Production of Cacao on the Gold Coast
| Year. | Quantity. | Value. £ |
| 1891 | 0 tons (80 lbs.) | 4 |
| 1896 | 34 tons | 2,276 |
| 1901 | 980 tons | 42,837 |
| 1906 | 8,975 tons | 336,269 |
| 1911 | 30,798 tons | 1,613,468 |
| 1916 | 72,161 tons | 3,847,720 |
| 1917 | 90,964 tons | 3,146,851 |
| 1918 | 66,343 tons | 1,796,985 |
| 1919 | 177,000 tons | 8,000,000 |
The conditions of production in the Gold Coast present a number of features entirely novel. We hear from time to time of concessions being granted in tropical regions to this or that company of enterprising European capitalists, who employ a few Europeans and send them to the area to manage the industry. The inhabitants of the area become the manual wage earners of the company, and too often in the lust for profits, or as an offering to the god of commercial efficiency, the once easy and free life of the native is lost for ever and a form of wage-slavery takes its place with doubtful effects on the life and health of the workers. In defence it is pointed out that yet another portion of the earth has been made productive, which, without the initiative of the European capitalist, must have lain fallow. But in the Gold Coast the “indolent” native has created a new industry entirely native owned, and in thirty years the Gold Coast has outstripped all the areas of the world in quantity of produce. Forty years ago the natives had never seen a cacao tree, now at least fifty million trees flourish in the colony. This could not have happened without the strenuous efforts of the Department of Agriculture. The Gold Coast now stands head and shoulders above any other producing area for quantity. The problem of the future lies in the improvement of quality, and difficult though this problem be, we cannot doubt, given a fair chance, that the far-sighted and energetic Agricultural Department will solve it. Indeed, it must in justice be pointed out that already a very marked improvement has been made, and now fifty to one hundred times as much good fermented cacao is produced as there was ten years ago.5 However, if a high standard is to be maintained, the work of the Department of Agriculture must be supplemented by the willingness of the cacao buyers to pay a higher price for the better qualities.
The phenomenal growth of this industry is the more remarkable when we consider the lack of roads and beasts of burden. The usual pack animals, horses and oxen, cannot live on the Gold Coast because of the tsetse fly, which spreads amongst them the sleeping sickness. And so the native, used as he is to heavy head-loads, naturally adopted this as his first method of transport, and hundreds of the less affluent natives arrive at the collecting centres with great weights of cacao on their heads. “Women and children, light-hearted, chattering and cheerful, bear their 60 lbs. head-loads with infinite patience. Heavier loads, approaching sometimes two hundredweight, are borne by grave, silent Hausa-men, often a distance of thirty or forty miles.”
One day, not so many years ago, some more ingenious native in the hills at the back of the Coast, filled an old palm-oil barrel with cacao and rolled it down the ways to Accra. And now to-day it is a familiar sight to see a man trundling a huge barrel of cacao, weighing half a ton, down to the coast. The sound of a motor horn is heard, and he wildly turns the barrel aside to avoid a disastrous collision with the new, weird transport animal from Europe. Motor lorries have been used with great effect on the coast for some seven years; they have the advantage over pack animals that they do not succumb to the bite of the dreaded tsetse fly, but nevertheless not a few derelicts lie, or stand on their heads, in the ditches, the victims of over-work or accident.
Having brought the cacao to the coast, there yet remains the lighterage to the ocean liner, which lies anchored some two miles from the shore, rising and falling to the great rollers from the broad Atlantic. A long boat is used, manned by some twenty swarthy natives, who glory—vocally—in their passage through the dangerous surf which roars along the sloping beach. The cacao is piled high on wood racks and covered with tarpaulins and seldom shares the fate of passengers and crew, who are often drenched in the surf before they swing by a crane in the primitive mammy chair, high but not dry, on board the hospitable Elder Dempster liner.
We now turn from the Gold Coast and the success of native ownership to another part of West Africa, a scene of singular beauty, where the Portuguese planters have triumphed over savage nature.
Two lovely islands, San Thomé and its little sister isle of Principe, lie right on the Equator in the Gulf of Guinea, about two hundred miles from the African mainland. A warm, lazy sea, the sea of the doldrums, sapphire or turquoise, or, in deep shaded pools, a radiant green, joyfully foams itself away against these fairy lands of tossing palm, dense vegetation, rushing cascades, and purple, precipitous peaks. A soil of volcanic origin is covered with a rich humus of decaying vegetation, and this, with a soft humid atmosphere, makes an ideal home for cacao.
