For Oompa-Loompas, Orange Was the New Black

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1 RESEARCH BRIEF Layla Eplett For Oompa-Loompas, Orange Was the New Black 12 Abstract: For some, Roald Dahl s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a story made of pure imagination. For others, it is emblematic of colonial ideology since the Oompa-Loompas were originally depicted as African pygmies. This article explores the inspiration, interpretation, and revisions of the classic story and looks at its appropriateness within children s literature. EVERLASTING GOBSTOPPERS, SCARLET SCORCHDROPPERS, and Glumptious Globgobblers were not the only things sugarcoated in Roald Dahl s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There may have been more beneath the sweet exterior of this classic children s book. In the original version, the Oompa-Loompas were African pygmies and their depiction has been critiqued for perpetuating British imperial ideologies. Although Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was officially published in 1964, the inspiration for the story began much earlier. During the 1930s, a homesick Roald Dahl attended Repton, a prestigious public boarding school in Derby, England. He and his schoolmates would occasionally receive packages from Cadbury. The dull, gray cardboard boxes were anything but fancy, but for Dahl, their contents were made of pure imagination. Each box contained twelve chocolates (eleven new varieties and one control) that the chocolate factory sent for the school s students to evaluate. It was a task Dahl took seriously; he fancied himself to be quite the chocolate connoisseur, leaving marks accompanied by comments such as Too subtle for the common palate (Dahl 1984: 148). Tasting the chocolates, Dahl would imagine working in Cadbury s chocolate labs, inventing an irresistible new chocolate bar and reveling in the accolades to follow. Although it was not exactly a Golden Ticket, when he later wrote his memoir, Boy, Dahl recalled how these events inspired him. It was lovely dreaming those dreams, and I have no doubt that, thirty five years later, when I was looking for a plot for my second book for children, I remembered those little cardboard boxes and the newly-invented chocolates inside Keywords: Roald Dahl, chocolate, children s literature, colonialism, Oompa-Loompas them, and I began to write a book called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1984: 149). The influence Cadbury had on Dahl did not end there. Around the time he was attending Repton, Cadbury and Rowntree were England s leading chocolate companies, and the competition between the two made them highly secretive about their confections. Apparently, a chocolate mole is not just a Mexican sauce rival companies would send moles posing as employees to spy in each other s chocolate factories. Dahl himself knew a thing or two about spying; he was a spy during World War II and also a screenwriter for the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. It has been said that Willy Wonka and competing chocolatiers Arthur Slugworth, Mr. Fickelgruber, and Mr. Prodnose were inspired by the dynamic between Cadbury and Rowntree. Before they were spying on each other, Cadbury and Rowntree had another problem in common that was much bigger than chocolate espionage; both companies had been accused of sourcing cocoa made by slave labor for their confectionaries. 1 William Cadbury got the first inkling this may be occurring in He received a catalog from a cocoa estate on the Portuguese island of São Tomé and among the items listed for sale were 200 black labourers valued at 3,555 (Higgs 2012: 9). Over half of the company s cocoa came from São Tomé and its neighboring island, Príncipe. The potential sourcing of cocoa made by slave labor was especially disconcerting for the Cadburys since they were Quakers active in antislavery campaigns. If it was proven true, the conditions on the islands would be in stark contrast to Bournville, the village built by the Cadburys in Birmingham to house its British workers that was often praised for its conditions. : THE JOURNAL OF CRITICAL FOOD STUDIES, VOL. 16, NUMBER 2, PP , ISSN , ELECTRONIC ISSN BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PLEASE DIRECT ALL REQUESTS FOR PERMISSION TO PHOTOCOPY OR REPRODUCE ARTICLE CONTENT THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS S REPRINTS AND PERMISSIONS WEB PAGE, DOI: /GFC

