal, its African empire became the key to its resurgence, and British interference—including that by the chocolatier William Cadbury—was an irritant.
The British Foreign Office's “Report on the Trade and Commerce of the Province of St. Thomé and Prinicpe,” issued in December 1902 and written by the British Consul in Angola, Arthur Nightingale, did not raise any concerns about the possibility of slavery on the islands. Nightingale distinguished between the indigenous free population, “descended from the ancient black colonists and liberated slaves” of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the more recently arrived serviçais, the word the Portuguese used to describe their contract laborers.Footnote 12 In English, it means “servants,” a relatively benign descriptor that does not fully capture the hard labor contracted workers did on the islands. The free São Toméan population generally refused to work for wages on the cocoa plantations. Free São Toméans made up just under half of the population and had ruled the islands after most Portuguese sugar planters left for Brazil in the early 1600s.Footnote 13 In 1881, the year Portugal stopped sending convicts to the islands, free São Toméan farmers produced about half of the islands' coffee and cocoa, and many employed contract laborers recruited from Angola.Footnote 14 By the early 1900s, as demand for high quality São Toméan cocoa soared, African farmers' market share dropped to 6 percent as they were edged out by large-scale white-owned plantations.Footnote 15 Whites accounted for only 3 percent of the islands' population. African contract laborers made up the balance. In 1900 there were 212 roças, and 19,211 contract laborers, recruited mostly from Angola. Nightingale's report revealed little about the working conditions of the laborers but did mention that the high mortality rate, verging on 20 percent on the smaller island of Príncipe, where sleeping sickness was endemic. This demanded “constant fresh supplies of labourers from Angola … where they are ransomed from the black traders who bring them from the far interior.”Footnote 16
William Cadbury was concerned both by how the contract laborers arrived in São Tomé and Príncipe and the conditions they faced once they arrived. Commentators in the early 1900s and subsequently have suggested that the system of “perpetually indentured” labor practiced on the cocoa estates through 1914 “was almost identical to slavery.”Footnote 17 On the islands, the period of apprenticeship required of libertos that followed the abolition of slavery had ended early, in 1875. Laborers for São Tomé and Príncipe were recruited in Angola and signed to five-year contracts. While legally free to leave at the end of their contracts, they rarely did. Though Nightingale would express little public concern in 1902, Clayton Pickersgill, the British Consul in Angola in 1894, had protested the system to the Foreign Office, quoting a workers' song: “In São Tomé there's a door going in, but none going out.”Footnote 18 In 1901, 4,752 serviçais (2,616 men and 2,136 women) were recruited for the islands' roças; none of the workers who had fulfilled their five-year contracts that year appear to have been repatriated.Footnote 19
There were Portuguese critics, as well. While working for Angola's governor general in the late 1890s, Júdice Biker investigated the labor trade to the islands, which competed with planters in Angola. Biker discovered that none of the serviçais who left Angola had ever returned home. Writing in 1897, he asked, “Is this because the roceiro [plantation owner] makes their life so agreeable, dressing them and feeding them so well, instructing them, civilizing them, creating necessities for them [?] . . . Do they choose to continue to work there, renewing their contracts? … Would that this were so.” This was a rejection of the argument the O Século letter writer would subsequently make. For Biker, the worst part was not the oppressive working conditions or the high morbidity and mortality rates, but “the bad faith of planter[s] and officials alike” evident in “the refusal of … plantation owner[s] to repatriate a single worker.”Footnote 20
