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The Oompa Loompas Were African Slaves In The 1964 Book


Dahl changed them to dwarfish hippies with long ‘golden-brown hair’ and ‘rosy-white’ skin.

https://groovyhistory.com/oompa-loompas-the-original-ones

In the first edition of Roald Dahl's book, published in 1964, the Oompa Loompas weren't fantastic or supernatural beings; they were slave laborers imported from Africa. The website RoaldDahlFans.com quotes this description from Jeremy Treglown’s Roald Dahl: A Biography:

In the version first published, [the Oompa-Loompas were] a tribe of 3,000 amiable black pygmies who have been imported by Mr. Willy Wonka from ‘the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before.’ Mr. Wonka keeps them in the factory, where they have replaced the sacked white workers. Wonka’s little slaves are delighted with their new circumstances, and particularly with their diet of chocolate. Before they lived on green caterpillars, beetles, eucalyptus leaves, ‘and the bark of the bong-bong tree.'

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Not necessarily slaves.

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Just imported labour , paid only in food, that was not allowed to go outside ?

..i guess as long as they had the option to be returned to ‘the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before.’ its OK

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But they were not afraid of the Vermicious Knids

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I think using little colored midgets would've been a hoot.

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