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Abstract
The most immediate and visible connection of early colonial Cape Town to the Indian Ocean world lay in its sizeable slave population. This article will examine new data from household inventories to enumerate in more precise ways than has previously been possible the Indian Ocean origins of slaves imported into the town in the 18th and early 19th centuries. In particular, it identifies the importance of south Asian sources in the earlier parts of the 18th century and the shift to the African coast in the later 18th and 19th centuries. Both of these regions are neglected in current academic and popular perceptions of the origins of slaves in the city. Comparisons will be made throughout with slavery in other colonial Indian Ocean port cities of the period.
Notes
1 For South Africa’s Indian Ocean connections, see, most notably, I. Hofmeyr, ‘South Africa’s Indian Ocean’, History Compass, 11, 7 (2013), pp. 508–12, and P. Gupta, I. Hofmeyr and M. Pearson (eds), Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (Pretoria, UNISA Press, 2010). Cape Town’s early colonial links to the Indian Ocean are highlighted especially in K. Ward, ‘“Tavern of the Seas”?: The Cape of Good Hope as an Oceanic Crossroads during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in J. Bentley, R. Bridenthal and K. Wigen (eds), Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu, Hawaii University Press, 2007), pp. 137–52; K. Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009); N. Worden, ‘VOC Cape Town as an Indian Ocean Port’, in H.P. Ray and E.A. Alpers (eds), Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 142–62. Recent examples of the growing awareness of Cape Town by Indian Ocean specialists include P. Larson, Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009); C. Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012). Meg Samuelson also made important initiatives with a series of workshops – ‘Indian Ocean Africa’ and ‘Thinking Africa from the Cape’ – held at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, in 2011.
2 For the most recent scholarship on these themes, see N. Worden (ed.), Cape Town between East and West: Social Identities in a Dutch Colonial Town (Johannesburg and Hilversum, Jacana and Verloren, 2012).
3 The literature on this is now extensive. Notable examples are R. Ross, Cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa (London, Routledge 1983); N.Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985); R. Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838 (Hanover and Johannesburg, Wesleyan University Press and Wits University Press, 1994). For the more recent growth of public and popular awareness of this heritage, see N. Worden, ‘The Changing Politics of Slave Heritage in the Western Cape, South Africa’, Journal of African History, 50, 1 (2009), pp. 23–40.
4 A. Bank, The Decline of Urban Slavery at the Cape, 1806–1843, Communications, No. 22 (Cape Town, Centre for African Studies, UCT, 1991). For work on urban slavery in the VOC period, which includes slave total numbers extracted from the few available sources, see R. Ross, ‘The Occupations of Slaves in Eighteenth Century Cape Town’, in C. Saunders and H. Phillips (eds), Studies in the History of Cape Town (Cape Town, Centre for African Studies, UCT, 1984), pp. 1–14; and parts of N. Worden, E. van Heyningen and V. Bickford-Smith, Cape Town: The Making of a City (Cape Town, David Philip, 1998).
5 For a discussion of the nature of archival sources on Cape slaves, see N. Worden, ‘Cape Slaves in the Paper Empire of the VOC’, Kronos, 40 (2014), pp. 23–44.
6 For example, Nationaal Archief, The Hague, Collectie Radermacher 507, for a record of the town’s inhabitants in 1731; Cape Archives Depot, C 2764, Taxatielijst van de slaven, 19 July 1762, pp. 8–29.
7 F. Bradlow and M. Cairns, The Early Cape Muslims (Cape Town, Balkema, 1978). Later analyses include Shell, Children of Bondage and N. Worden, ‘Indian Ocean Slavery and its Demise in the Cape Colony’, in G. Campbell (ed.), Abolition and its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (Abingdon, Routledge, 2005), pp. 29–49.
8 Transcribed from Cape Archives Depot, MOOC 8/1–8/40, Master of the Orphan Chamber, Inventories: General Series, 1673–1825, available at http://databases.tanap.net/mooc/, retrieved 1 August 2008. These data have already provided a major stimulus to a new quantitative approach to the 18th-century Cape, led by Stellenbosch economic historians: see J. Fourie, ‘The Quantitative Cape: A Review of the New Historiography of the Dutch Cape Colony’, South African Historical Journal, 66, 1 (2014), pp. 142–68.