Thus the Portuguese government faced criticism from its own officials as well as pressure from European and Creole planters in Angola who opposed the export of workers to São Tomé and Príncipe because it drained labor from Angola. In response to this criticism, the Portuguese government issued a royal decree on January 29, 1903, intended to address the flaws in the contract labor system.Footnote 21 The law guaranteed the supply of workers for São Tomé and Príncipe but strictly enforced five-year contract periods and directed 40 percent of workers' monthly wages to a fund to pay for their repatriation.Footnote 22 The workday was limited to nine and a half hours, with a half day off on Sunday. Minimum pay scales were set at 2,500 reis for men and 1,800 reis for women per month (approximately ₤5 10s or $27 per year for men and ₤4 or $19.50 per year for women). Workers who renewed their contracts received a 10 percent increase in wages.Footnote 23 In Angola, the governor general responded to the decree by arresting twenty-seven businesspeople and civil servants in an attempt to stop illegal slave trading.Footnote 24
With support from his fellow Quaker chocolate makers Rowntree and J.S. Fry, William Cadbury began his investigation in March 1903, with visits to officials and businesspeople in Lisbon connected to the cocoa trade. Reassured by these meetings and willing to wait to gauge the impact of the 1903 Portuguese labor decree, he put aside the concerns of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the Aborigines' Protection Society in Britain, which favored pressuring the British Foreign Office to demand immediate action from the Portuguese government.Footnote 25 Foreign Office officials were nervously watching the unfolding crisis in the Congo Free State where Africans were forced—under threat of physical abuse—to produce rubber for international companies operating under concessionary licenses granted by the territory's owner, King Leopold II of Belgium. The Foreign Office feared that cocoa in São Tomé would become the next great scandal, a worrisome prospect because gold mines in the British colony of Transvaal in Southern Africa were dependent on workers migrating from the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. British officials feared that pressuring Portugal on São Tomé and Príncipe might prompt it to end the labor flow to the Transvaal mines.Footnote 26
Under the circumstances, Cadbury's reticence was appreciated by British officialdom, even as it proved short-lived. In July 1904, after concluding that no improvements had been made in São Tomé and Príncipe's labor conditions, Cadbury hired Joseph Burtt as his agent and sent him to Porto to study Portuguese for a year. In the interim, the chocolate maker turned down an offer of assistance from the journalist Henry Nevinson, who had signed a contract with Harper's Monthly Magazine to survey labor conditions in São Tomé and Príncipe and in Angola, the source of most of the islands' laborers. Burtt and Nevinson would meet in São Tomé in June 1905; Burtt would submit his preliminary report to Cadbury in December 1906. Cadbury would travel to Lisbon in 1907 for another round of talks with Portuguese officials and planters before deciding to visit the islands and Angola in 1908.
As Cadbury was preparing for his trip, an editorial in the Standard newspaper on September 26, 1908, called into question the sincerity of the company's efforts. While the needs of workers at Bournville were carefully considered, Cadbury Brothers seemed less concerned with the “African hands, whose toil also is so essential to the beneficent and lucrative operations.”Footnote 27 In part, the Standard was asking implicitly if the happiness of the mostly white workers at Bournville was more important than that of their African counterparts. The O Século letter, published two weeks later, was explicit: “The servants [workers] in S. Thomé are much happier than our peasants.” The article may have been written in response to William Cadbury's decision to visit São Tomé and Príncipe and Angola himself. The author identified himself as a former curador on the island of Príncipe, and he might have been Jerónimo Paiva de Carvalho. In the early 1900s, he worked in the office of the Curador de Serviçais—the guardian or trustee of serviçais—which oversaw the recontracting of laborers already on the island. In a 1907 pamphlet, Carvalho had rejected the charges that labor practices in Portugal's colonies were inhumane and asserted that African laborers were better treated than rural workers, not just in Portugal, but in England and more broadly, in Europe.Footnote 28 How happy were Cadbury workers in Bournville and peasants in Portugal, and how might their working conditions illuminate the status of African workers on São Tomé and Príncipe, who the British came to regard as slaves and the Portuguese insisted were contented and freely contracted workers?
