Chocolate Islands — 2012 ·

Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa

“Higgs provides a fascinating exploration of the use of forced labor in Portuguese African colonies and the politics of humanitarian investigations in the early 20th century…. This well-written book deserves to be read by scholars of colonial Africa and imperialism. Summing Up: Highly recommended.

Choice

“Like Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, Catherine Higgs takes us into another ‘heart of darkness’ of colonial rule. Chocolate Islands is a compelling read examining how the British chocolate firm Cadbury Brothers investigated the use of slave labor in Portuguese colonies to produce cocoa. It raises challenging questions not only about how a business with a humanitarian streak dealt with the use of forced labor in the early twentieth century, but also about the labor practices of businesses in the twenty-first-century world.”

Robert R. Edgar — Howard University, editor of An African American in South Africa: The Travel Notes of Ralph J. Bunche and coauthor of African Apocalypse: The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a Twentieth-Century South African Prophet

“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.”

London Review of Books

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In Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, Catherine Higgs traces the early-twentieth-century journey of the Englishman Joseph Burtt to the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe—the chocolate islands—through Angola and Mozambique, and finally to British Southern Africa. Burtt had been hired by the chocolate firm Cadbury Brothers Limited to determine if the cocoa it was buying from the islands had been harvested by slave laborers forcibly recruited from Angola, an allegation that became one of the grand scandals of the early colonial era. Burtt spent six months on São Tomé and Príncipe and a year in Angola. His five-month march across Angola in 1906 took him from innocence and credulity to outrage and activism and ultimately helped change labor recruiting practices in colonial Africa.

This beautifully written and engaging travel narrative draws on collections in Portugal, the United Kingdom, and Africa to explore British and Portuguese attitudes toward work, slavery, race, and imperialism. In a story still familiar a century after Burtt’s sojourn, Chocolate Islands reveals the idealism, naivety, and racism that shaped attitudes toward Africa, even among those who sought to improve the conditions of its workers.

Catherine Higgs is a professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of The Ghost of Equality: The Public Lives of D.D.T. Jabavu of South Africa, 1885–1959, and coeditor of Stepping Forward: Black Women in Africa and the Americas, both published by Ohio University Press.