Slavery at the Cape 1658-1834

The Slaves played an integral part in the evolution of the Cape's people. Slaves outnumbered burghers in the Cape Colony for most of the eighteenth century. Their Genes contributed to the physical evolvement of the population, and also brought diverse cultures, cuisine and traditions from their widespread countries of origin. They contributed enormously to all descendants of South Africa and deserve to have special recognition and homage paid to them.

For an overview of slaves from India go to: https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/indian-slaves-south-africa-lit...

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Background

1653-4
The very first slave appears to have been one Abraham van Batavia, who arrived as a stowaway in 1653 and claimed to have run away from his owner in Batavia, one Cornelis Lichthart. He was allowed to stay on and was put to work - a reflection, no doubt, of the general scarcity of labour at the Cape. The other slaves had been brought to the Cape by their owners, and it has been claimed that some Asian convicts were brought to the Cape as early as 1654."

1654
In 1654 the VOC gave permission for van Riebeeck to import slaves to the Cape. The slave ship Roode Vos was sent to Mauritius and Antongil Bay in Madagascar to get slaves but returned empty.

1658
Four years later in 1658 the first slaves arrived at the Cape, brought by the Amersfoort after being captured from a Portuguese slaver. (Included were two groups of slaves from the Portuguese -ruled colonies of Angola and Guinea) 170 of an original 250 slaves survived the journey.
Later in the same year another 228 slaves from West Africa arrived aboard the Hassalt - these two 'shipments' were the only slaves from West Africa as subsequently the Dutch East and the Dutch West India Companies agreed not to encroach on one another's slaving grounds.

Later batches of slaves were imported from Mozambique as well as from Madagascar. These were followed by Asian contingents of slaves, political exiles and some freemen who came of their own volition.

1658-1664
From 1658 over the next five years, only 40 more slave arrivals are recorded (from as far away as Abyssinia, Bengal, Ceylon, Cabo Verde, Madagascar, Malabar, even Japan). The death rate was high (and some slaves managed to escape) with the result that by 1663 there were only 82 slaves in total, both privately and VOC-owned.

1690
By 1690, there were still only 350 privately owned slaves at the Cape, a number that would of course increase exponentially.

1808
Between 1658 and 1808 an estimated 63 000 slaves were imported into the Cape. Many slaves were born into slavery and further "stock" was only brought in to maintain levels. The slave population was apparently 40 000 at its height - far outnumbering the burgher population at the time.

The slaves were mainly brought in from

• India - mostly from Bengal, Malabar and Coromandel (36.4%),

Ansu Datta (From Bengal to the Cape - Bengali Slaves in South Africa 2013) p 19 - "...studies of transoceanic trade suggest that slaves hardly played a part in the export trade from Bengal at that time [1665-1721]. As far as Africa is concerned, it seems that Bengali slaves who were brought to the Cape came mostly by way of Batavia."
However, according to Steenkamp (Steenkamp, Willem. (2012) Assegais, Drums and Dragoons. The early military and social history of the Cape of Good Hope, 1510-1806. p33-4) "Contrary to popular belief, the largest single ethnic group , over 50% of the total, according to the respected Cape Malay historian, Achmat Davids, came from Bengal, Coromandel, the Malabar Coast and elsewhere in India, and, he says, formed the embryo of the Cape Muslim vommunity - often thought to have been founded by the substantial number of late arrivals from Indonesia (especially the Celebes, Java, and later Macassar) and Ceylon. (Achmat Davids moots the possibility that some of the handful of slaves that Van Riebeeck brought with him might have been Muslims)"

• the East Indies (31.47%),
• Ceylon/Sri Lanka (3.1%),
• Mozambique, Madagascar and the East African coast (26.65%)
• Malaya (0.49%)
• Mauritius (0.18%)
• The rest were from unidentified places

Their arrival eased the shortage of unattached women at the Cape, as few families had come to the Cape (usually the VOC uppercrust), and the traditionalist Khoina frowned on marriage and casual liasons with their women and whites. Although the VOC disapproved of these liasons, they

"According to Heese, the first such [mixed] marriage at the Cape took place in 1656, before slaves started arriving in significant numbers. One Jan Woutersz, late of Middelburg Neherlands, married an Indian woman called Catherina Anthonis van Bengale when the return fleet on which they were travelling to Europe called in at theCApe. Wotersz and his new bride contrived to stay behind when the fleet sailed - among the first, but certainly not the last, birds of passage who arrived at the Cape on their way to somewhere else but chose to go no further. Since freemen could not marry those in bondage, this means Catharina van Bengale was probably also the first slave to be freed at the Cape." [2]

1838 Emancipation
Although Slave Trading was abolished in 1808, it wasn't until 1834 that slave ownership and slavery in all its forms was abolished in the British Empire. All slaves had to be officially registered by the end of September 1817. If they were not registered they were considered to be manumitted. On 1 December 1834 the Slavery Abolition Act became law throughout the British colonies, but the slaves did not become free on that day. They were 'apprenticed' to their owners for four year to prepare them to be wage labourers in the future, giving them time to adapt. This meant that freedom was delayed until 1 December 1838. Finally, on Emancipation Day (1 December 1838), over 39,000 slaves would be freed.