British Workers and Cadbury Brothers' Factory in a Garden
Cadbury Brothers Limited began as a retailer of coffee and tea in 1824, in the manufacturing city of Birmingham. The firm became a producer of “pure cocoa essence” in the 1860s, when brothers George and Richard Cadbury took over the company. Most of Birmingham's manufacturers produced refined metals. Older industries included jewelry, brass, buttons, and pens; by the early 1900s, the range of products extended from bicycles to automobiles.Footnote 29 Birmingham's laborers benefited from national laws that banned children under twelve from working and that regulated the workweek. By 1890, the average work week was fifty-four hours, extending from Monday morning through noon on Saturday. By 1901, the average yearly income for a laborer in Birmingham was ₤44 (then approximately $214), and the unemployment rate ran about 6 percent. Skilled and semiskilled workers could join a wide variety of craft and trade unions, and though the tendency in Birmingham was to seek conciliation between labor and capital, bakers and railway workers were among those who went on strike in the early 1900s.Footnote 30
Working-class housing in Birmingham was a more problematic issue. The city's population more than doubled, from 233,000 in 1851 to 526,000 in 1911, and new housing stock did not keep pace. A major threat to workers' health was poor sanitation, and in 1874, the city council began the weekly removal of waste from backyard latrines. Only in 1914 did most city residents gain increased access to indoor toilets and waterborne sewage. An 1897 survey reported that 65 percent of the houses in the poorest districts lacked adequate ventilation, and this contributed to an estimated death rate of 35 percent. The death rate varied considerably across the city, from 240 deaths per 1,000 births in Birmingham's poorest slums, to 119 in the affluent suburb of Edgbaston.Footnote 31
George and Richard Cadbury, the brothers who transformed the family firm by taking advantage of the “increase in real wages and in consumer consumption by the end of the nineteenth century,” and making cocoa a “cheap and popular bedtime drink,” grew up in Edgbaston.Footnote 32 Both men were devoted members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, and this affiliation, the historian Charles Dellheim has argued, had a profound effect on how they conducted business. First, the Cadbury brothers gave serious consideration to their workers' living conditions, and second, they sought to balance efficient production with respect for workers' rights. For these reasons, Cadbury Brothers Limited was not, in Dellheim's view, “a typical British firm.”Footnote 33
George Cadbury was a “ ‘practical mystic’ who perceived no split between the spiritual and the material.” Beginning in 1859, he taught pupils in the Society of Friends' adult school movement in Birmingham for more than sixty years.Footnote 34 He recruited students from the city's poorest slums and insisted they help him run the school, believing that “the best way to improve a man's circumstances is to raise his ideals.” It was his interactions with Birmingham's poorest slum dwellers and his realization of “how difficult it was to lead a good life in a back street” that prompted George Cadbury to build Bournville village.Footnote 35
Twenty-first century researchers concerned with the links between happiness and work can trace their antecedents in part to the Quaker concern with addressing “major social ills,” including “poverty, war, slavery, intemperance, the opium trade, impurity and gambling.”Footnote 36 Citing the “horror of industrial cities,” the incidence of violent strikes, and “the degradation of the workers,” the Quaker Joseph Burtt would leave a career in banking and spend a year living and working in the utopian Whiteway Colony before agreeing to visit Portuguese Africa on behalf of Cadbury Brothers.Footnote 37 George Cadbury's concern with improving conditions for the urban poor fit into a broader pattern of reform in industrial Britain.Footnote 38
In 1878, Richard and George Cadbury began building a new factory in the countryside four miles from the city's polluted center. Housing was built for factory foremen, but the rest of the company's workers traveled by train from Birmingham. In 1895, George Cadbury built Bournville village, a planned community for workers. He intended it as “an object lesson on the housing problem of the working class.” The only thing missing was a pub. The purchase of a house was not limited to company employees, nor did buyers have to be Quakers. Cadbury gave the village to its homeowners in 1900.Footnote 39
The missing village pub hints at paternalism, but Dellheim insists that the company was not paternalistic. Cadbury workers were neither “inferior” nor “dependent”; rather, “the firm empowered workers by establishing works councils, supporting trade unions, and providing education.”Footnote 40 In 1900, most workers were either semiskilled or unskilled, and they worked a forty-eight hour week. Two out of three were women.Footnote 41 Women's Work and Wages (1906) and Sweating (1907), two books by George Cadbury's son Edward examining the impact of low-wage labor on women, led the younger man to conclude that “state regulation of working conditions and wages” was the key to alleviating poverty. Edward Cadbury estimated the living wage for a family of five in Birmingham at ₤65 per year ($317), or approximately ₤20 ($97) above the average laborer's wage, and advocated the introduction of unemployment, health, and old age benefits.Footnote 42 Though he