Innocence Betrayed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the Deep Roots of White Supremacy

Eleven years after he had written Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dahl confessed to being “mildly ashamed” about his attitude toward those Africans that had made such an impression upon him. His imperial adventure, he confessed, seemed “not right.” To one interviewer, he admitted that he had unconsciously fallen into an imperial frame of mind, something that could not be helped: “You can’t buck the tide,” he remarked. “It was the last days of the British Empire.” Yet, at almost the exact same time, he also expressed angry astonishment that anyone could find racial prejudice in the wonderful fantasy that he had crafted and dedicated to his brain-damaged son. “It didn’t occur to me that my depiction of the Oompa-Loompas was racist,” he remarked when the new edition of the book emerged in 1973, “but it did occur to the NAACP and others . . . which is why I revised the book.” Dahl hated criticism, especially when it pointed to his deepest flaws. His bewilderment, if any, came not from embarrassment or regret, but from the fact that his racism had been exposed to public view, threatening his reputation and, perhaps, his profits. His editor at Knopf, which published both James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, had never questioned the offensive characterizations of Africans in the book, although her attention had been drawn to them prior to publication. As if the world’s critical eyes had fallen asleep, Dahl’s first major biographer, Jeremy Treglown called the Oompa-Loompas “slaves,” but never questioned their role in the book. Even in 1982, long after some critics and the NAACP condemned the way he presented Africans, and after he dropped the black Oompa-Loompas in the revision of the book, he continued in the same vein. When publishing yet another successful children’s book, The BFG, his first draft of the friendly giant at the center of that book emerged as the very worst imitation of a Zip Coon figure, a black, flat-nosed, giant with “thick rubbery lips . . . like two gigantic purple frankfurters lying on top of the other.” For once, an editor spoke up. Dahl’s new editor, Stephen Roxbourgh at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, would have none of it; he properly denounced Dahl’s characterization as a “derisive stereotype.” Dahl conceded the point, responding: “the negro lips thing is taken care of.” Yet, Dahl’s inability to conceive of people of African descent as anything other than caricature remained, despite denials, as did the fact that his legendary book’s stimulating imagination about poverty, chocolate, and unexpected salvation had actually been built on racially toxic assumptions, illusions, and images.[18]

The very idea of chocolate, which Charlie and the Chocolate Factory pivoted on, was inextricably linked to slavery, something that Dahl could not have been unaware of given Britain’s long involvement with the slave and chocolate trades. Indeed, as early as the 1850s, American abolitionists had protested the cocoa trade, as they did the cotton trade, and pledged themselves to buy only free-labor products. In this way, the antislavery newspaper the National Era wrote in 1856, “the sweet may be obtained without the bitter.” 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. After World War I, 62% of the world’s cocoa production had shifted to West Africa, specifically because of Britain’s interests there, especially Cadbury, the famed British chocolatier. While the company made much of its attempt to raise and purchase “free-labor” cocoa, it in fact purchased much slave grown product from the Portuguese controlled Sao Tomé and Príncipe regions. The company explained, just as the slaveowners had done in the previous century, that Africans were necessary for the production of cocoa because the “harder manual work would be too arduous for Europeans unused to the heat of those regions.” Further strengthening the connection, Dahl’s prep school resided very near the Cadbury plant. Dahl and other students even had served as test subjects for the plant, passing judgment on various chocolate products, which gave him a life-long addiction to the candy and additional inspiration for his book. As Jill Lane wrote in her 2007 essay “Becoming Chocolate, A Tale of Racial Translation,” the industry 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. Many survive “on little food, little or no pay, and endure regular beatings.” According to Órla Ryan, roughly half of the world’s chocolate comes from the labor of exploited children. As Catherine Keyser recently emphasized, we continue to “ignore the global labor exploitation and racism that facilitates the circulation of sugar.^[19]

Moreover, as Dahl took full advantage of in his book, chocolate and African children remain united in an anthropomorphized candy fantasy, inextricably melted into one image, both existing for the pleasure of whites. One can, astonishingly, still buy Chocolate Babies, a child’s candy that had been popular in the 1950s. The terms chocolate babies and hot chocolate, for most of the twentieth century, invoked the exotic, and especially the presumed primitive nature of black women, sentiments ironically exploited by black performers to forge careers during the era of the Harlem Renaissance. European and American advertisers employed demeaning and objectifying images of Africans to enhance the exotic appeal of chocolate. As people of color, both in Africa and in Central America, were employed to harvest cocoa, their presence in Dahl’s book could only reinforce the connection between chocolate and racial subservience, a connection which Emma Robertson asserted Cadbury made clear in its advertising. Throughout Dahl’s life, minstrel performers achieved great popularity on both sides of the Atlantic. As late as the 1950s, G.H. Elliott (1882-1962) enjoyed “phenomenal success” in Great Britain as the “Chocolate Coloured Coon.”[20]