2 FIGURE 1: Cadbury was amongst the first companies to be confronted with the ethical issues of cocoa sourcing, an issue that continues to pervade modern chocolate production. CADBURY S COCOA ADVERTISEMENT (1885) IS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. Slave trade was formally abolished in the British empire with the Slave Trade Act of Portugal followed, eventually, in 1870; however, unethical practices still persisted with new names and in other forms. Contract labor remained permissible in its colonies and, with this stipulation, workers known as serviçais could sign agreements in which they were contractually bound to work for five years at a fixed wage. By 1900, nearly four thousand serviçais were sent to São Tomé and Príncipe annually to work on cocoa plantations. For William Cadbury, it was critical to know whether the serviçais had the ability to leave the islands once their contracts were complete. Fellow Quakers and cocoa manufacturers from Rowntree and Fry s joined together in supporting the Cadbury Brothers decision to investigate labor conditions on the islands cocoa plantations. Cadbury entrusted the task to Joseph Burtt, a longtime acquaintance and Quaker who also shared an opposition to slavery. Burtt arrived on the islands in Although he learned Portuguese prior to his departure, he did not speak any of the indigenous African languages, making him unable to communicate directly with the serviçais. Grasping the situation on the cocoa plantations was made even more difficult because the Portuguese gave him a special curated tour throughout his investigation, presenting conditions in a way that was para o Inglês ver (just for the English to see). Despite the obstacles, Burtt found evidence that supported Cadbury s suspicion. A lyric sung by the contract laborers best summarized their conditions, In São Tomé there s a door for going in, but none for coming out (Higgs 2012: 12). Burtt reported back to Cadbury that the serviçais were essentially slaves. Cadbury shared the information with Fry s and Rowntree, and in 1909, the companies announced they would boycott cocoa from São Tomé and Príncipe. Cadbury was criticized for initially delaying their decision to boycott (Satre 2005). The firm had been reluctant to employ this approach upon learning of the conditions, believing it would be more effective to lobby the British government to pressure the Portuguese, and that a continuation of the relationship with the plantation owners would lead to repatriation for the workers once their contract was complete. Cadbury s initial opposition to boycotting was essentially based on the argument that their economic engagement was a way to wield influence. They believed breaking off relations would not only minimize their potential impact it was likely there would be other buyers, for whom ethics were not an issue. Following their eventual boycott, Cadbury began sourcing the company s cocoa from the Gold Coast. The new competition, as well as other factors, contributed to the improvement of conditions in São Tomé and Príncipe but it still took over another decade for slavery to end on the islands. The efficacy of boycotting continues to be debated in the chocolate industry, as slavery, child labor, and other ethical issues persist in cocoa sourcing. Both Willy Wonka and William Cadbury were secretive chocolatiers concerned with spies, but there was one similarity Dahl had not planned when writing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Wonka and Cadbury have both been accused of using slave labor. When the book was published in 1964, the original Oompa-Loompas were depicted as African pygmies. Much like the serviçais of São Tomé and Príncipe, they were locked inside Wonka s factory to produce chocolates with no chance of ever leaving. Clare Bradford (2001: 201) writes, In its promotion of colonialism, its homogenization of the colonized, and its 13

3 14 FIGURE 2: The lived realities of chocolate laborers in São Tomé, the source of Cadbury s cocoa, was a striking contrast to the experience of their employees in the idyllic village of Bournville, where the company s chocolate was manufactured. IMAGE FROM ARTHUR WILLIAM KNAPP, PUBLIC DOMAIN, COCOA AND CHOCOLATE - THEIR HISTORY FROM PLANTATION TO CONSUMER (1920). LONDON: CHAPMAN. strategies of Othering, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory harks back to texts of the nineteenth century. From this perspective, the book is no longer a children s fantasy. Instead, it is a tale of Willy Wonka, a business owner who bears the white man s burden. 2 Wonka explains how he brought three thousand Oompa-Loompas back to work in his factory. He found them in the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before (Dahl 1964: 73). They were practically starving to death (74), subsisting off caterpillars, which they despised, and longing for chocolate. Wonka explained, You only had to mention the word cacao to an Oompa-Loompa and they would start dribbling at the mouth (75). He took it upon himself to save them. Wonka negotiated with their tribal leader to bring all three thousand of the Oompa-Loompas back to work for him and compensate them solely with chocolate. To bring them back to the factory, he smuggled them over in large packing cases with holes (76). At the end of the book, the burden is passed to his white successor, Charlie, who is tasked with looking after the Oompa-Loompas when Wonka is gone. As he says, who is going to run the factory when I get too old to do it myself? Someone s got to keep it going if only for the sake of the Oompa-Loompas (157). Instead of simply people from another country, the Oompa-Loompas are perceived more as foreign objects than foreigners. When Charlie first sees them, he cannot believe they are real, declaring, I think Mr. Wonka has made them himself out of chocolate! (72). Veruca Salt commands her father to get her one, screaming, I want to take one