Emancipation wasn't always kind to the freed slaves - many continued to be employed by their previous owners; others were evicted from the farms where they worked. Some of the farmers could not afford the cost of employing the ex slaves as labour. The ex-slaves had very little access to land, (most of the land was owned by the burghers). On the whole very few had accumulated savings and so many were poverty stricken, left destitute.

Slavery in the Early Cape Wine Industry

The origins of the wine industry are far less ‘white’ than has historically been documented, and not only from the point of view of anonymous, thankless, back-breaking labour, but also in the slave blood running through ‘Afrikaner’ wine families with surnames including (among others) Badenhorst, Basson, Beyers, Colyn, De Wet, Goosen, Hattingh, Heyns, Human, Jonker, Kruger, Snyman, Vermaak, Vermeulen, Visser, Van Zyl… the list goes on.

An interesting starting point is that the VOC was reluctant to send any slaves to the Cape at all, with Jan van Riebeeck being told by the Council of India on 13 December 1658: ‘In our opinion, the colony should be worked and established by Europeans, and not by slaves, as our nation is so constituted that as soon as they have the convenience of slaves they become lazy and unwilling to put forth their hands to work.’
At that stage, the vrijburghers (free citizens) who’d been released from their VOC contracts to farm along the Liesbeeck River were ‘putting forth their hands to work’ under unimaginably harsh conditions. A motely bunch of mostly illiterate soldiers and sailors with little knowledge of farming, they had to ‘without delay’ plant crops (plus the odd vine cutting that Van Riebeeck forced on them). They also urgently had to build themselves some sort of shelter, not only against the elements but also against the lions, leopards and other predators still roaming the area, not to mention the Khoi who were now taking up arms, rightfully angry at being pushed off their traditional grazing lands.
Throw in the brutally monopolistic trading conditions imposed by the VOC, which paid the vrijburghers barely enough for them to settle their ‘start-up loans’ let alone make any profit, and it’s hardly surprising that of almost 190 men given their Letters of Freedom over a five-year period by Jan van Riebeeck, there were fewer than 35 left when he departed for Batavia in May 1662. A few had died and some had run away on passing ships but many more had opted to apply for re-employment by the VOC, having discovered that ‘freedom’ actually meant living in abject poverty.
One challenge identified by Van Riebeeck was that the unmarried vrijburghers had virtually zero prospect of settling down in the conventional sense, with a wife and children, so even the least ‘lazy and unwilling’ of them were disinclined to commit to the Cape long-term. ‘Working with unmarried men is very unstable and rests but on loose screws,’ he wrote.
Not only did he ask his VOC directors, the Lords XVII, to send over ‘at least 20 lusty farmers’ or other ordinary people’s marriageable daughters’ (which in due course, believe it or not, they did, along with the odd shipment of orphan girls) but he also argued for the procurement of female slaves as potential wives for the unmarried vrijburghers: ‘Should some of the agriculturists marry the women, they will be nicely bound to the Cape for life.’

And this is where slavery at the Cape enters very grey territory. Marriages between Europeans and (freed) slave women had already occurred at the Cape – for example,

• Jan Woutersz (from Middelburg) with Catharina Anthonis (from Zelagon) on 21 May 1656,
• Anthoni Muller (from Arnhem) with Domingo Elvingh (from Bengal) on 29 September 1656, and
• Jan Zachariasz (from Amsterdam) to Maria van Bengale on 21 July 1658.

It’s important to note that as long as a freed slave woman had been baptised, she was regarded as an ‘honourable maiden’, regardless of her race. As the years went by, there were more marriages between freed slave women and vrijburghers.