 

What criticism existed of the book did nothing to slow sales, but cumulatively it had an impact on Dahl. Lois R. Bouchard in 1972 and Katherine B. Baxter in 1974 had issued frosty warnings about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but the “delightful fantasy,” as Baxter wrote in The Reading Teacher, seemed unstoppable. Rather than innocent fantasy, Baxter warned that the book imparted messages as clear as any of a thousand U.S history school textbooks from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which, as she wrote, are “as demeaning as they are untrue.” Just as Tarzan had landed in “deepest, darkest Africa” and “helped” inferior natives, Willy Wonka, the “white messiah” for the Oompa-Loompas and little Charlie Bucket, the book’s main character, duplicated the Tarzan role of the “Great White Father” who went to Africa to rescue a primitive pygmy tribe, the mythical Oompa-Loompas. As Baxter observed, by labeling the invented people as dark-skinned Africans, Dahl “seems to have gone out of his way to preserve the myth of Black inferiority and dependence.”[21]

From October 1972 to October 1973, Eleanor Cameron, the Canadian-born children’s book author and critic condemned Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In a three-part series of essays in the Horn Book Magazine (reprinted in a 1977 collection) she and Dahl became embroiled in personal attacks over his book. Cameron had launched a curious and unfocused assault, comparing Dahl and his book to Marshall McLuhan, the great media theorist, and seeing both as threats to good teaching and appropriate learning. She even accused teachers who taught Dahl’s work of being too ignorant to know a good book when they saw one. Only in her reply to Dahl’s understandably angry reaction, do we get some hint as to what Cameron really objected to: “its phony humor, which is based on punishment with overtones of sadism.” While she acknowledged that the Oompa-Loompas had been taken from Africa and were used for Wonka’s purposes for “enforced servitude,” she did not condemn the Wonka figure as a slavemaster, but rather as a TV showman. Her criticism may have vexed the easily annoyed Dahl, but it had little public impact. White supremacist desires remained so entrenched that one respondent in The Elementary School Journal completely ignored the book’s obvious racism and instead accused Cameron (and similar critics) of advocating censorship. Equally importantly, by the time the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory aired in 1971, producers had clearly perceived a problem in depicting black pygmy slaves under the thumb of an idiosyncratic white man. They instead turned the Oompa-Loompas into green-haired, orange dwarfs. Then the NAACP protested how the book depicted people of African descent, so when Knopf republished it in 1973, the Oompa-Loompas were “denegrified” into white dwarf hippies, and the offensive Sambo-like images drawn by Joseph Schindelman disappeared. But the stamp of white supremacy remained. The replacements simply became white “slaves,” originating from a jungle with the “most dangerous beasts in the entire world.” It left, as Ron Novy recently wrote, “colonial ideology intact.”[22]

Dahl’s book did not exist in a vacuum. Far worse white supremacist views appeared in school history and geography textbooks, in pamphlets and newspapers. These were buttressed by the publications of academic exponents of eugenics, especially the Harvard Ph.D. Lothrop Stoddard and Yale’s Madison Grant, who represented a movement with intensely racist and anti-immigrant ideologies that proved immensely popular in the United States prior to World War II. Nonetheless, there should be no misunderstanding. Dahl’s work helped perpetuate supremacist ideology and with ingenious imagination depicted Africans as an ignorant, savage people, best suited for enslavement, whose lives were most improved by subordination to white people as slaves. Astonishingly, the 2005 film remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory returned to the original 1964 text for inspiration. Director Tim Burton declared that Dahl’s “politically incorrect” views attracted him to the project, and Gurdeep “Deep” Roy, an Anglo-Indian actor became the dark-skinned stand-in for the Oompa-Loompas. That so many commentators missed or refused to comment on the book’s depictions of dark-skinned people is testament to the enthralling power of Dahl’s language and imagery. But it is one that played as much to the subconscious as to the unconcealed. It is also evidence to affirm James Baldwin’s observation that “white people, with scarcely any pangs of conscience whatever,” are determined “to create, in every generation, only the Negro they [wish]  to see.”[23]

I want to express my gratitude to Benjamin Irvin and his colleagues at Process for their skillful editorial work. I was fortunate to benefit from the blog’s very talented staff. I also want to express my thanks to professors Michael Birkner, Frank Bremer, Dennis Downey,  Roy Finkenbine, Carla Martin, Mark Schneider, and James Brewer Stewart. I also owe thanks to Dell Hamilton, David Harris, Rob Heinrich, Shirley Sun, and my wife Mary E. Yacovone.

