São Tomé's Cocoa Islands: The Forced Labor Behind Europe's Chocolate

By the early 1900s, the Portuguese islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, off the coast of West Africa, had become the world’s largest producer of cocoa, and their beans supplied a substantial share of the raw material behind Europe’s chocolate industry, Cadbury Brothers of Birmingham among its biggest customers. The islands’ roças, plantation estates that functioned as self-contained economies with their own processing buildings, worker housing, and administrators, ran on the labor of tens of thousands of Africans known as serviçais, most of them brought under contract from Portugal’s colony of Angola.

Portugal had officially abolished slavery in 1876, and the serviçais system was formally structured as voluntary contract labor: recruits were brought before a Portuguese tribunal in Angola, declared free, and signed to five-year labor contracts on the islands, with a 1903 labor decree promising the right to repatriation once a contract ended. In practice, none of it functioned as advertised. Workers were typically recruited under coercion or debt in the Angolan interior, transported to the islands, and then had their contracts renewed indefinitely by plantation administrators without their consent; the promised repatriation fund existed mainly on paper, and the islands became, in the words of contemporary critics, the laborers’ grave rather than a temporary posting. Mortality on the roças was high, and workers who arrived rarely left.

The system drew international attention after William Cadbury, head of the Quaker-owned chocolate firm that depended heavily on São Tomé beans, learned in 1901 that his company’s cocoa was tied to labor conditions resembling slavery. Rather than act immediately, Cadbury spent years pursuing quiet diplomatic pressure on Portugal and commissioned his own investigator, Joseph Burtt, to spend two years touring the plantations and Angola’s interior. It was the British journalist Henry Nevinson, traveling independently on assignment for Harper’s Magazine, who broke the story publicly: his firsthand reporting from Angola and São Tomé ran as a series in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in 1905 and 1906, and was published in book form the same year as A Modern Slavery, documenting the recruitment, transport, and plantation conditions of the serviçais in detail and naming the repatriation clause as a fiction that had never been honored.

Cadbury’s caution in the face of Nevinson’s reporting drew its own scrutiny: the firm was accused in the British press of hypocrisy for continuing to buy São Tomé cocoa for years after learning of the conditions behind it, a dispute that culminated in a much-publicized 1909 libel trial after the Standard newspaper made the accusation directly. Cadbury won the case but with damages of only a farthing, a verdict widely read as a rebuke of the company’s slow response. By then, however, the boycott Nevinson had called for was already underway: Cadbury, along with fellow chocolate makers Fry’s, Rowntree, and the German firm Stollwerck, jointly stopped buying São Tomé cocoa in 1909, shifting their purchasing to Britain’s Gold Coast colony instead. Portugal did not dismantle the contract-labor system on the islands until decades later, but the boycott marked the moment the trade most directly linking European chocolate to the islands’ plantations came to an end.