Born of Norwegian parents in Wales, a World War II fighter pilot, and British intelligence officer, Dahl became part of the lives of millions of children around the world, especially through two of his works, James and the Giant Peach (1961) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964). Roald Dahl, one of the world’s most successful writers of children’s books, grew up with chocolate-and white supremacy-in his veins. Is this new Caribbean production free of the exploitation still found in Africa? What does cocoa production mean for today’s world? Do producers understand the contexts of their business? Lucia are increasingly becoming involved in cocoa production and have formed a network of rural female producers. Cocoa orchards have been revived in Jamaica and thousands of farmers have become involved in production. Many survive “on little food, little or no pay, and endure regular beatings.” By one estimate, roughly half of the world’s chocolate comes from the labor of exploited children.Īs Daphne Ewing-Chow of Forbes magazine pointed out in 2019, Trinidad and Tobago are experiencing a steady increase in cocoa production after a century of progressive decline-from 30,000 tons per year to less than 500 tons. African cocoa production remains “fraught with social problems, including child and slave labor.” Today, millions of West African children, especially in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, are caught up in the cocoa trade. Yet, as Jill Lane wrote in her 2007 essay “Becoming Chocolate, A Tale of Racial Translation,” the industry there offers an important warning for Caribbean nations. World’s cocoa production shifted to West Africa (about 70% today), specifically because of Britain’s interests there, especially Cadbury, the famed British chocolatier. The first cocoa shipments to Europe began in 1585 and ever since the commodity has been identified with the colonial world of Central America and the Caribbean, but especially with West Africa. In this way, the antislavery newspaper the National Era wrote in 1856, “the sweet may be obtained without the bitter.” abolitionists had protested the cocoa trade, and the cotton trade, pledging themselves to buy only free-labor products. The very idea of chocolate is inextricably linked to slavery. ![]() While initial English efforts to produce Jamaican cacao-highly prized today-proved successful, exporting “quite large quantities,” as one imperial historian wrote, the crop soon fell victim to hurricanes and disease and competition from sugar as the more profitable (slave-produced) investment. As British literature professor Kate Loveman wrote in Journal of Social History in 2013, the Earl of Sandwich tried to entice the English government into cultivating new harvests, including cacao, in the West Indies, and especially Jamaica. Like sugar, it became the business of colonial-and slave trade-powers, and Great Britain, since the mid-17th century, sought to be in the thick of it. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.”Ĭhocolate also has a history and, despite its sweetness to many Americans, it has a bitter legacy. “We carry it within us,” African American novelist James Baldwin memorably remarked in his essay, “The White Man’s Guilt.” We “are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. Since the 1980s, if not earlier, public schools began dropping history from their curriculums or assigned athletic coaches the task of teaching such classes. For generations, we manufactured blatantly racist textbooks that taught young readers about the inferiority of African Americans. People in the United States love chocolate, but history-not so much. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. ![]() Oompa-Loompa illustration by Joseph Schindelman, copyright © 1964 and renewed 1992 by Joseph Schindelman, from CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY by Roald Dahl.
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