Donald Yacovone, an Associate at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, is a recipient of the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal, the highest honor awarded by Harvard in the field of African and African American studies. Wendell Phillips, Social Justice, and the Power of the Past (2016) is his eighth book and he is currently engaged in two projects: the battle over white supremacy in American history textbooks, and a study of the legacy of the antislavery movement.

For more Process essays on education and race, see this piece on schools and vandalism, this piece on Reconstruction politics and HBCUs, and more.

[18] Sturrock, Storyteller, 110–11; Ron Novy, “Willy Wonka and the Imperial Chocolate Factory,” in Jacob M. Held, ed., Roald Dahl and Philosophy: A Little Nonsense Now and Then (Lanham, 2014), 137–40; Paul Heins, ed., Crosscurrents of Criticism: Horn Book Essays, 1968–1977 (Boston, 1977), 97–125; Treglown, Roald Dahl, 140–45, 219.

[19] Silke Hackenesch, Chocolate and Blackness: A Cultural History (New York, 2017), 30–35, 37–41. For the history of chocolate see, Catherine Higgs, Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa (Athens, 2012); Louis Evan Grivetti and Howard-Yana Shapiro, eds., Chocolate, History, Culture, and Heritage (Hoboken, 2008); William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765–1914 (London, 2000). Treglown, Roald Dahl, 20; Shultz, “Finding Fate’s Father,” 263–64. On the current state of the chocolate producing business see, Jill Lane, “Becoming Chocolate, A Tale of Racial Translation,” Theatre Journal, 59 (Oct. 2007), 382–88; Órla Ryan, Chocolate Nations: Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa (London, 2011), 44, 48–51; Carol Off, Bitter Chocolate: The Dark Side of the World’s Most Seductive Sweet (New York, 2008); John Robbins, “Is There Child Slavery in Your Chocolate?” The Food Revolution Network, https://foodrevolution.org/blog/child-slavery-chocolate; Catherine Keyser, “The Sweet Tooth of Slavery: Django Unchained and Kara Walker’s A Subtlety,” Transition 115 (2014), 143.

[20] James F. Wilson, Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (Ann Arbor, 2010), 112–53; Emma Robertson, Chocolate, Women, and Empire: A Social and Cultural History (New York, 2009), 35–40; Hackenesch, Chocolate and Blackness, 128–29.

[21] Lois R. Bouchard, “A New Look at Old Favorites: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” in The Black American in Books for Children: Readings in Racism, ed. Donnarae MacCann and Gloria Woodard (Metuchen, 1972), 112–15; Katherine B. Baxter, “Combating the Influence of Black Stereotypes in Children’s Books,” The Reading Teacher, 27 (March 1974), 540–44; Novy, “Willy Wonka and the Imperial Chocolate Factory,” 137–48.

[22] Eleanor Cameron, “McLuhan, Youth, and Literature,” in Crosscurrents of Criticism: Horn Book Essays, 1968–1977, ed. Paul Heins (Boston, 1977), 98–120; Mary Lou White, “Censorship-Threat Over Children’s Books,” The Elementary School Journal, 75 (Oct. 1974), 2–10; Novy, “Willy Wonka and the Imperial Chocolate Factory,” 137–40; Treglown, Roald Dahl, 188.

[23] Dennis B. Downey, “‘Detect early; Protect always:’ Philadelphia Physicians and the Gospel of Eugenics,” Legacies, 17 (Fall 2017), 12–19; Donald Yacovone, “Textbook Racism: How Scholars Sustained White Supremacy,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 8, 2018, section B, 14-16; Novy, “Willy Wonka and the Imperial Chocolate Factory,” 144–45; James Baldwin, “A Fly in the Buttermilk, in Nobody Knows My Name,” Collected Essays, 195.