The bean, introduced in 1822, was not cultivated with diligence till fifty years ago. To-day the two islands, which together have not half the area of Surrey, grow 32,000 metric tons of cacao a year, or about one-tenth of the world’s production.6 The income of a single planter, once a poor peasant, has amounted to hundreds of thousands sterling.
Dotted over the islands, here nestling on a mountain side, there overlooking some blue inlet of the sea, are more than two hundred plantations, or rocas, whose buildings look like islands in a green sea of cacao shrubs, above which rise the grey stems of such forest trees as have been left to afford shade.
Here, not only have the cultivation, fermentation and drying of cacao been brought to the highest state of perfection, but the details of organisation—planters’ homes, hospitals, cottages, drying sheds and the Decauville railways—are often models of their kind.
Intelligent and courteous, the planters make delightful hosts. At their homes, five thousand miles away from Europe, the visitor, who knows what it means to struggle with steaming, virgin forests, rank encroaching vegetation, deadly fevers, and the physical and mental inertia engendered by the tropics, will marvel at the courage and energy that have triumphed over such obstacles. Calculating from various estimates, each labourer in the islands appears to produce about 1,640 pounds of cacao yearly, and the average yield per cultivated acre is 480 pounds, or about 30 pounds more than that of Trinidad in 1898.
As there is no available labour in San Thomé, the planters get their workers from the mainland of Africa. Prior to the year 1908, the labour system of the islands was responsible for grave abuses. This has now been changed. Natives from the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique now enter freely into contracts ranging from one to five years, two years being the time generally chosen. At the end of their term of work they either re-contract or return to their native land with their savings, with which they generally buy a wife. The readiness with which the natives volunteer for the work on the islands is proof both of the soundness of the system of contract and of the good treatment they receive at the hands of the planters.
Unfortunately, the mortality of the plantation labourers has generally been very heavy, one large and well-managed estate recording on an average of seven years an annual death rate of 148 per thousand, and many rocas have still more appalling records. Against this, other plantations only a few miles away may show a mortality approximating to that of an average European city. In February, 1918, the workers in San Thomé numbered 39,605, and the deaths during the previous year, 1917, were 1,808, thus showing on official figures an annual mortality of 45 per thousand. Comparing this with the 26 per thousand of Trinidad, and remembering that most of the San Thomé labourers are in the prime of life, it will be seen that this death rate represents a heavy loss of life and justifies the continued demand from the British cocoa manufacturers for the appointment and report of a special medical commission.
The Portuguese Government is prepared to meet this demand, for it has recently sent a Commissioner, Dr. Joaquim Gouveia, to San Thomé to make a thorough examination of labour conditions, including work, food, housing, hospitals and medical attendance, and to report fully and confidentially to the Portuguese Colonial Secretary.
If this important step is followed by adequate measures of reform there is every reason to hope that the result will be a material reduction in the death rate, as the good health enjoyed on some of the rocas shows San Thomé to be not more unhealthy than other tropical islands.
CAMEROONS.
The Cameroons, which we took from the Germans in 1916, is also on the West Coast of Africa. It lags far behind the Gold Coast in output, although both commenced to grow cacao about the same time. The Germans spent great sums in the Cameroons in giving the industry a scientific basis, they adopted the “estate plan,” and possibly the fact that they employ contract labour explains why they have not had the same phenomenal success that the natives working for themselves have achieved on the Gold Coast.
Various countries and districts which are responsible for about 97 per cent. of the world’s cacao crop have now been named and briefly commented upon. Of other producing areas, the islands, Ceylon and Java, are worthy of mention. In both of these (as also in Venezuela, Samoa7 and Madagascar) is grown the criollo cacao, which produces the plump, sweet beans with the cinnamon “break.” Cacao beans from Ceylon or Java are easily recognised by their appearance, because, being washed, they have beautiful clean shells, but there is a serious objection to washed shells, namely, that they are brittle and as thin as paper, so that many are broken before they reach the manufacturer. Ceylon is justly famous for its fine “old red”; along with this a fair quantity of inferior cacao is produced, which by being called Ceylon (such is the power of a good name), tends to claim a higher price than its quality warrants.