home with me! Go on, Daddy! Get me an Oompa-Loompa! Isolated from the outside world, they maintain their foreignness in the factory. They still wear the same kind of clothes they wore in the jungle. They insist upon that. The men, as you can see for yourselves across the river, wear only deerskins. The women wear leaves, and the children wear nothing at all (76). The Oompa-Loompas as pygmies received little attention until it was announced that the book would be made into a film in 1971 in the United States. The announcement came on the heels of the civil rights movement, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) saw the story as reinforcing stereotypes about slavery and threatened to protest the movie. In response, Dahl was shocked and sullen. He found the NAACP to be unreasonable, telling Knopf editor Bob Bernstein he was unable to understand why they perceived his story as a terribly dastardly anti-negro book, and described their attitude as real Nazi stuff (Dahl

4 enforced servitude, and the fact that their situation is all a part of the fun and games. FIGURE 3: Author Roald Dahl is often known for his inclusion of dark elements in his children s stories, although the macabre imagery of slavery conjured up by the Oompa-Loompas in the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was said to be inadvertent. PHOTOGRAPH BY CARL VAN VECHTEN, 1954, PUBLIC DOMAIN, PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION, VAN VECHTEN COLLECTION, REPRODUCTION NUMBER LOT 12735, NO ). To Alfred Knopf, he lamented, The book is banned by the NAACP. They thought I was writing a subtle anti-negro manual. But such a thing had never crossed my mind (1970). Ultimately, the Oompa-Loompas were changed to the tiny Tang-tinted people with green hair and white eyebrows most remember from childhood. The following year, literary critic and children s fiction author Eleanor Cameron offered her own thoughts on the book. Writing in Horn Book Magazine (1972), she described Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to be one of the most tasteless books ever written for children. Cameron (1973) objected to the book for many reasons, including the depiction of the Oompa-Loompas: And I can only say that I find a certain point of view (or is it the lack of a point of view?) felt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Knopf) to be extremely regrettable when it comes to Willy Wonka s unfeeling attitude toward the Oompa-Loompas, their role as conveniences and devices to be used for Wonka s purposes, their being brought over from Africa for This certainly is not the first time an objection has been raised over racial content in a children s story. Named for Thomas Bowdler, an English physician who published a revised version of The Family Shakespeare that altered portions of the text he considered offensive, bowdlerizing refers to expurgating written texts by revising or removing passages or phrases deemed to be objectionable. Several children s books have been bowdlerized for their content Hugh Lofting s Doctor Dolittle was revised, minimizing its colonial ideologies, but the most notable example of bowdlerized children s literature may be The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. In some versions, slave replaces the n-word, which was used over two hundred times throughout the book. In the case of Cameron s criticism of the depiction of Oompa-Loompas, she and Dahl continued a series of exchanges over the next year in the magazine. Following their verbal sparring, Dahl revised Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When it was republished in 1974, all references to pygmies and Africa had been removed. In the newly bowdlerized version, the Oompa-Loompas were long-haired, rosy-cheeked white hippies from the island of Loompaland. The original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is just one of many children s books perceived to be embedded in colonial ideology. Hergé s comic, Tintin in the Congo, has also been criticized for offensive racial stereotypes. The second in the comic s series, it was published when Congo was under Belgian colonial rule. The Congolese encountered by the globetrotting Tintin are depicted as monkey-like and in a manner that perpetuates negative stereotypes of the time. Hergé revised it in later years and partially acknowledged that colonial ideology had influenced the original version. Eating Cadbury chocolates at Repton, the rivalry among chocolatiers those were conscious influences in Dahl s storytelling. Although he never attributed the Oompa-Loompas characteristics to his time there, Dahl spent several years in Africa following his graduation from Repton. Later in life, he admitted that he felt slightly ashamed of accepting British imperialism in Africa during his youth. 3 Deji Olukotun is a novelist, lawyer, and Ford Foundation Freedom to Write Fellow at PEN American Center who has written on issues surrounding censorship in children s literature 4 as well as art, racism, and freedom of expression. 5 He notes how the imperial zeitgeist could shape a person s perceptions without their awareness: What never ceases to amaze me is how writers like Hergé and Dahl were these incredible founts of imaginative energy. But the stereotypes and racism were so imbued in their outlook that even they did not realize that 15