• After her manumission in 1666 and baptism in 1668, for example, Maaij Ansela (Angela) van Bengal married Arnoldus Willemsz Basson in 1669.
• Her daughter Anna de Koning, who’d arrived with her at the Cape in 1657, married Olof Bergh (future owner of Groot Constantia) in 1678. Anna was a so-called halfslag (half-slave), which is to say that her father was European (most likely Francois de Coninck from Ghent). For although concubinage and ‘that shameful crime of fornication or whoredom’ were strictly forbidden in terms of the Statues of India, they most certainly did occur – and nowhere more so than in the heavily male-skewed Cape, where VOC commissioner Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein was shocked to find such sexual ‘relations’ openly acknowledged and certainly not considered illegal when he visited in 1685.
• By 1685, the young German soldier Lourens Campher had started his life-long relationship with the halfslag Ansela van de Caap, whose mother came from Guinea. (Their three children would be born at the notorious Slave Lodge, only moving to what is now the Stellenbosch wine farm Muratie after their mother was manumitted in 1695.)
• By 1685, the remarkable Swarte Maria Everts (the Cape-born daughter of Evert and Anna van Guinea) was also living with Bastiaan Colijn, with whom she would have four children, most notably Johannes Colijn, who would take up where Simon van der Stel left off, making sweet Constantia wine at the original Klein Constantia (Hoop op Constantia), which his descendants would own until 1857, completely assimilated into ‘white’ society.

For every ‘happy’ story of concubinage, needless to say, there must have been countless unhappy ones. Sexual abuse was rife, with the ‘fructification’ of VOC-owned female slaves not merely tolerated but encouraged ‘for the benefit of the Company’ (i.e. to guarantee a future workforce). These European-fathered halfslag children were ‘born into freedom’, however, which meant that they should be baptised, educated in Dutch and manumitted at legal majority, which was 22 for women, 25 for men.

Even ‘ordinary’ slaves could potentially be granted freedom under varying circumstances – sometimes when their owners died or left the Cape, sometimes in reward for ‘good behaviour’ – and after manumission, these so-called Free Blacks ostensibly had the same rights and privileges as European or white Cape-born vrijburghers. (At least until 1705, that is, when Adam Tas came along and accused Willem Adriaan van der Stel – whose great-grandmother had been an Indian slave – not only of corruption but also of favouring ‘that black brood living among us, who … have so grown in power, numbers and arrogance … that they now tell us that they could and would trample us…’)

And the rest, as they say, is history. Give me half a chance, though, and I’ll tell you more about Swarte Maria Everts and the Colijns of Constantia.

• I’ll share the sordid details of Jan Coenraad Visser’s not-so-happy household (here’s a teaser: he and his son both had children with the slave Maria van Negapatnum, including a daughter named Susanna who would marry Hans Heinrich Hattingh, thereby becoming the mistress of Stellenbosch wine farm Spier).
• There’s even the unusual case of a man born into slavery, Christoffel Snyman (son of the exiled convict Groote Catrijn van Paliacatta, adopted son of Anthonij Jansz van Bengale), who married Marguerite-Therese de Savoye, daughter of the French Huguenot Jacques de Savoye, and eventually owned the Delta part of what is now Solms-Delta.
• There’s also Anthonij van Angola, who had 4,000 vines and employed (wait for it) three white men on his Jonkershoek farm ‘Angola’ (now part of Lanzerac).
• And there’s Willem Stolts, who owned the Swartland farms Wolwedans and Hoornbosch, not to mention 11 slaves of his own.

We can’t right the slave wrongs of the past but I guess we can at least try to tell the stories of some of those remarkable individuals who, until fairly recently, have been whitewashed out of South African wine history.
https://winemag.co.za/wine/opinion/joanne-gibson-on-some-of-the-inv...

Influences on Cape Culture

Because the slaves at the Cape came from such diverse backgrounds there was no common language or custom. This influenced -

• Religion - Hunduism, Islam and Catholcism (brought in by salves of the Portuguese colonial possessions) were introduced.
• Language - the languages spoken by the Cape slaves influenced the development of a lingua franca, firstly called Kaaps and later Afrikaans, to make communication possible between all the people not sharing a mother tongue.
• Food - The Cape has a diverse cuisine influenced by the widespread origins of the people who lived there - in particular the Indonesian slaves who were favoured as cooks by the Dutch.
• Architecture - [Needs developing]
• Furniture - Early furniture at the Cape was heavily influenced by the Dutch, but became more ornate and ostentatious as the ornate Islamic and Hindu decorative motifs were incorporated.

