Two books – one on slavery and the chocolate business, the other on the British state and loyalist paramilitaries – tell the same tale of government deceit...

Slavery, conspiracy and cover-up: the ethics of empire

WORKERS, FEB 2007 ISSUE

Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics and the Ethics of Business, by Lowell J. Satre, paperback, 308 pages, ISBN 0-8214-16626-X, Ohio University Press, 2005, £16.50.

This superb book studies the connection between slavery in West Africa and the British, and Quaker, firm of Cadbury, particularly in the first decade of the twentieth century.

From the fifteenth century, the slave trade was the foundation of the Portuguese empire. Even in the early 1900s, Angola was still a slave state, with half its people enslaved.

The British Empire was an ally of Portugal, so it was complicit in the slavery. Portugal's islands of Sao Tomé and Principe, 150 miles off Africa's west coast, had 40,000 slaves producing cocoa beans which Cadbury had been buying since 1886. From 1901 to 1908, Cadbury got half its beans from the islands.

A Foreign Office official noted, "The fact of the matter is that the system is neither more nor less than slavery but that we do not dare to say much as we might thus offend the Portuguese with whom we desire to stand well."

In the 1900s, the British Empire was trying to recruit African labour from Portuguese Africa for its gold mines in South Africa. The Foreign Office warned against the "danger of learning inconvenient facts which might oblige us to make representations to the Portuguese Govt. which we don't want to do."

Slavery in Africa as depicted by Edward Winsor Kemble, the artist chosen by Mark Twain to illustrate Huckleberry Finn and other novels. Kemble, an American, was born in 1861 and died in 1933. His drawings of African slaves were taken from real life.

Treaties ignored
So Britain, like Portugal, ignored the treaties obliging them to act to halt the slave trade. Prime Minister Lord Salisbury ordered, "Leave it alone."

It was not, of course, the only country in Africa where the British government ignored treaties. As Joseph Hanlon from the Open University pointed out in a piece the Guardian newspaper on 25 January, slavery carried on in the British empire for several decades after the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1833. In 1924 it was still being practised, with government knowledge, in Sierra Leone, northern Nigeria, Gambia, Aden, Burma and Hong Kong.

In 1901, William Cadbury first heard rumours of slave labour on Sao Tomé and Principe. All the evidence that he later received confirmed that there was a brutal slave trade in Angola, that the labourers on the islands were forced, that the death rate was huge (often 20% a year), and that none was free ever to leave. Yet Cadbury did not boycott the products of slave labour until 1909.

The company claimed that discreet diplomacy, and continued purchase of Sao Tome's cocoa, would improve the workers' position. Their position, however, did not improve: 6,000 slaves died every year, though profits certainly increased, as did the number of slaves and the amount of cocoa exported.

Humanitarian pressure groups tried to get the British government to act in the labourers' interests. It responded with endless promises to press the Portuguese state to reform, and repeated investigations and commissions.

This all proves the folly of relying on companies, pressure groups, treaties or governments to effect improvement. Angola and the islands suffered forced labour until they won independence from Portugal in 1975.

How we have progressed since then! Such outrages are long gone. Or are they? In 2001, the Financial Times reported, "Nestle and Cadbury were accused of turning a blind eye to child slavery in the cocoa industry."

A 2002 study estimated that 284,000 children worked in West Africa's cocoa farms. Another study concluded that there were 15,000 child slaves in the Ivory Coast alone. Cadbury responded, "We were completely unaware of the allegations concerning cocoa growing in the Côte d'Ivoire." Plus ça change.

The USA spends $8.5 billion a year on chocolate products; Britain spends £4 billion, while the children who produce the chocolate toil in poverty and slavery.


A Very British Jihad: Collusion, Conspiracy & Cover-Up in Northern Ireland, by Paul Larkin, paperback, 313 pages, ISBN 1-900960-25-7, Beyond the Pale Publications, 2006, £10.99.

Paul Larkin, an investigative journalist, made many films for Spotlight, BBC Northern Ireland's current affairs programme. The research for these films was the raw material for this outstanding book in which he details the British state's secret collaboration with loyalist paramilitaries.

He sums up, "The compelling evidence in this book, however, is that one of the most powerful states in the world, the United Kingdom, was the primary sponsor of a covert regime of murder and terror which lasted for three decades and was demonstrably directed against one section of the community only – Irish Catholics and nationalists and their 'fellow travellers'."

He contends that MI6 was involved in many covert assassinations in the 1970s. He shows how the British state connived at the attempted coup in Northern Ireland in May 1974, and how much it had in common with other 1970s coups, in Chile, Greece and Argentina.

Thatcher personally authorised Brian Nelson's 1985 arms-smuggling, sanctions-busting trip to South Africa. Nelson, a British Army agent working in the Ulster Defence Association, also developed the UDA/Ulster Freedom Fighters alliance with South Africa's death squads. The murders at Milltown Cemetery and other atrocities were carried out with arms from South Africa. MI6 also helped British and Irish mercenaries fighting against Africa's national liberation movements.

Larkin asks about Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, "How have the DUP gotten away with it for so long? What other party and its leadership would get away with founding and supporting paramilitary loyalist armies and continually aligning itself with loyalist gunmen and killers without suffering the kind of rigorous media questioning that Sinn Fein, quite rightly, has faced?"

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