By Johnny Coomansingh
This article describes some of the horrors I experienced in the production of cocoa beans on my godmother’s cocoa estate. I was just around ten years old, but fair game to be used, abused, and somewhat confused by people I loved and trusted. In this story, I functioned as a minion, a cog in the wheel of a multinational cocoa production syndicate. The drive to produce more and more export-quality cocoa beans in Trinidad and Tobago became an obsession. There was much money to be made. Child slave labour was imperceptibly woven into the system, and it seemed that many producers thought that this form of labour was acceptable. My comments also speak to the dread of international child slave labour, especially in the production of cocoa.
December comes around, and so are the harvests of the cocoa and coffee crops. The cocoa harvesting activity was my nemesis. Harvesting cocoa, especially the breaking or cracking of the pods, meant pain, disgust, and utter discomfort for me. What was I to do? How could I escape? I found myself in the clutches of my godmother’s drive to make money, to rake up every bean, to avariciously catch every penny. Early on Sunday morning, she would rise to cook a meal of rice, dhal, and curried chicken. To prevent spillage, the enamel pots of rice, dhal, and chicken were tied up firmly with cotton cloths and packed in a cocoa basket. Watercress, cucumbers, and sliced tomatoes accompanied the meal.
After making a karat (a circular cushion constructed from dried banana leaves), Boon, her nephew, placed the pad on his head to receive the cocoa basket with the food. Down the muddy, slippery path he nervously trod with the precious victuals needed for lunch on top of his head. As he walked, he was ever reminded by Zagabeau, one of the workers, to be careful. Zagabeau repeated, “Take care boi, doh fall dey nah…yuh have to take care with di dhal boi. Watch di dhal boi.” Zagabeau loved her yellow split peas dhal and drank himself a cupful at lunchtime. By all standards, it was certainly the best dhal ever; boiled, seasoned, and chunkayed to perfection. A kalchool (metal ladle) containing hot, garlic-infused vegetable oil is used to chunkay dhal. The kalchool is normally immersed in the pot of dhal with the emittance of a sizzling noise.
As the company made their way to the biggest heap of cocoa pods that anyone could have seen; I did not feel any desire to be part of such a group. My repulsion of the humongous task ahead grew exponentially. Internally I resented the cracking of cocoa, not to mention the pain in my fingers that followed. The two or three days needed to complete the cocoa-cracking process were like a lifetime of torture for me. The questions in my mind remained; no answers given.
Several heavy bags of wet cocoa would soon grace the roadside next to the pile of green bananas stacked for sale to the Marketing Board. The toting of cocoa was Boon’s job. Although tired and grumpy, late in the evenings, after plying his taxi for hire, her husband would pick up the bags of wet cocoa for delivery to her compie’s (friend) sweat box (fermentation box). My godmother had a small drying house, but it was not large enough for the huge quantity of cocoa and coffee beans she harvested. In fact, she used her drying house for the coffee beans she harvested a couple of weeks before. Also, she did not have a fermentation box.
Seven or eight days later, the fermented cocoa beans would be moved upstairs into her friend’s drying house. Fermented cocoa is hot and steamy, but this process is extremely important to bring about a better-tasting chocolate. Before getting into the activities for the day, she cautioned me to take an early bath because she did not want me to catch a cold if I had to bathe after cleaning the hot sweaty cocoa. After the bath, she told me to rub my hands and feet with coconut oil to prevent the cocoa slime from sticking to my ankles.
Literally working like a mule, Boon hauled the sweating cocoa, basket after basket, up a flight of stairs, maybe 20 feet high. Leaving enough space to walk around, Boon dumped the cocoa in heaps all over the cedar wood drying floor. Every heap of the hot cocoa contained large balls of cocoa called bull. Double beans, beans that stuck together, were also present in the heaps. The bulls and double beans had to be broken into single beans. In essence, during the drying process, all beans had to be single beans, provided the proprietor prefers fetching a better price.
In the blazing Sun, along with her, I sat on a peerha (small wooden one-seater bench), and faced heap after heap of steamy hot cocoa beans. My job was to separate the beans and remove trash from the fermented hot cocoa. The constant heat of the cocoa hitting my face was very unpleasant; the smell, “unkind.” Cleaning out the hot cocoa was just as unpleasant as cracking and cleaning out the pods, not to mention the pesky mosquitoes in the hot and humid cocoa field. Apparently, in the cocoa business, this was the repulsive type of work prescribed for little children.
