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xi Preface This book is about an Englishman’s journey through Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century, undertaken as European colonial powers were tightening their grip on the continent. The traveler’s name was Joseph Burtt. He had been hired by William A. Cadbury on behalf of the British chocolate firm Cadbury Brothers Limited to determine—in response to an emerging international controversy—if slaves had harvested the cocoa the company was purchasing from the Portuguese West African colony of São Tomé and Príncipe. Burtt’s voyage took him from innocence and credulity to outrage and activism. Between June 1905 and March 1907, he traveled to the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, then south along the coast to the large Portuguese colony of Angola, to Mozambique in Portuguese East Africa, and to the Transvaal Colony in British southern Africa. Through his eyes, we learn about the often complacent British and Portuguese attitudes toward work, slavery, race, and imperialism in the early twentieth century. He visited agricultural estates—roças on São Tomé and Príncipe and fazendas in Angola. He talked to diplomats, journalists, and European and African businesspeople, and he traced the slave route through Angola’s interior. He conferred with mine owners in the Transvaal and colonial officials in Mozambique, which supplied most of the labor for the Transvaal’s mines. He was not the first man to make such a trip; readers interested in the broader literature into which this narrative of his experiences fits may wish to read “A Note on Sources” at the end of this book. Burtt wrote a stream of letters to Cadbury recording what he saw and whom he met. He was not a flawless observer, but this should not surprise us, living as we do in an age that has long abandoned the pretense of objectivity . What Burtt wrote prompted Cadbury Brothers Limited to seek alternate sources of cocoa. The report he prepared summarizing his observations was submitted to the British and the Portuguese governments, and it helped reform the recruitment and treatment of laborers. Joseph Burtt was no casual visitor to Africa: he traveled with a purpose, and what he saw and what he xii  Preface did mattered. A century later, his journey echoes in the human rights organizations of our own day, which seek to expose the sometimes oppressive conditions under which workers still produce our foodstuffs. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the observations of this “big, innocent-looking man,” by turns idealistic, naive, perceptive, and too often racist, help us understand the cultural blindness of those who sought to improve the lot of African workers . Yet help to improve it, as the following story demonstrates, he did.1 ...

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