3- The Bitter Sweetness of Chocolate

Abstract

Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics, & the Ethics of Business
by Lowell J. Satre
Ohio University Press, 2005, ix and 298, Cloth, ISBN 0 8214 1589 1

Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics and the Ethics of Business is centred around the controversy surrounding the use by the British Quaker chocolate company, Cadbury Bros., of cocoa produced by slave labour on the islands of Sao Tome, a Portuguese colony,in the early years of the twentieth century. Cadbury were initially unaware of the situation, until alerted around 1904 by the vigorous agitation of anti-slavery campaigners, notably Henry W. Nevinson. They subsequently made their own investigations into labour conditions on Sao Tome. However, when these investigations confirmed that these were indeed far from free, Cadbury continued to use the cocoa beans produced on the islands whilst they lobbied the Portuguese colonial authorities and planters to make improvements, simultaneously urging successive British Conservative and Liberal governments to push them into doing so. In this way, they repudiated the pressures of the more radical humanitarian campaigners that they boycott Sao Tome cocoa in favour of supplies from elsewhere right up until 1909. Conversely, they argued the correctness of their own course in working for improvements and the implementation of Portuguese labour codes
that, in theory, should have provided for the freedom of labour, and most importantly, for the paid repatriation of labourers to their country of origin at the end of their contracts. Yet in temporizing, even if from motives which they themselves deemed to be well-intentioned, Cadbury Bros. were to run into a storm which had as much to do with contemporary political controversies in Britain as it had to do with what was or was not happening in Sao Tome.