favored “equal pay for equal work” and sat on the Women's Works Council established in 1918 to ensure that women participated fully in company decision-making, Edward Cadbury thought that men should be paid more because their skilled work was more physically demanding and they had to sustain families. Women were also required to leave the firm when they married.Footnote 43 If not paternalistic, the firm's policies could be contradictory, perhaps unavoidably so in a firm run by “practical idealists.”Footnote 44 Still, the directors of Cadbury Brothers practiced their core belief: a worker was not a “living tool.” A former bank clerk turned chocolate worker remarked that the Cadburys “somehow conveyed the idea that their purpose was to do something for one, rather than to get the last ounce in the way of work; I think they generally did get the fullest in service, but they attracted it—they did not force it.”Footnote 45
Were Cadbury workers happier than their counterparts? Birmingham's workers had access to craft and trade union membership, and to improving housing; they earned competitive wages. After 1906 they benefited, as did all British workers, from Liberal Party reforms that introduced health and unemployment insurance and old age pensions.Footnote 46 Yet industrial work could be mind-numbing: V. W. Garratt got fired for surreptitiously reading instead of soldering gas meters in a Birmingham factory. He was unrepentant: reading freed him from “the stubborn domination of the group mind over the individual worker.”Footnote 47 It was Cadbury Brothers' attentiveness to its workers' voices and ideas that arguably made the company distinctive, even if the motive was efficiency.Footnote 48
The Portuguese are a Sad People
The nineteenth century novelist Alexandre Herculano, remembered as “one of two principal representatives of the Portuguese soul,” wrote of the “sadness that has characterized the Portuguese people in all of its epochs.”Footnote 49 For the poor, this sadness was compounded by low wages, long hours, and poor working conditions. Perhaps one reason the letter writer to O Século could make an argument about the happiness of African contract workers in São Tomé and Príncipe was because the bar for the happiness of Portugal's urban working class and rural peasantry was set so low.
In 1900, after two centuries of enclosure acts that consolidated landholdings and commercialized farming in the countryside, the majority of Britain's workforce was industrial. In contrast, Portugal remained largely rural. Out of a population of 5.4 million in 1900, perhaps 455,000 at most were industrial laborers, although the sociologist Maria Mónica suggests a much lower figure of 100,000.Footnote 50 In the early 1900s, trade union membership in Britain approached three million workers; in Portugal it was around 27,000.Footnote 51 After the introduction of compulsory and free elementary education in Britain in 1891, basic literacy rates climbed towards 100 percent. In Portugal, an 1844 law compelled children to attend school if one was available within one mile of their home; however, the law was not rigorously enforced, and in 1900, the literacy rate was estimated at 21 percent.Footnote 52 The average British laborer worked between forty-eight and fifty-four hours per week, while an urban worker in Portugal's major cities of Lisbon and Porto could expect to labor twelve to fourteen hours per day, six days per week. Wages were low; a highly skilled male worker could expect to earn between 3,000 and 4,000 reis per week (approximately eleven to fifteen shillings, or $3–$4). A skilled female worker earned between 1,000 and 2,000 reis per week. Thus, at the top of the pay scale, a skilled male Portuguese worker could earn between ₤29 and ₤39 per year ($141–$190), close to the average Birmingham worker's wage, but for a workweek that was, at a minimum, eighteen hours longer. It was not a living wage, and as the Portuguese economy—never strong—deteriorated in the often rocky and violent transition from constitutional monarchy in 1908 to republicanism after 1910, one commentator would describe the Portuguese working class as white slaves.Footnote 53
Rural Portuguese peasants worked seventeen to eighteen hours a day.Footnote 54 In the south, where large estates, or latifundia, were common, peasants had little access to land. They harvested wheat and picked olives and tried to find the time to sharecrop for themselves. Soils in the region are generally poor, the climate is hot and dry, and rainfall can be erratic. The estates were large by necessity, and the demand for labor varied considerably over the year, reinforcing, as the social anthropologist José Cutileiro has observed, the “rigidity of social and economic stratification.” Population density in the south was low and made up of “landless or near-landless labourers and sharecroppers.”Footnote 55 What defined a worker was the labor he performed. He was clearly not a landowner (for whom people worked), but neither was he an artisan, a shopkeeper, or a salesman. Work meant hard, dirty, back-breaking physical labor. “Agricultural work,” Cutileiro notes, is “performed with the body bent forward; most of the time too, the eyes have to fixed on the ground. … A man's independence is vertical, a man's serfdom makes him bend.”Footnote 56 With no right to strike prior to 1909, cheating one's employer was one way to ease a worker's sense of humiliation. With few skills beyond “hands fit for work,” leaving did not guarantee an escape from that kind of labor.Footnote 57 Peasants in Portugal's south had little to be happy about.
