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

Few people of any age today are unaware of the books of Roald Dahl. His adult works, but especially his children’s books, still maintain their grip on readers of all ages. Few disagree that his writing “is perfectly vivid, wildly alive . . . difficult, strange, enchanting, yes—and bloody tremendous, terrific, fantastic too.” One fan even confessed recently that anyone who was a child or had been a parent in the last fifty years “has at some point loved Roald Dahl, or perhaps hated him. His books, and now the films of his books, have punctuated Anglophone childhood, and their characters, vocabularies and ditties have slipped into our common parlance.” Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has become ubiquitous thanks to two popular films, endless websites, 374 print editions of the book with various editors, prefaces, and illustrators, 119 e-books, 118 video versions of the films in all formats, and even seventeen versions of it in Braille. A simple Google search for it produced over 20 million results. In the first year, the book’s sales proved modest, about 5,000 copies, but in four years it sold 607,240 copies and remained at about 100,000 per year for over twenty years, amounting to several million copies. In the next ten years, editions came out in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Japan, and Israel. As one commentator remarked, it became “one of the most enduring post-war children’s books.” Dahl’s book received endorsements from a generation of educators, many of whom recommended that it be read or played out in classrooms, across the country and around the world. In New Jersey, teachers read the book to students in grades two through four, who in turn wrote poems about chocolate with the winner receiving a “Wonka Chocolate Bar.” On the American West Coast, his book was read on the radio and Dahl even recorded an LP album of it for children to hear him read the book in their homes. There is, of course, an official Dahl website, which urges the teaching of his books and offers lesson plans for teacher use. Dahl’s influence and his book’s reach is nothing short of profound. And that is the problem.[5]

Born of Norwegian parents in Wales, Dahl, a World War II fighter pilot, and British intelligence officer, has become a part of the lives of millions of children around the world, especially through two of his works, James and the Giant Peach (1961) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But in 1938, he began his adult career working for the Asiatic Petroleum Company, soon to become a part of Royal Dutch Shell, in the former German East Africa, then known as Tanganyika. He lived happily with many favored pets and servants in Dar es Salaam, where he helped operate a coastal oil terminal. The experience with imperial life in the former German colony suited Dahl and he thoroughly enjoyed his time in the British-administered, League of Nations colony before the world came crashing down (literally in Dahl’s case) with the onset of the war and his brief and painful experience in the RAF in North Africa, Greece, and Iraq. There are endless ironies in Dahl’s life. An author who lived simply, but loved wealth and glamor, he could be painfully egotistical, cruel, and impatient, yet also kind and immensely generous. He came of age in Africa, lived part-time in New York City and Los Angeles, and married the American actress Patricia Neal, nursing her through a devastating illness and then divorcing her after thirty years of marriage. He loved and was devoted to his large family, and his mistress. He refused to permanently leave the England he worshipped but largely withdrew from English society. He endured numerous heartbreaking family tragedies and found first success writing dark adult fiction, which one reviewer labeled as “clever, often savage . . . [and]  utterly heartless,” but he gained international renown for children’s fantasy. A Norwegian Englishman, Dahl became one of America’s best-selling children’s book authors—and an agent of white supremacy.[6]

Often quoted, a Dahl family friend once remarked, “Almost anything you could say about him would be true. It depended on which side he decided to show you.” His fame, talent, and generosity, especially to his family, should not divert us from acknowledging his ingrained racism, a common quality within the British Empire. While in prep school, for instance, and once dreaming about the gold and adventurous life that might be awaiting him in Africa, he remarked, “Sometimes there is a great advantage in traveling to hot countries where niggers dwell.” While some surviving family members understandably cannot tolerate criticism of Dahl’s character, likely they never experienced, or chose to overlook, his racism and his anti-Semitism. In his later years, he attracted much unwanted attention by his public complaints about Jews and his very public stand against Israel after its invasion of Lebanon in 1983. Inexcusably, he denounced Jews as cowards who submitted to the Holocaust and failed to fight against Hitler, despite the 60,000 Jews who had served Great Britain in the war. As the national director of B’nai B’rith pointed out in 1990, Dahl also publically charged that the “United States Government was ‘utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions.’” Even worse, in an infamous 1983 issue of the New Statesman, Dahl unforgivably croaked that there must be some innate Jewish trait that provokes “animosity . . . even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”[7]

Undeniably, he had a complex, sometimes venomous, patriarchal, and tempestuous character. His wife, Patricia Neal, called him “Roald the Rotten,” and even before they married told him that he was “rude, arrogant and nasty.” When feeling secure, however, Dahl could respond quite charitably to individuals of various ethnic groups that he otherwise thought inferior or in some way deeply flawed. The first recorded instance of him meeting a person of African descent came in 1934 aboard a steamer to Newfoundland where he met a crewmember from British Guiana named Sam, whom he called a “marvelous fellow.” His biographers agree that Dahl thoroughly enjoyed the Africans who worked for him in Dar es Salaam, and spent a lot of time with them teaching English and various other skills. He, in turn, studied the local languages and never abused or directly insulted any of his servants. In fact, one biographer even remarked that Dahl loved his African adventure and “became close friends with the Mwanumwezi tribesmen who served as his assistants.” But these men were his servants, and in good imperial fashion Dahl usually referred to them as “boys,” even though all were grown men (the youngest was nineteen). His “boy” cook, Piggy, earned his anglicized name from Mpishi. His “head boy” was Mwino and another “boy,” Mdisho, spoke Swahili and attended to all his various needs, while others worked in the kitchen and in the garden. Mdisho proved “absolutely loyal” to Dahl, his “young white master,” who taught him English and offered financial advice. When writing home to his mother during the African sojourn, Dahl punctuated his letters with occasional remarks about how his “boy” woke him in the morning, serving tea and fruit. While he did form intense relations with several of the Africans, Dahl, like most any colonizer, also regularly expressed contempt for the Africans and Hindus that lived in Dar es Salaam: “[T]hey’re all the same, these bloody Hindus,” their minds “grind exceedingly low.”[8]