9 R. van Welie, ‘Patterns of Slave Trading and Slavery in the Dutch Colonial World, 1596–1863’, in G. Oostindie (ed.), Dutch Colonialism, Migration and Cultural Heritage (Leiden, KITLV Press, 2008), pp. 217–18.
10 R. Raben, ‘Cities and the Slave Trade in Early-Modern Southeast Asia’, in P. Boomgaard, D. Kooiman and H. Schulte Nordholt (eds), Linking Destinies: Trade, Towns and Kin in Asian History (Leiden, KITLV Press, 2008), p. 119; and R. Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo: The Ethnic and Spatial Order of Two Colonial Cities, 1600–1800’, doctoral thesis, University of Leiden, 1996, p. 119.
11 H. Niemeijer, Batavia: Een Koloniale Samenleving in de 17de Eeuw (Amsterdam, Uitgeverij Balans, 2005), pp. 50–64.
12 Kate Ekama, ‘Slavery in Dutch Colombo: A Social History’, MA dissertation, Department of History, University of Leiden, 2012.
13 For accounts of Cape Town in this period, see Worden et al., Cape Town: The Making, and Worden (ed.), Cape Town Between East and West. For comparisons of VOC personnel with other VOC establishments, F. Lequin, Het Personeel van de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie in Azië in de 18e Eeuw, Meer in het Bijzonder in de Vestiging Bengalen (2nd edn., Alphen aan het Rijn, Canaletto/Repro Holland, 2005), table A.26, pp. 238–43.
14 Worden et al., Cape Town: The Making, pp. 66–7.
15 J. Armstrong, ‘The Chinese Exiles’, in Worden (ed.), Cape Town between East and West, pp. 115–17.
16 Worden et al., Cape Town: The Making, p. 50
17 Bank, Decline of Urban Slavery, p. 236. This includes both privately owned and government slaves.
18 For example, Niemeijer, Batavia, pp. 63–4, and, for a broader discussion of the impact of European colonial use of slaves in south-east Asia, K.Ward, ‘Slavery in Southeast Asia, 1420–1804’, in D. Eltis and S. Engerman (eds), The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Volume 3, AD 1420–AD 1804 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 179–81.
19 Bank, Decline of Urban Slavery.
20 The Orphan Chamber inventoried estates of owners who died intestate, who nominated the Chamber as executors or who did not specify an executor, or who left unmarried heirs under 25 years old or living outside the colony. The MOOC inventories do, however, ‘form the single most cohesive record of privately owned slaves at the Cape’, TEPC Transcription Team, ‘Introduction to the Inventories of the Orphan Chamber at the Cape of Good Hope’, available at http://databases.tanap.net/mooc/, retrieved 1 August 2014, pp. 34, 49.
21 Shell, Children of Bondage, p. 40. There are no estimates of locally born slave totals, although Shell has calculated that their number exceeded imported slaves (the ‘moment of creolisation’) in the 1760s and 1770s, and again after 1810; see pp. 47–8.
22 J. Armstrong and N. Worden, ‘The Slaves, 1652–1834’, in R. Elphick and H. Giliomee (eds), The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, second edition (Cape Town, Maskew Miller Longman, 1989), pp. 129–32.
23 Ibid., p. 133.
24 Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo’, Table .14, p. 112.
25 The position of female slaves (as opposed to elite indigenous women) in VOC Asia has only recently been the focus of historical research. See, for example, H.,Niemeijer, ‘Slavery, Ethnicity and the Economic Independence of Women in Seventeenth-Century Batavia’, in B. Andaya (ed.), Other Pasts: Women, Gender and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia (Honolulu, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Hawai’i, 2000), pp. 174–94; E. Jones, Wives, Slaves And Concubines: A History of the Female Underclass in Dutch Asia (DeKalb, Northern Illinois University Press, 2010).
26 For examples of the disparities of Cape slave toponyms, see N. Worden and G. Groenewald, Trials of Slavery: Selected Documents Concerning Slaves from the Criminal Records of the Council Of Justice at the Cape of Good Hope, 1705–1794, second series, Vol. 36 (Cape Town, Van Riebeeck Society, 2005), pp. 5n1, 80n11, 169n1, 189n1, 455n2, 487n1, 609n2, 616n1.
