For Oompa-Loompas, Orange Was The New Black
Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, 1971. Credit: Allstar/Warner Bros.
(This research piece was originally published in Gastronomica)
Abstract: For some, Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a story made of pure imagination. For others, it's 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 like “Too subtle for the common palate” (Dahl 1984, 148). Tasting the chocolates, Dahl would imagine working in their chocolate labs, inventing an irresistible new chocolate bar and the accolades that would follow.
Although it wasn’t 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 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. Near the same time he was attending Repton, Cadbury and Rowntree were England’s two leading chocolate companies and the competition between the two made them highly secretive about their confections. Apparently, a chocolate mole isn’t just a Mexican sauce; the world of chocolate production was filled with espionage--rivaling companies would send moles posing as employees to spy in each other’s 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 larger than chocolate espionage; both companies had been accused of sourcing cocoa1 made by slave labor to make their confectionaries. William Cadbury got the first inkling this may be occurring in 1901. He received a catalog from a cocoa estate on the Portuguese island of São Tomé and amongst the items listed for sale were ‘200 black labourers’ valued at £3,555 (Higgs 2012, 9).
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