Portugal's northern region had large landowners, but there were also “small-scale, self-subsistent, independent peasant family farms.” The cultural anthropologist Caroline Brettell stresses the complexity of land ownership in the north—peasants did not necessarily own all the land they farmed, and not all peasants owned land. The peasantry itself was not homogenous and included “small and medium-sized property owners, tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and agricultural laborers.”Footnote 58 The north is wine country; it rains more, and the land is more fertile. The practice of dividing property among heirs nevertheless limited access to land and was a factor pushing emigration. So, too, were low wages. If work was available, an agricultural day laborer in the north could earn 280–360 reis per day in 1888 (about thirty-two cents). Like their urban counterparts, peasants also emigrated to escape “the misery of slavery.” Most who left went to Brazil. Between 1888 and 1929, an average of 15,000 Portuguese left each year for the former colony.Footnote 59 Decidedly fewer went to Africa, and once there, options for improving one's status—financial or otherwise—proved limited. The sociologist Augusto Nascimento has described the white workers who went to São Tomé and Príncipe in this period as “orphans of the race.”Footnote 60 In Brazil, Portuguese workers encountered prejudice, but they found jobs that paid well. Some returned home with enough savings to live in relative comfort.Footnote 61
Nevertheless, for most working men and women in Portugal in the first decade of the twentieth century, life was a struggle. They likely were less content than many British workers. The idea that African contract workers—especially if they lacked mobility—might be happier than Portuguese peasants, however, remained implausible to English cocoa buyers.
African Contract Workers on São Tomé and Príncipe
What first struck Joseph Burtt when he arrived in São Tomé in June 1905 was the beauty of the island: the lush forest and the low volcanic mountains. It seemed an ideal setting in which to work, though his agenda for Cadbury Brothers—to determine if the African workers harvesting cocoa had been freely contracted or whether they were, as critics alleged, slaves—would challenge this impression.Footnote 62
Among the first roças Burtt visited was Boa Entrada, owned by the philanthropist and investor Henrique Mendoça, whose interests included cocoa, textiles, and diamonds. Mendoça had built the 4,200-acre Boa Entrada into a model plantation of 600 workers. Each family had a small, private apartment built of brick, access to a thirty-six-bed hospital, a nursery school, and eventually, a primary school. Burtt was impressed by the cleanliness and openness of the plantation, which included running water and electricity. It was not all for show, though the illustrated history of the roça—published in Portuguese in 1906 and translated into English in 1907—did present the case for contented, well-cared-for workers.Footnote 63
Henry Nevinson, Burtt's companion on his visit to Boa Entrada, was unimpressed and doubted that the roça was representative of conditions elsewhere on the islands. Nevinson had also arrived on São Tomé in mid-June, after completing his six-month tour of Angola for Harper's Magazine. Malaria had nearly killed him as he traced the old slave route along which newly contracted workers still walked from the interior to the coast. Along the way, Nevinson had seen rotting corpses and skeletons and abandoned wooden shackles. Of those who survived, many would board ships for the islands. The law may have changed, but the methods of recruitment on the ground in Angola remained the same. No matter how well Boa Entrada's workers were cared for, they were slaves, and Burtt was naïve to think otherwise.Footnote 64
Though Burtt could not reach this conclusion just days into his own investigation, there were other reasons to suspect that even on a model plantation the workers were not necessarily content. The roça's doctor, José Matta, reported a death rate of 12 percent among adults and as high as 25 percent among children. Pregnant women and children were given extra care, and the plantation's manager tailored workers' tasks to suit their physical abilities. Nothing seemed to lower the death rate. The primary culprit was malaria—the estate was in a swampy section of the island—but workers also died of anemia, pneumonia, dysentery, and diarrhea. When Nevinson asked what caused the anemia, the doctor replied “tristeza,” or sadness.Footnote 65 Good working conditions did not guarantee happy workers.Footnote 66 This was underscored by Matta's assertion that all of Boa Entrada's laborers suffered from alcoholism. This included the few white workers, whom Matta dismissed—in a manner that would have been familiar to their compatriots back in Portugal—as “birds of passage—who despise everything connected with hygiene and cleanliness, and never stay longer than a month on any estate.”Footnote 67