27 These figures exclude 306 slaves whose toponyms were not recorded (288 names) or were unidentifiable (18 names).
28 Shell, Children of Bondage, Figure 1, p. 41.
29 Ross, Cape of Torments, p. 13.
30 For example, Shell, Children of Bondage, pp. 40–46; Bradlow and Cairns, Early Cape Muslims, pp. 118–24; Worden, ‘Indian Ocean Slavery’, pp. 29–38.
31 Bank, The Decline of Urban Slavery, p. 232. Bank’s figures drawn from the slave registers include the surrounding arable Cape district, and so are not directly comparable with the solely urban data used here.
32 G. Campbell, ‘The Question of Slavery in Indian Ocean World History’, in A. Sheriff and E. Ho (eds), The Indian Ocean: Oceanic Connections and the Creation of New Societies (London, Hurst Publishing, 2014), p. 125.
33 Van Welie, ‘Patterns of Slave Trading’, pp. 185–6.
34 Campbell, ‘Question of Slavery’, p. 127.
35 Worden and Groenewald, Trials of Slavery, p. 8.
36 P. Westra and J. Armstrong, Slave Trade with Madagascar: The Journals of the Cape Slaver Leijdsman, 1715 (Cape Town, Africana, 2006); D. Sleigh and P. Westra, The Taking of the Slaver Meermin, 1766 (Cape Town, Africana, 2013).
37 M.Vink, ‘“The World’s Oldest Trade”: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of World History, 14, 2 (2003), pp. 140–3.
38 A. Datta, From Bengal to the Cape: Bengali Slaves in South Africa (Bloomington, XLibris, 2013), p. 40.
39 R. Eaton, ‘Locating Arakan in Time, Space and Historical Scholarship’, in J. Gommans and J. Leider (eds), The Maritime Frontier of Burma: Exploring Political, Cultural and Commercial Interaction in the Indian Ocean World, 1200–1800 (Leiden, KITLV Press, 2002), pp. 227–8; W. Dijk, Seventeenth-Century Burma and the Dutch East India Company, 1634–1680 (Singapore, NIAS Press, 2006), pp. 140–2.
40 Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo’, p. 122; Niemeijer, Batavia, p. 53.
41 Cape Archives Depot, Miscellaneous 49, Serrurier papers, file (n), transfer deeds of slaves, 1763–6. This is a single rare example of a record detailing the gradual movement of a slave to Cape Town.
42 Vink, ‘“The World’s Oldest Trade”’, p. 142.
43 Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo’, p. 131; Ekama, ‘Slavery in Dutch Colombo’, p. 13.
44 Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo’, p. 122.
45 Shell, Children of Bondage, pp. 43–4.
46 K.Ward, ‘Southeast Asian Migrants’, in Worden (ed.), Cape Town Between East and West, p. 86.
47 Van Welie, ‘Patterns of Slave Trading’, pp. 196–7.
48 Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo’, p. 125.
49 Worden and Groenewald, Trials of Slavery, pp. 355–84, 537–56; R. Ross and S. Koolhof, ‘Upas, September and the Bugis at the Cape’, Archipel, 70 (2005), pp. 281–308.
50 Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo’, p. 125.
51 Van Welie, ‘Patterns of Slave Trading’, p. 206; Shell, Children of Bondage, p. 43 n. 8.
52 J-M. Filliot, La Traite des Esclaves vers les Mascereignes au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, ORSTOM, 1974); D. Scarr, Slaving and Slavery in the Indian Ocean (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1998); M.D. North-Coombes, ‘Labour Problems in the Sugar Industry of Ile de France or Mauritius, 1790–1842’, MA dissertation, University of Cape Town, 1978, especially Ch. 2.
53 The figures differ slightly because of divergent lists by the key historians of the trade: Armstrong and Worden, ‘The Slaves’, p. 112; J. Ravell, ‘The VOC Slave Trade between Cape Town and Madagascar’, unpublished paper, Bilthoven, 1979.
54 Armstrong and Worden, ‘The Slaves’; Ravell, ‘The VOC Slave Trade’; Westra and Armstrong, Slave Trade, p. 9.
55 N. Worden, ‘Slavery and Amnesia: Towards a Recovery of Malagasy Heritage in Representations of Cape Slavery’, in I. Rakoto (ed.), L’esclavage à Madagascar: Aspects Historiques et Résurgences Contemporaines (Antananarivo, Institut de Civilisations – Musée d’Art et d’Archéologie, 1997), p. 54.
