ChocolateHQ

The São Tomé cocoa scandal

Between about 1900 and 1909 the cacao islands of São Tomé and Príncipe supplied a large share of the world crop using contract labourers recruited in Angola who were never repatriated. British chocolate firms learned of it, investigated privately, kept buying for years, and eventually boycotted — after suing a newspaper for saying so.

Circa 1900 to 1909Documented historySão Tomé and Príncipe, Angola, and Britain

São Tomé and Príncipe, two small Portuguese island colonies in the Gulf of Guinea, were for a period around the turn of the twentieth century among the largest cacao producers in the world. The estates were worked by labourers described as *serviçais* — contract workers, formally free, recruited in the Angolan interior and shipped to the islands.

The contracts were a legal fiction. Labourers were acquired through mechanisms that were difficult to distinguish from purchase, marched to the coast, and transported to islands from which, in practice, nobody returned. Portuguese law had abolished slavery; the recruitment and repatriation provisions that were supposed to make the contract system something other than slavery were not enforced.

Henry Nevinson, an English journalist, travelled the route in 1904 and 1905 and published his account, first in Harper's Monthly and then as *A Modern Slavery* in 1906. He described the overland labour marches and the absence of any returning labourers.

The British chocolate manufacturers — Cadbury foremost, and the other Quaker firms with them — were substantial buyers of São Tomé cacao. They had been aware of allegations before Nevinson published, and had commissioned their own investigation, which broadly confirmed them. They continued buying while pursuing reform through diplomatic and private channels, on the reasoning that a buyer who withdrew lost whatever leverage it had.

That reasoning was also commercially convenient, and the delay ran for years. In 1908 the *Standard* newspaper attacked Cadbury for profiting from slave-grown cacao while professing philanthropy at home. Cadbury sued for libel and won in 1909 — and the jury awarded one farthing in damages, the smallest coin then in circulation and an unmistakable verdict on the merits of the case beyond the narrow legal point.

The firms announced a boycott of São Tomé and Príncipe cacao in 1909. Buying shifted substantially to the Gold Coast, where cacao was grown by African smallholders on their own land rather than on estates — a structure that persists in Ghana today.

Period
Circa 1900 to 1909
Region
São Tomé and Príncipe, Angola, and Britain
Kind of record
Documented history

Significance

It is the first modern controversy in which chocolate companies were held publicly responsible for labour conditions in a supply chain they did not own — and the template, including the long delay between knowing and acting, recurs through the sector's later child-labour commitments.

RecordedSource: Ohio University Press (2005)

What the farthing verdict actually decided

Cadbury won the libel action. The jury found that the Standard had defamed the firm — and awarded the smallest coin in circulation.

The distinction it drew is worth stating precisely, because both sides of the argument have since misreported it. The newspaper had gone beyond the evidence in what it alleged about Cadbury's motives and knowledge; that was defamatory, and the verdict says so. But the underlying facts about the islands were substantially as reported, the firm had known about them for years while continuing to buy, and the award said so as loudly as a jury can.

It is not a vindication and it is not a conviction. It is a jury declining to let either party have the story it wanted.

The argument for staying, and why it recurs

The firms' stated reasoning for continuing to buy was that engagement gave them influence a withdrawal would forfeit — that a buyer inside the trade could press for reform while a buyer who left simply handed the supply to someone less scrupulous.

This is not a straw man and it is not obviously wrong. It is the same argument made today for staying in supply chains where child labour has been documented, by firms that also fund remediation programmes, and it has the same structure: a genuine strategic point that is also extremely convenient for the party making it.

What the São Tomé case supplies is the one thing the modern version cannot — an ending. The engagement ran for years, the conditions did not materially change, and what eventually moved the trade was withdrawal plus publicity. That is a data point rather than a rule, and it is the reason this episode is worth knowing when reading a contemporary sourcing commitment.

What it did not fix

The boycott ended British purchasing from the islands. It did not end the labour system, which continued to supply other buyers, and it did not establish any durable mechanism for verifying conditions in cacao supply chains.

The trade moved to the Gold Coast, and the West African smallholder structure that dominates world cocoa today owes something to that shift. Whether that outcome was an improvement is a genuine question rather than a rhetorical one: smallholder production avoided the estate labour system and created the fragmented, low-income producer base whose economics the sustainability section describes.

Ninety years later the Harkin-Engel Protocol addressed child labour in West African cocoa with a voluntary industry commitment, a series of missed deadlines, and continuing documented problems. The resemblance to 1909 is close enough to be worth noticing and loose enough that it should not be pushed into a single narrative.

Related

History and culture

Sustainability and economics covering this

Sources

  • Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics, and the Ethics of Business — Ohio University Press, 2005(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)
  • A Modern Slavery — Harper & Brothers, 1906(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)