Nevinson left the islands after two weeks. Burtt stayed six months and visited many of the roças on São Tomé and on the smaller island of Príncipe. There, endemic sleeping sickness increased the average death rate among adults to 20 percent; to reduce it, the colonial medical service had begun clearing swamps in an effort to eradicate the tsetse fly.Footnote 68 Burtt did collect stories about the routine abuse of workers, usually out of view of plantation managers, a reality subsequently documented by Augusto Nascimento and the historian William Clarence-Smith. White overseers beat, kicked, and sometimes whipped workers. It was illegal, but the curador's office did not have the manpower to stop it. Nor could the curador respond effectively to plantation managers' complaints about the theft and destruction of equipment by disgruntled workers. The clearest indicator of discontent was running away, but there was not much to eat in the forest, which survived above 3,500 feet. Fugitives were usually tracked down and returned to the roças they had fled.Footnote 69
Asking contract workers what they thought seems not to have occurred to Burtt. Language was a barrier: most Angolan workers knew only a few words of Portuguese. Burtt knew no African languages. Yet when he encountered a young Portuguese-speaking woman worker from the Cape Verde islands (also a colony of Portugal), and an African man supervising a labor gang, who likely also spoke Portuguese, Burtt still asked no questions. The only (former) contract worker on the islands Burtt interviewed—“a happy smiling fellow”—was working for Emeríco Cabral, São Tomé's curador. Burtt did not report the content of that meeting to Cadbury, which, given its circumstances, was unlikely to have been very critical.Footnote 70
Nevinson spoke no Portuguese and no African languages but he had little doubt what the islands' workers were thinking. His September 1905 Harper's article prompted outrage in Lisbon. He noted that no workers had been repatriated under the 1903 labor law and asserted that the contract renewal process, conducted in Portuguese and overseen by the curador, was a sham. Burtt was somewhat more circumspect when he left the islands in December 1905. Contract workers were fed, clothed, and housed, he wrote to Cadbury, but they had “no life beyond the plantation.” It was “at its best but a mild form of slavery.”Footnote 71
When Burtt subsequently spent a year in Angola and, like Nevinson, retraced the old slave route from the interior to coast, his attitude hardened. He too concluded that slave trading continued and that slavery was still being practiced in the colony even if, as on São Tomé and Príncipe, the slaves had been renamed serviçais. In the preliminary report he sent to Cadbury in December 1906, Burtt praised the 1903 labor law passed by Portugal but noted that it was all too easy to ignore on the ground. A contract worker was “taken from his home against his will . . . forced into a contract that he does not understand, and never returns to Angola. The legal formalities are but a cloak to hide slavery.”Footnote 72
William Cadbury and Portuguese West Africa
In March 1907, William Cadbury shared Burtt's report with representatives of J.S. Fry and Rowntree, the fellow Quaker chocolate makers who had helped fund Burtt's investigation. Cadbury also sent a copy to the British Foreign Office, promising that he would not publish it without their permission, to the dismay of activists in the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection societies. For the Foreign Office, the concern was maintaining the flow of labor from Portuguese Mozambique to the gold mines in the British Transvaal Colony. The chocolate makers acknowledged the problem of slavery; their issue was finding a substitute for high quality São Toméan cocoa, though Cadbury Brothers had identified free African farmers in the British Gold Coast (modern Ghana) as possible suppliers. All these concerns were complicated by political turmoil in Lisbon, where republicans seemed poised to overthrow the monarchy.Footnote 73
By July 1907, all interested parties had agreed to an edited version of Burtt's report, and he headed to Porto to arrange its translation. The British Foreign Office sent copies of both versions to Portugal's foreign secretary in September. In a speech to the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce the next month, Cadbury explained his reluctance to boycott: The company would lose its ability to effect change as a major purchaser of São Toméan cocoa. At the end of November, he visited Lisbon at the invitation of the islands' cocoa planters; Burtt served as his translator. The planters were both cordial and critical. Under questioning, Cadbury acknowledged that most laborers were well-treated, and Burtt conceded that he had never seen any workers beaten, even though he had reported this as fact. The planters assured Cadbury that they also wanted serviçais to return home—with positive reports of their experiences on the islands. This process was scheduled to begin in 1908, funded by £100,000 ($487,000) in repatriation fees collected from planters. The evil of slave-trading in Angola, they hoped, would end when the interior was effectively occupied. The published reply of the planters to Burtt's report was well received in Britain.Footnote 74