56 Larson, Ocean of Letters, p. 244.
57 Van Welie, ‘Patterns of Slave Trading’, p. 203.
58 M. Reidy, ‘The Admission of Slaves and “Prize Negroes” into the Cape colony, 1797–1818’, MA dissertation, University of Cape Town, 1997, p. 111.
59 P. Harries, ‘Middle Passages of the Southwest Indian Ocean: A Century of Forced Immigration from Africa to the Cape of Good Hope’, Journal of African History, 55, 2 (2014), pp. 173–90; P. Harries, ‘Slavery, Indenture and Migrant Labour: Maritime Immigration from Mozambique to the Cape, c.1780–1880, African Studies, 73, 3 (2014), pp. 323–40.
60 I owe this observation to one of the anonymous readers of this article, for which I am most grateful.
61 N. Worden, ‘“Armed with Ostrich Feathers”: Cultural Revolution and the Cape Slave Uprising of 1808’, in R. Bessel, N. Guyatt and J. Rendall (eds), War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830 (London, Palgrave, 2010), pp. 121–38.
62 There is now a thriving literature on Mauritian slavery, but, as at the Cape, very little of this specifies the character of Port Louis as distinct from the plantations of the island where most of the slaves laboured. For an earlier comparative study of both ports, see N. Worden, ‘Cape Town and Port Louis in the Eighteenth Century’, in G. Campbell (ed.), The Indian Ocean Rim: Southern Africa and Regional Co-operation (London and New York, Routledge Curzon, 2003), pp. 42–53.
63 Ward, Networks of Empire; Ward, ‘Southeast Asian Migrants’.
64 S. Newton-King, ‘Family, Friendship and Survival among Freed Slaves’, in Worden (ed.), Cape Town between East and West , pp. 153–75; Anderson, Subaltern Lives.
65 O. Mentzel, A Complete and Authentic Geographical and Topographical Description of the Famous and (All Things Considered) Remarkable African Cape of Good Hope, Vol. II (Cape Town, Van Riebeeck Society, 1925), p. 125.
66 Anon., Gleanings in Africa (London, Cundee,1806), p. 58.
67 J. Barrow, An Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa in the Years 1797 and 1798, Vol. I (London, Cadell and Davis,1801), p.108; W. Burchall, Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa (London, Longman, Hirst Rees, Orme and Brown, 1822), p. 33; F. Krauss, ‘A Description of Cape Town and its Way of Life, 1838–40’, Quarterly Bulletin of the South African Library, 21, 1 (1966), p. 5. For further discussion of these sources in relation to their representation of Malagasy slaves, see Worden, ‘Slavery and Amnesia’, pp. 57–9.
68 Datta, From Bengal to the Cape.
69 T. Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Cape Town, David Philip, 1996), p. 125.
70 V. Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 31.
71 P. Harries, ‘Making Mozbiekers: History, Memory and the African Diaspora at the Cape’, in B. Zimba, E. Alpers and A. Isaacman (eds), Slave Routes and Oral Tradition in Southeastern Africa (Maputo, Filson, 2005), pp. 91–123.
72 S. Jeppie, ‘Historical Process and the Constitution of Subjects: I.D. du Plessis and the Reinvention of the “Malay”’, BA (Hons) dissertation, University of Cape Town, 1986–7; L. Witz, Apartheid’s Festival: Contesting South Africa’s National Pasts (Bloomington and Cape Town, Indiana University Press and David Philip, 2003), pp. 178–9.
73 K. Ward and N. Worden, ‘Commemorating, Suppressing and Invoking Cape Slavery’, in S. Nuttall and C. Coetzee (eds), Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 208–9.
74 Worden, ‘The Changing Politics of Slave Heritage’.
75 K. Ward, ‘The “300 Years: Making of Cape Muslim Culture” Exhibition, Cape Town, April 1994: Liberating the Castle?’, Social Dynamics, 21, 1 (1995), pp. 96–131. The exhibition was organised by the Sheikh Yusuf Tercentenary Commemoration Committee, led by the historian and linguist Achmat Davids. The main research publication associated with this was Y. da Costa and A. Davids (eds), Pages from Cape Muslim History (Pietermaritzburg, Shooter and Shuter, 1994).
76 P. Gqola, What is Slavery to Me?: Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2010), pp. 140–1.