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 Seven Cadbury, Burtt, and Portuguese Africa In mid-March 1907, William Cadbury sent proof copies of Joseph Burtt’s report to his fellow Quaker chocolate makers Fry and Rowntree and to the German firm Stollwerck in Cologne, accompanied by a bill for just under £705, or one-quarter of the cost of Burtt’s African sojourn. The secretary of state, Sir Edward Grey, also received a copy, along with the assurance that nothing would be published without his approval. The Foreign Office was Burtt’s first stop when he returned to England a month later. On April 25, he spent forty-five minutes with Edward Clarke and Charles Lyell, who praised the “very moderate” tone of the report. Nevertheless, Grey’s undersecretary, Eric Barrington, wrote to Cadbury Brothers Limited asking the firm to edit sections that might offend the Portuguese government and requesting that Burtt delay publication until Portugal had the opportunity to address the issues the report raised.1 Joseph Fry also equivocated when Burtt met with him in Bristol on April 29. Though Fry conceded that “the main point of the question is not how the serviçal is treated, but whether or no, he is a slave,” he also noted that the quality of São Tomé’s cocoa made it “very difficult to decline to buy it.” Arnold Rowntree was more receptive, observing that the “painful” revelations about “the conditions of coloured labour in Portuguese West Africa” demanded that “some action must be taken.” About the value of Burtt’s impressions of Mozambique and the Transvaal, given his very short visit, Rowntree was rather more skeptical.2 At dinner with Henry Nevinson in London, Burtt passed on William Cadbury’s appreciation of the journalist’s work and mentioned Cadbury’s “desire to support the solid part of it.” Cadbury may have been stroking Nevinson’s ego to encourage his discretion, but Travers Buxton of the Anti-Slavery Society was also willing to wait patiently for Burtt’s report to be published. The wild card, not surprisingly, was H. R. Fox Bourne of the   C h o c o l a t e I s l a n d s Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS), who wrote to Cadbury after meeting with Burtt to protest the “inexpedience, as it seems to me,” of letting Grey and the Foreign Office determine when Burtt’s work would be released to the public. “Ten years of apathy over Congo affairs” made Fox Bourne doubt the government’s sincerity, and he urged Cadbury to “push the matter to the front before the evidence (much of which you have collected at great outlay and with such zeal) can be thrown aside as ‘ancient history.’” Cadbury replied the next day, sympathizing with Fox Bourne’s suspicions about the motives of the Foreign Office but noting that the four chocolate makers who had sponsored Burtt were willing to let Grey contact the Portuguese government . “It would be absurd,” Cadbury thought, to ask Grey “to make the representation and then before he has had time to do so to cut the ground from under his feet.”3 Burtt also had misgivings about the dissemination of his report. He did not trust the Portuguese government and regarded the plan of the British Foreign Office to forward a copy of his report through official channels as an effort to “shirk the responsibility of the matter and pacify us at the same time.” What really worried him was what would happen to the missionaries in Angola who could be identified even if they were not named: “It does not seem right to expose such people brave as they are to the chance of persecution without their most definite consent.” His experiences in São Tomé and Angola had demonstrated that even well-intentioned officials had little power to change policy. By May 1907, Lisbon appeared even less amenable to change: João Franco, appointed as prime minister by King Carlos I the previous year, had evolved into a dictator, and a Republican-led revolution to overthrow the monarchy seemed increasingly possible.4 On the question of the missionaries, Cadbury’s reply appeared almost callous, and it was clearly influenced by his long association with Edmund Morel’s Congo Reform Association. “Nothing was a greater hindrance to Congo reform,” Cadbury asserted, “than the fact that the Baptist missionaries for years would not breathe a word of these abuses because they feared to lose their influence—nothing gave a bigger lift...

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