Free Bitter Chocolate by Carol Off Page A

lived and died as slaves.
    Theoretically, the slave trade had ended by the middle of the nineteenth century. Laws outlawing slavery were in force all over industrialized Europe. Abolitionists from Washington to London had triumphed. But somehow, on the margins of civilized society, people still lived in slavery, the reality of their circumstances obscured by wilful blindness and by euphemism. All the good intentions of King Charles of Spain, and later Philip, couldn’t save the Maya and the Aztecs from murderous exploitation. The extraordinary priest Bartolomé de Las Casas spent a lifetime trying to do something about it, and in the end he failed. But in the nineteenth century, the voice of moral outrage would come not from a priest but from an entirely new phenomenon: the crusading investigative reporter.

    The Englishman Henry Woodd Nevinson was part of a new breed of journalist who emerged in the late nineteenth century, writerswho combined a moralistic zeal with a flare for storytelling. They trekked around the world, exposing the sins of empire through their reporting. Nevinson’s parents were evangelical Christians, but he was more inclined to conduct a secular battle for the rights of the working class, here and now, than to await the promises of heaven. He spent time with Henrietta and Samuel Barnett, the celebrated poverty activists who had installed a university settlement in London’s East End to provide education to the underprivileged; he also joined Britain’s first socialist party.
    Nevinson was a scholar of Greek and Latin and taught history in various schools throughout London while writing books about the plight of the poor. He hiked and cycled all over England and sometimes spent days walking while contemplating the human condition. But Nevinson longed to travel in uncharted places, to see the world and to write about it.
    In the late 1890s, he got his chance. A liberal English newspaper called the
Daily Chronicle
dispatched Nevinson to cover the Greek uprising against the Ottomans on the island of Crete. He was hardly over the experience when, in 1899, he was off to report on the Spanish-American war. Then it was the Boer War in South Africa. Such events were of great interest to an intellectual Anglo socialist who eschewed the imperial chauvinism of his own native country. By the time he was covering events in Macedonia, Nevinson had established himself as a formidable journalist with a penchant for exposing the social injustices of a rapidly changing world, a spokesman for the downtrodden. At forty-eight, he was working for the
Daily Chronicle
, writing books, hiking furiously and generally enjoying himself when he got the most important assignment of his career.
    The respected American magazine
Harper’s Monthly
—which over the years counted among its contributors Horatio Alger, Mark Twain, Henry James and Jack London—was always on the lookout for writers anywhere in the world willing to go to “adventuresome” places and bring back a piece of the action for itsreaders. The editors at
Harper’s
asked Nevinson to come up with a story proposal for them, and he did.
    As with many social activists of the age, Nevinson was captivated by the reports then emerging from the Congo about a new manifestation of slavery that was on a scale to match the worst excesses of the eighteenth century. During triangular trade, European and British merchants regarded Africa as a massive labour pool for their colonies in the New World. But King Leopold II of Belgium saw the value of Africa to his Empire a bit differently. He laid claim to vast areas of the Congo, declaring it a free state but in reality, launching one of the most devious campaigns of wealth extraction in human history, as he enslaved native people to facilitate his ruthless harvest of ivory and rubber. Africans who refused to work for the Belgians were routinely beaten to death. Whole villages of people were