Bitter Chocolate by Carol Off Page A

certain most of their cocoa originated. Surely they had heard and read the same disturbing accounts! Maybe they’d help him by providing names of contacts there. But Nevison found the Cadburys strangely coy about labour conditions on the Portuguese islands. George Cadbury, the paterfamilias, told Nevinson that the company had plans to do its own investigation and was actively seeking someone suitable to send to the islands. Nevinson was not their man.
    Something about their unwillingness to talk made the reporter suspicious. The Cadburys were well-known abolitionists, extremely active in the anti-slavery societies and were major contributors in the campaign to expose the evils of the system King Leopold had created in the Congo. William Cadbury, in particular, was deeply involved in the movement and later became not only Edmund Morel’s benefactor but also his confidant. Why wouldn’t the Cadburys want to know everything they could about alleged abuses on the African cocoa farms? As he recorded in his diaries, it took Nevinson a long time to realize that it was because they already knew a lot more than he or any of his sources did. And they had no idea what to do about it.
    In an archive at the library of the University of Birmingham lie the Cadbury family’s collected papers. The archive shows notonly that the company had a subscription to the Anti-Slavery Society’s
Reporter
, but also that individual members of the family subscribed to it. If the Cadburys read the periodicals, they would have seen the same articles and anecdotes that Nevinson had, where contributors described conditions on the Portuguese islands to be as bad—or worse—than in Leopold’s Congo.
    The only conclusion Nevinson could make is that the Cadburys chose to turn a blind eye. Even though it was the Portuguese, not the English Quakers, who ran the wretched islands and the trade in cocoa beans, the manufacturers who bought the beans benefited from a system that kept the prices of their raw materials minimal through cruel exploitation. But the first record indicating that the Cadburys raised the issue with their board of directors was in 1901. In January of that year, the
Reporter
had published an account from a missionary that must have stunned all chocolate-making abolitionists: “I have never seen such slave gangs bound west as pass us day after day since crossing the Quanza, and the many dead bodies left on the side of the road tell the sad tale—knocked on the head to end their misery or hamstrung and left.” The Cadburys would have known about the abuses for years before Nevinson came calling.
    William Cadbury tried to downplay the reports when he wrote to another Quaker activist: “[One] looks at these matters in a different light when it affects one’s own interests but I do feel there is a vast difference between the cultivation of cocoa and gold or diamond mining [in reference to reports of the time concerning British abuse in African mining].”
    According to archival records, the Cadbury family was getting almost half of its cocoa from the islands, as were all the other Quaker cocoa companies, including Rowntree and Fry, with the remainder coming from British colonies in the Caribbean. The companies had numerous meetings among themselves at the turn of the century to discuss whether they should boycott the Portuguese islands. But they inevitably concluded that a boycottwouldn’t have much effect on anything except their own bottom line.
    True to their word, the Cadburys did find their own investigative researcher. Joseph Burtt was a businessman in his early forties, handsome, keen and dedicated to the principles of the anti-slavery movement. He might have been the right man, but in a colossal act of foot dragging, the Cadburys insisted that Burtt conduct his inquiries in Portuguese, a language he knew nothing of. So they sent him to Lisbon to learn it.
    While there, he and the