Manusmṛti (Manu smṛti, Manusamhita)

is the ancient book of Hindu laws (third century B.C.E. The institution of slavery had an acknowledged position in their society of birth. It spoke of seven types of slavery -

1. Prisoners of War
2. those who are enslaved for their sustenance
3. those born in their master's house
4. those who were purchased
5. those inherited as part of patrimony
6. those who are given away by their parents
7. those who fail to repay a fine or in execution of a judicial decree

In his book From Bengal to the Cape - Bengali Slaves in South Africa 2013 Xlibris Corporation, Ansu Datta says -

"As far as Bengal is concerned, slavery was an accepted institution so much so that the ancient treatise that governs the inheritance system of Bengali Hindus (Dayabhaga) recommends how a slave should be inherited. This was largely true of other ethnic groups as well"



The Slave Lodge, Cape Town can be seen using Google Earth and Google Maps.

The website link for the Slave Lodge is: https://www.iziko.org.za/museums/slave-lodge

See the photo album of the Slave Lodge Museum : https://www.geni.com/photo/view/4304600675890068096?photo_id=6000000184930046274

South African Slave Owners (1658-1834)

The Inventories of the Orphan Chamber, Cape Town Archives Repository, South Africa are a fascinating collection of documents. Many of the residents at the Cape prior to 1808 (when slave-trading was abolished in South Africa) owned slaves. Slaves are often listed amongst the possessions. Many are named and make interesting reading. Some examples of those that have larger numbers of slaves (at present over 25) are/will be added at the end of this section.

There were four kinds of slave ownership at the Cape;

• The Dutch East India Company - VOC - itself.
• VOC Company Officer in their private capacity
• Burghers
• Free Blacks

Glossary

• Bastaard - child of a white father & Hottentot / Bushman mother.
• Bastaard Hottentot - child of a Hottentot / Bushman mother & (African / Negro / Bantu or Asian) slave father.
• Chattel slaves - slaves who were forcibly acquired in their native land and forcibly taken to to different places where they could be sold and made to work for others.
• gedrost - absconded, run-away
• Halfslagh = half-caste.
• Heelslagh - full caste or full-blood - usually refering to non-white slaves and were sometimes further distinguished as neger, caffer, indisch, chinees etc.
• Kastiço or Kasties - child of a mesties or mulatto slave mother and white father.
• Lijfeijgen or Slaaf - slave.
• Mestiço or Mesties - Eurasian half-caste (usually a child of a white father and an Asian slave mother).
• Mulatto - Eurafrican half-caste (usually a child of a white father and an African / Negro / Bantu slave mother).
• Vrij geboren - free-born, never enslaved (generally refers to swartes - indigenes, east Asian political exiles & to offspring of liberated slaves).; not the same as a free-black, alsometimes mis-identified as being vrij zwart.
• Vrij zwart - manumitted or liberated from slavery - also further defined as vrij chinees & vrij caffer etc.

Footnotes

1. Steenkamp, Willem. (2012) Assegais, Drums and Dragoons. The early military and social history of the Cape of Good Hope, 1510-1806. Jonathan Ball Publishers. Jhb & CT p 33 2. ibid p35

References and Sources

• From Bengal to the Cape - Bengali Slaves in South Africa 2013 Xlibris Corporation, Ansu Datta
• Steenkamp, Willem. (2012) Assegais, Drums and Dragoons. The early military and social history of the Cape of Good Hope, 1510-1806. Jonathan Ball Publishers. Jhb & CT
• van Rensburg Genetic pool including excellent notes on various slaves.
• CRIMINAL JUSTICE AT THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: NARRATIVES OF INFANTICIDE AND SUICIDE by Gardiol van Niekerk (University of South Africa)-This paper is extremely interesting - well worth a read.
• Bibliography of Slavery at the Cape
• Precis of the archives of the Cape of Good Hope (1896)
• 1714 Census of Slave Lodge giving Slaves, the names of mother and/or father, their origins and any available information.
• The lodge women of Cape Town, 1671 to 1795 by Prof. Robert C.-H. Shell
• Slave Stamouers
• Introduction to The Resolutions Of The Council Of Policy Of Cape of Good Hope
• Population Growth
• Colonial Voyage
• [http://www.archivalplatform.org/blog/entry/reflecting_in_order_to_h...] The story of the Camissa People – Indigene & Slavery Heritage roots in the Western Cape
• Mansell Upham - Uprooted Lives Series: Unfurling the Cape of Good Hope’s Earliest Colonial Inhabitants (1652-1713)
• Cape Slave Transactions based on Research by Prof R Shell 1658-1731
• SA wine history: On some of the ‘invisible’ people of early Cape wine By Joanne Gibson, 14 August 2018

Publications

• Böesrken A.J. slaves and Free Blacks at the Cape 1658-1700
• Mountain, Alan - An Unsung Heritage A perspective on Slavery ISBN 0-86486-622-4 2004

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• South African Genealogical Reference Centre is there to help with SA genealogical nitty gritty; naming conventions and language usages.

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