Description:This photograph album was produced as a limited run of 50 copies by Cadbury and supported William Cadbury’s 1909 publication Labour in Portuguese West Africa. The album and book documented William Cadbury and Joseph Burtt’s visit to Angola and San Thomé in 1908 to investigate the employment conditions of labourers working on cocoa plantations on the island of San Thomé. Their journey was intended to reflect the journeys made by many male and female ‘contracted labourers’.
The photographs are grouped together under simple headings (for example, ‘SS. Ambaca, January 1909’) and are afforded no further commentary.<small><sup>1</sup></small> The album pages illustrated here depict labourers or ‘serviçaes’ on SS. Malange in December 1908, as well as plantation estates in San Thomé.<small><sup>2</sup></small> William Cadbury wrote that he saw three shipments of labourers leave the port of Novo Redondo in 1908, describing the passengers as ‘composed of healthy people, who were under thirty years of age, the majority much younger’. He goes on to say that, although these men appeared to be physically ‘healthy’, ‘the general attitude [of the labourers] is one of sullen resignation or sleepy indifference’.<small><sup>3</sup></small> A second group of images depicted the children of labourers on San Thomé. William Cadbury wrote that the ‘children on all the estates are well treated and seem to have a happy existence in the crèche under the care of one or more black nurses’. Cadbury informs us that children began to work for the estate at the age of ten and by the age of fourteen they could contract themselves as labourers, although their wages went to their parents on the island up until the age of twenty-one.
<font color="#666633"><small><sup>1</sup> Photograph album: Views taken by William A. Cadbury and Joseph Burtt during a visit to St Thome and Angola, Portuguese West Africa in the winter of 1908-9 (also 14 prints from negatives by local photographers), 1909 [UBSC: Cadbury Papers/242]
<sup>2</sup> William A. Cadbury, Labour in Portuguese West Africa (London, 1909), p.90
<sup>3</sup> Cadbury, p.91</font></small>