Free Bitter Chocolate by Carol Off Page B

murdered. To reluctant workers, Leopold’s agents displayed buckets of the severed hands of others who had resisted. Despite widespread international laws against such exploitation, Leopold got away with murder on an epic scale. In fact, the world celebrated the Belgian king as a humanitarian, subscribing to Leopold’s claims that he was introducing the savage natives of the Congo to the redeeming ways of European civilization. No one knew (or admitted to knowing) what the Belgian monarch was really up to until it was exposed by an enterprising writer.
    Edmund Morel discovered the horrific abuse while working for a Liverpool shipping company, and he began to keep a detailed record of what he learned. Though it would destroy his career in shipping and eventually land him in prison, Morel painstakingly documented the Belgian atrocities in the Congo, many of them reported by Belgian bureaucrats. The Congo was a commercial success story in a place few people ever visited. With the king in charge, the likelihood of whistle-blowers seemed just as remote as the place itself. If not for the crusading journalism of Morel the world might never have discovered thefull breadth of a scheme that claimed the lives of as many as ten million Africans.
    Leopold, like many greedy potentates before him, had discovered the value of euphemism in obscuring the true nature of his imperial behaviour. To escape the legal implications of slavery, he simply called it something else. His involuntary workforce in the Congo was “indentured,” and his colonial bureaucrats claimed that the African labourers worked willingly for wages—there was no coercion. Leopold had actually convinced other European governments that his mission in Africa was charitable and that he was providing job opportunities for the Congolese. The fact that the Africans arrived at work in chains at gunpoint somehow didn’t register.
    Nevinson was fascinated and appalled when he read Morel’s exposés but he learned that Leopold was not alone in his clever deceit. Nevinson heard about particularly egregious practices on the coast of equatorial Africa, where there was a seemingly innocuous trade in a product the very name of which conjured up the best of human impulses. It seemed that cocoa, by now Britain’s most cherished confection, the raw material for the high-minded Quaker industrialists, was produced by slaves. The story, like the product, was delicious. This investigation was one Nevinson could get his teeth into, following in the famous footsteps of Morel. But as was the case for Morel, the story would consume Nevinson for the rest of his life, and would never be completely resolved.

    By the mid-1800s, the cocoa trees of the Caribbean and the Spanish Americas were depleted and disease ridden: colonists had destroyed the
Theobroma
stock through over-production and poor management, just as they had ravaged the populations that had taught Europe about cocoa. But cocoa traders had learnedthat the beans could grow anywhere within a twenty-kilometre belt north or south of the equator, provided the atmosphere was humid and the altitude was not excessive. The Dutch had already transplanted cocoa stock to their colonies in Indonesia. The Portuguese found the ideal terrain for their own plantations on two small islands under their control in the Gulf of Guinea, just off the coast of present-day Cameroon. For years they’d been transporting Africans to the Americas to work as slaves on cocoa farms. Now they’d take the cocoa trees to Africa. One thing wouldn’t change: The Africans would continue to work the cocoa farms in appalling circumstances.
    The islands of São Tomé and Príncipe had served as transfer stations for the earlier slave trade. Millions of hapless Africans had passed through warehouses on the tiny islands and had caught their last glimpses of their homeland from the gangplanks of ships in São Tomé’s