5 16 FIGURE 4: The Oompa-Loompas were adapted for film, depicted as the iconic orange characters most remember from childhood. PHOTO FROM ALAMY LTD. blowing up a rhinoceros or importing a group of pygmies was a failure of the imagination. Dahl explained it himself: such a thing had never crossed my mind. You can also understand how such things would happen. At the time both writers were creating their stories, the unknown cultures of the world were being rapidly identified by the Western world. The authors needed characters who were so different, and so other, that the reader could enjoy them as alien cultures. (2014) As with Tintin in the Congo, there have been efforts to ban Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Olukotun does not think the original version should be banned but notes that is not the same thing as saying that I think everyone should read it. He points to writer and graphic novelist Eugene Luen Yang, who Olukotun believes has convincingly argued that young readers, even children, have different levels of development and understanding, and some are ready to read books with themes of sex or violence, while other readers are not. According to Olukotun: The same goes for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I think any teacher or reader should think very carefully about sharing the original version of the book will the children merely believe the stereotypes about the pygmies, or will they reject them as a portrayal of indentured servitude? You could start with a simple, but provocative question: how healthy is it, really, for someone to subsist on chocolate alone? Why would anyone want that? (2014; emphasis added). Debating its appropriateness for children, the argument could be made that the revised version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory still may be unsuitable for children that the book s whitewashing, or in the case of the movie, orangewashing, embedded colonial ideology deeper into the discourse. From this viewpoint, the book presents a more subtle form of colonial beliefs since the revised Oompa- Loompas are still from a tribe in a foreign land who are shipped over to work in a factory. Olukotun offers a different perspective. Reading Tintin in the Congo, he was appalled by the stereotypes, but beyond that, he disliked the story. In contrast to Tintin in the Congo, he thinks the revised Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has valuable themes for children s literature: For me, the orangewashing of Roald Dahl s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is less repulsive. The reason is that the story itself is timeless and mythical and still promises to be entertaining even if you change the ethnic makeup of the Oompa-Loompas. Because the story is as much about courage and honesty as it is an indictment of industrialism. I personally love the mythical themes of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and its subtle exploration of capitalism and redemption. And I was entranced as a child by the flowing chocolate rivers and Gene Wilder s brilliant, but terrifying performance. That film moves people for different reasons. Above all, it s good storytelling. It s up to the audience to decide whether to delve deeper or not. (2014)

6 NOTES 1. Theobroma cacao is a tree that produces cacao beans. These beans are processed to create cocoa, and then further processed to make chocolate. 2. For more on the dynamic between Willy Wonka and the Oompa- Loompas and its imperial overtones, see Ron Novy, Willy Wonka and the Imperial Chocolate Factory, in Roald Dahl and Philosophy: A Little Nonsense Now and Then (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), For more on imperialism in children s literature, see Bob Dixon, Catching Them Young: Political Ideas in Children s Fiction, vol. 2 (London: Pluto Press, 1977). 4. Deji Olukotun, The Banning of Harry Potter, Huffington Post, September 7, 2012, (accessed 07/30/2015). 5. Deji Bryce Olukotun, The Spear of the N-word, Artsfreedom, January 21, 2015, (accessed 07/30/2015). REFERENCES Bradford, Clare The End of Empire? Colonial and Postcolonial Journeys in Children s Books. Children s Literature 29(12): Cameron, Eleanor McLuhan, Youth, and Literature: Part 1. Horn Book, October. Accessed November 22, hbook.com/magazine/articles/1970s/oct72_cameron.asp A Reply to Roald Dahl. Horn Book, April. Accessed November 22, s/apr73_cameron.asp. Dahl, Roald Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. New York: Knopf Letter to Bob Bernstein, October 1. Roald Dahl Museum and Story Center Letter to Alfred Knopf, July 25. Harry Ransom Center for Humanities, The University of Texas at Austin Boy: Tales of Childhood. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Higgs, Catherine Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press. Olukotun, Deji message to author, October 19. Satre, Lowell J. Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics, and the Ethics of Business. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press,