Mdisho made an enduring impact on Dahl. Indeed, according to Dahl’s most recent biographer, who consulted the first draft of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mdisho may well have been the original model for Charlie Bucket, the central figure in the book, who seems to have started out much like Sambo, an appealing dark-skinned figure, “bright and clever” and “brave as a lion.” In the early draft of the book, Dahl even described Charlie as a “small NEGRO boy.” Other Africans he saw in Tanganyika, men who drank a brew called Pombe and then danced “in a manner which would make Mae West look like a fourth-rate novice,” clearly embodied the exoticism in Dahl’s thinking about the “natives” he encountered and inspired those Oompa-Loompas who labored for Willy Wonka.[9]

How much Dahl learned about American society and race relations while serving as a British intelligence officer in Washington, D.C., during World War II is uncertain. But his wartime friendship with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his capacity as a British agent, gave him direct and personal access to the president’s opinions, especially regarding African Americans. Dahl reported back to his superiors that in his vision of the postwar world, Roosevelt claimed to have no designs on Britain’s Caribbean colonies since they would only prove a headache: “[T]hese places are inhabited by some eight million dark-skinned gentleman and I don’t want them coming to this country and adding to the problem which we already have with our thirteen million black men.” Thus, from the president of the United States Dahl learned that black men were a “problem,” a headache for whites. Indeed, a few years after the war as his literary career blossomed, one of his early adult short stories—employing typical “colored” dialect—revolved around a sleazy and dangerous, brown-skinned Jamaican gambler who owned a Cadillac. Soon after publication of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dahl’s wife Patricia Neal suffered a devastating series of strokes while they were staying in Southern California where Neal was starring in what would be John Ford’s last film, Seven Women. To help with her care, Dahl hired a live-in nurse, someone he identified as “Annie, a ‘fine enormous negress.’” Neal’s autobiography avoided any comment on her husband’s racial opinions. Indeed, she appeared to largely share them. She described her own father as one who could move through her home town of Packard, Kentucky, “like a white god in a native village.” Clearly, what he had experienced in Africa and, apparently, what he learned about race in the United States never challenged his imperialist and colonial world-view. Rather, they seemed to feed it.[10]

[5] Erica Wagner, “Cruel World: Roald Dahl’s Grown-Up Stories of Revenge and Menace are Impossible to Put Down,” New York Times, Dec. 3, 2006, p. G84; Claire Messud, “The Uses of Enchantment,” New York Times, Oct. 3, 2010, p. A25; Mark I. West, Roald Dahl (New York, 1992), 66–67; Jeremy Treglown, Roald Dahl: A Biography (London, 1994), 177; “Children’s Best Sellers,” New York Times, May 2, 1971;”Stories, Poems Mark Halloween at Toll Gate,” Trenton Evening Times, Nov. 15, 1982; “Radio Notes,” Seattle Daily Times, April 17, 1967; Judy Flander, “The Recorded Voice Can Soothe a TV-Era Child,” Washington Evening Star, Sept. 9, 1975; Emma Robertson, Chocolate, Women, and Empire: A Social and Cultural History (New York, 2009), 13n1;“Teach the Stories,” RoaldDahl.com, https://www.roalddahl.com/create-and-learn/teach/teach-the-stories.

[6] Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (New York, 1964); Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach (New York, 1961); Roald Dahl, Love from Boy: Roald Dahl’s Letters to his Mother, ed. Donald Sturrock (New York, 2016), 93–99; Wagner, “Cruel World,” p. G84; Donald Sturrock, Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl (London, 2010), 15–17. The two most thorough biographies are Sturrock, Storyteller and Treglown, Roald Dahl.

[7] Quoted in Treglown, Roald Dahl 7, 29, 88–89, 202, 237–39; Laurel Graeber, “A Tempestuous Man of Extremes,” New York Times, May 1, 1994, p. BR28; Abraham H. Foxman to editor, November 27, 1990, New York Times, Dec. 7, 1990.

[8] Patricia Neal, As I Am: An Autobiography (New York, 1988), 167, 181–82, 294; Dahl, Love from Boy, ed. Sturrock, xvii, xxiii, 88; West, Roald Dahl, 6–7; Sturrock, Storyteller, 94, 108–9; Dahl, Love from Boy, xvii, xxiii, 88, 105, 113–14, 131.

[9] Sturrock, Storyteller, 109–11, 129-32, 397. Dahl had a long history of “re-imagining” his own biographical details.

[10] Neal, As I Am, 19–20; Sturrock, Storyteller, 222–23, 408–15; Dahl, “Man from the South,” (1954) in Roy Blatchford, ed., A Roald Dahl Selection (Essex, Eng., 1980), 1–12.