After cleaning out all the heaps of steaming cocoa, the beans would be spread on the drying floor. The roof of the drying house would be pushed back to accommodate the raging sunshine every day. Because of the tropical rainforest weather conditions that exist in Trinidad, drying cocoa requires acute vigilance; don’t ever fall off to sleep. Rain could fall at the drop of a hat, and the extra water will not only spoil the beans, but all the rooms and their contents below the drying floor could get soaked.
Drying the beans took much time, and my godmother would be up at the drying house at the crack of dawn. Some days were hot and dry, and the heat of the day contributed to a modicum of laziness that I experienced on quite a few occasions during the cocoa drying activities. There was almost nothing to do but listen to the songbirds.
In the almost still environment, I heard the “blee-blee, blee-blee” call of the cravat (Euphonia violacea) perched way up high on the leafless branches of the rubber trees that flanked the hilly southern side of her friend’s cocoa plantation. The dry rubber trees were ring-barked and were just standing there, falling off piece by piece. Combined with the pleasant tones of the birds, I also heard the cackle of sandbox and rubber seed capsules in the distance as they exploded in the hot, blazing sun. I wondered about how to cage one of these songbirds.
If I couldn’t cage a bird or go catch some fish in a cocoa canal, there wasn’t much for a little boy to do when cocoa was drying except to turn the beans upstairs on the drying floor. My designated task was to walk through the beans to turn them as they dried. When the beans became drier, I used a rabo, a flat piece of cedar wood affixed to a thin, strong ‘Ceylon’ bamboo pole, to turn the beans. Basically, the rabo is a rake without tines.
Walking through the beans amounted to a sort of shuffling action with the feet without crushing even one bean. As I shuffled the beans, slimy clumps of cocoa refuse would cling to my feet and ankles. I disliked this aspect of cocoa drying. In fact, I disliked every phase involved in the production of cocoa. After the beans are crisply sun-dried, the dancing of the cocoa (polishing of the beans) was the final stage of cocoa bean production before bagging in the ‘Blue Seam’ crocus bags. At the cocoa store, the buyer would slap the bag to hear the rattle of the beans. A good rattle is the sign for a good bag of cocoa beans; money in the bank.
Resentment for my ‘enslavement’ grew rapidly and uncontrollably as I contemplated how to break free from the shackles of the rounds of toil that comprised cocoa production. A few lines of my poem titled Cocoa Slave published in Musings in a Tea Shop (2023) give a good idea about my feelings:
It is the food of the gods they say; chocolate is good, yesterday and today
But when the sweetness they savor; when they cry, “O what a flavor!”
Those with a craving, a sweet tooth; never entertain the brute
That keeps in eternal bondage; the little children…underage
That toil in the cocoa fields; to give the cocoa man greater yields
They struggle with bags; too heavy to carry…to drag!
For their weak little bodies; are forced in modern slavery
With no hope, no promise…such sorrow; for a brighter tomorrow
All they see is a heap of cocoa, to crack open pods
And rip out the slimy beans with painful fingers
They fight to live, while the cocoa man
Cares not about childish dreams; all he thinks about are beans it seems
In the crocus bag with the “blue seam”
How full it is when cocoa is sold; to a market wicked and bold
That drinks the blood of children; from a money-spinning cauldron
Arrogant and insane; they quibble over their cocoa gains
O, those children under the trees? We cannot see them, why worry?
They will never taste the Cadbury.
Knowing that I was working for just a plate of food and that not one penny would be shared with me, I asked myself whether this was the type of work that I wanted to be saddled with for the rest of my life. The answer came back crystal clear. No! At that stage in my life, my godmother had no clue about the musings in my mind. I was beginning to view the world differently.
My labour, however insignificant, was there only to funnel money into her bank account. My existence on her cocoa plantation was a dance in futility; the dance of a mere cocoa slave engaged in menial labour. My payment was food; working for nothing more than just a morsel to satiate my hunger! I accepted the fact that I was a cocoa slave, but not at all poor. It was my godmother who was poor. As Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Roman philosopher, said: “It is not the man who has little, but he who desires more, that is poor” (Adapted from my book titled: Cocoa Woman (2017).
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