In February 1908, the Portuguese king and his heir were assassinated; his second son inherited an even more fragile monarchy. Nevertheless, the new government sent a representative to investigate the slave trade in Angola in March. In April and May, articles critical of Cadbury Brothers' decision to continue buying São Toméan cocoa began appearing in the British press. The newspapers issued apologies, but in June, William Cadbury decided to visit the islands and Angola. The Standard's editorial questioning the company's motives appeared at the end of September, just as Cadbury was about to embark. As the historian Lowell Satre has argued, the Standard's attack was in part political; the newspaper was aligned with the pro-imperial Conservative Party and had often disagreed with the anti-imperial Liberal-leaning Daily News owned by George Cadbury. Still, the Standard had a point: How could the antislavery Quaker firm continue to buy São Toméan cocoa while seemingly ignoring the toil of the African hands that had produced it? When there was no retraction, Cadbury Brothers sued for libel.Footnote 75
The other letter that framed Cadbury's trip to Portuguese West Africa was the October 1908 letter to O Século, claiming that workers on the islands were “much happier than our peasants.” The letter was a barometer of Portuguese sentiment, despite the rapprochement Cadbury had reached with planters in Lisbon the year before. With Burtt again acting as his translator, Cadbury arrived in São Tomé in late October for a three-week stay. The official reception was frosty—the new governor general had just arrived and claimed to know little about previous practices and policies. Cadbury did tour several of the larger plantations, where he assessed the process of producing cocoa beans, inspected the machinery, asked about workers' wages and their working and living conditions, and about the balance in the repatriation fund. He reached two conclusions. First, most cocoa estates teetered on bankruptcy. Second, the defense offered by some planters that they were exposing workers to Christianity was self-serving and harkened back to discredited notions of “happy” slaves. “To offer a man religion,” Cadbury would write, “is not sufficient compensation for slavery.”Footnote 76
In Angola, colonial officials were frostier still. Cadbury could travel where he wished and study any available statistics he wanted, but he received no official introductions. He visited the coastal cities of Moçamedes, Novo Redondo, and Benguela and had pleasant conversations with two district governors. In six weeks, he never saw the contracting process for new serviçais, but the steamer he and Burtt took north to the Gold Coast at the end of December included among its passengers eighty women and children headed to the islands. Dressed in cotton and each carrying a blanket, they appeared healthy. In the Gold Coast, Cadbury found the alternative source of cocoa he was seeking. The historian Kevin Grant has argued that this gave the company the means it needed to declare a boycott. Shortly after Cadbury returned to England in March 1909, the firm stopped buying São Toméan cocoa.Footnote 77
What remained was the libel case the company had brought against the Standard. The trial began in Birmingham at the end of November 1909. For the firm, the newspaper's libelous claim was that Cadbury Brothers had been unconcerned with labor conditions on the islands. The directors pointed to William Cadbury, who had carefully tracked the issue from April 1901 and sent Joseph Burtt to investigate. The Standard's lawyer noted the £1.3 million ($6.3 million) of São Toméan cocoa the firm had imported between 1901 and 1908. After four days of testimony, the jury conferred for an hour, deciding in the company's favor but awarding one farthing—the smallest settlement possible. Cadbury Brothers' concern for African workers had been sacrificed too long to the quality of the islands' cocoa.Footnote 78
Happiness and Work
Cadbury Brothers paid careful attention to the working lives of its laborers, and still more attention to the price and quality of cocoa. The long hours and low wages of Portuguese workers suggest indifference on the part of their employers. For African contract workers, on whose alleged happiness hinged a broader debate about the relative value of working conditions versus mobility, the cocoa controversy did yield some positive results. In 1911, a new Republican government in Portugal limited contracts for workers in São Tomé and Príncipe to two years; Angola's governor general succeeded in enforcing the law in 1913. By 1916, workers from the islands, having collected their “deferred pay” from the repatriation fund, began returning to Angola at the end of their contracts.Footnote 79 The Portuguese, who had valued working conditions over mobility, and the British, who had insisted that an inability to leave one's job made one a slave, had reached a rapprochement, though not one that included the voices of the African serviçais whose labor (and happiness) had prompted such controversy.
