Runaway slaves, rock art and resistance in the Cape Colony, South Africa

ABSTRACT

The protracted colonisation of southern Africa's Cape created conditions of extreme prejudice and violence. Slaves, the unwilling migrants to the Cape, comprised a mixed group of individuals from the Dutch and British colonies: people with Malay, Malagasy, East and West African heritages. They combined to form the labour force for the colonial project, along with indigenous Khoe-San trafficked within an illegal domestic unfree labour economy. Escaped or ‘runaway’ slaves joined forces with groups of ‘skelmbasters’ (mixed outlaws), who themselves were descended from San-, Khoe- and Bantu-speaking Africans (hunter-gatherers, herders and farmers). Together, they mounted a stiff resistance that held up the colonial advance for many decades from the late eighteenth century until the mid-nineteenth century. Engaging in guerilla-style warfare, they raided colonial farms for livestock, horses and guns. The ethnogenesis of such raiding bands is increasingly coming to the attention of archaeologists encountering the images they made of themselves in rock shelters, as well as the spiritual beliefs that they held in connection with escape and protection. The ‘reverse’ or ‘entangled gaze’ provided by this painted record gives us the perfect opportunity to view something of the slave and indigenous resistance from outside the texts of the colonial written record.

RÉSUMÉ

La colonisation prolongée du Cap d’Afrique australe créa des conditions de préjugé et de violence extrêmes. Les esclaves, immigrants contre leur gré, constituaient un groupe mixte d'individus issus des colonies hollandaises et britanniques: ils et elles étaient de descendance malaisienne, malgache, est-africaine et ouest-africaine. Leur regroupement fournit la main-d'œuvre du projet colonial, aux côtés des indigènes Khoe-San victimes de la traite au sein d’une économie illégale de travail domestique forcé. Les esclaves évadés ou ‘fugitifs’ s’associèrent à des groupes de ‘skelmbasters’ (hors-la-loi mixtes), eux-mêmes descendants d’Africains de langue san, khoe et bantou (chasseurs-cueilleurs, éleveurs et agriculteurs). Ensemble, ils montèrent une résistance acharnée qui ralentit l'avancée coloniale pendant plusieurs décennies, de la fin du dix-huitième siècle au milieu du dix-neuvième siècle. S'engageant dans une guerre de type guérilla, ces groupes attaquèrent les fermes coloniales pour s’emparer de bétail, de chevaux et d’armes. L'ethnogenèse de ces groupes attire de plus en plus l'attention des archéologues, qui découvrent dans des abris sous roche les représentations que ces communautés se firent d'elles-mêmes, ainsi que de leurs croyances spirituelles en rapport avec l'évasion et la protection. Le regard ‘inversé’ ou ‘enchevêtré’ fourni par ces archives peintes offre une occasion parfaite de discerner quelque chose de la résistance des esclaves et des indigènes, hors du domaine des écrits coloniaux.

KEYWORDS:

• slavery
• rock art
• rebellion
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank our colleagues at the Rock Art Research Institute and Geoff Blundell at the KwaZulu-Natal Museum. We are grateful to Will and Jill Pringle, Denham Pringle and Andrew Pringle, Louw de Beer, Mr and Mrs Bennett and Bruce Rodney for accommodating us on our fieldwork excursions. We thank Jeremy Hollmann and Pieter Jolly for comments on drafts of this article. We further thank the University of the Witwatersrand library for the scanned image of Júli and sculptor Barry Jackson, as well as Sarah Haines at the National Heritage Project Company for the image of Louis van Mauritius. We thank the editors for their invitation to attend the SAA conference session in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2019 and their attention to detail on our manuscript. Any omissions or errors are entirely our own.

Notes on contributors

Brent Sinclair-Thomson is a PhD candidate at the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He has a special interest in the rock art of mixed-ethnic bandit groups and how this medium relates to resistance to colonialism, as well as how the interaction between different ethnic groups are manifested and reflected in rock art, particularly the ‘indigenising’ of the gun.

Sam Challis is Head and Senior Researcher at the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand. His focus is on the interaction between hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and farmers, as well as Europeans, as expressed in rock art around the world. His DPhil focused on the acquisition of horses by creolised raider groups in the nineteenth-century, and his current research programme in Matatiele aims to redress the imbalance of this neglected former-apartheid region while training local community Field Technicians.

Notes

1 Our definition of ‘slaves’ is explained presently.

2 Nomenclature deriving from High Dutch, Cape Dutch, Farm Dutch (Boeretaal) and Afrikaans all ultimately relates to Dutch occupation of the Cape in 1652 and subsequent colonisation. British colonists after 1795 adopted many such words, for example Boschiesman from which Bushman is derived.

3 The progeny of relations between the immigrant and indigenous Khoe-San slaves were known as ‘Bastaard-Hottentots’ (Newton-King 1999: 117). As children, ‘Bastaard-Hottentots’ were usually raised similarly to their parents in unfree labour, from which they were legally entitled to leave after a certain period. This allowance of freedom, however, was not always observed (Penn 2005: 20) — yet further evidence of conditions from which one might wish to escape.

4 The exact number of slaves from each region is uncertain owing to missing records coupled with illegal slave dealing not sanctioned by the VOC (Armstrong and Worden 1989: 115). What is known is that during the period 1680–1731 48.5% of the 3283 slaves imported to the colony were from Madagascar, while 31.6% were from India and Indonesia. 19.8% were not identified (Armstrong and Worden 1989: 121).

5 Although pejorative, this term is useful for illustrating the interactions between immigrant and indigenous slaves.

6 The precise number of sites is at present unknowable because survey work is still very piecemeal. In our fieldwork in the Stormberg region, we found four painted rock shelters and in the Winterberg region a further five. Two additional shelters were found in the Windvogelberg to the east of the Winterberg, along with a single shelter in the Zuurberg. There are probably many more. This is not even taking into account the 100+ sites with horses in the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains.