Book 2: The Impact and Limitations of Colonialism - Chapter 3 - What is Your Name, Age, and Whose Slave are You? by Rayda Jacobs

From the book: Book 2: The Impact and Limitations of Colonialism commissioned by The Department of Education

In1652, three ships belonging to the Dutch East India Company - the Vereenigde Oost-Indisch Compagnie (VOC) - sailed into Table Bay. The young commander, Jan van Riebeeck, was eager to establish a refreshment station for passing ships. Although Europeans had visited the Cape before, 1652 was the year in which they took permanent possession of the Cape peninsula. The indigenous people at the time were Khoi pastoralists and San hunter-gatherers.

The VOC needed cattle. Initially, they bartered for them and for other food. The Khoi and San, however, refused to labour for the settlers, and slaves were imported from outside the Cape.

The first group of slaves arrived in the ship Amersfoort in March 1658. By the time the Amersfoort slaves reached their destination, so many had died at sea that only 170 were left alive, of whom many were very ill.

The majority of the slaves were young boys and girls, and it was felt that they would not be of much use for the next four or five years.

A second group - 228 in number - arrived in the Hasselt in May 1658. By 1717 there were 2 523 privately-owned slaves in the colony. In the same year the rulers of the VOC in the Netherlands questioned whether slavery should continue. A VOC Council member, D.M. Pasques de Chavonnes, wanted slavery to end and be replaced with immigrant labour from Europe. Another Council member argued against it; he did not believe that labourers from overseas would be any better or more useful than slaves. His thinking was that it did not cost very much to feed and clothe a slave, so slaves would be less expensive to maintain. Two other VOC members argued that slaves were more easily controlled. As a result, the VOC continued to import slaves to the Cape. By 1795, when VOC rule ended, there were 16 839 privately-owned slaves at the Cape. By the time slavery ended in 1834, there were 36 274 slaves.

What was it like to be a slave in the Cape Colony?

Many of the slaves came from Madagascar, some from Mozambique, the East African coast, India and the islands of the East Indies such as Sumatra, Java, the Celebes, Ternate and Timor. They had been snatched away from family, friends and their familiar environment, and become the property of strangers. They were purchased and transported, treated as commodities, not allowed to marry, and had no rights to their own children. They could cohabit but not marry. They could not possess property. They could not choose their employers or what work they would perform. Their production and reproduction was controlled. Children born to slaves were also slaves. The cycle repeated itself. Slaves could not even keep their own names. They were stripped of the names they were born with and given new ones. New names often showed the origin of the slave - for example, Abraham van Malabar, Meij van Bengal, Willem van der Caab. This last name indicated that the slave was born in the Cape. Calendar names were also given, such as February, April and September. Then there were the classical names, often after an emperor or some mythical figure - Alexander, Hector, Titus, Hannibal. Old Testament names like Adam, Moses, Abraham and David were also given. Some slaves were named after an owner, or after the one who had fathered the child.

Others were given nicknames such as Dikbeen, Pasop, Fortuijn. These names were very demeaning and designed to keep the slave in his place.

The life of a slave was one of servitude and uncertainty. A slave could be sold many times over. A female slave named China was sold for 15 silver rupees in India in 1768 when she was 9 or 10 years old. She was renamed Rosa, and sold four more times before she finally became the property of an owner at the Cape in 1775. Often families were purposely split up and sold to different owners; some parents never saw their children again. This was very hard for the slaves. In many cases, when the owner died, the slaves were inherited by the owner's children.

Little is known about the personal lives of slaves - who they were, how they had come to be in the Cape, their real feelings about their subservient positions and the white masters who owned them. No one was interested in the life of a slave. Writers and visitors to the Cape who did write something about them, mostly described their appearance or their work. They did not speak to the slaves and ask them about their lives. There are no personal accounts by the slaves themselves, except for Katie Jacobs, a former slave who at age 96 was interviewed by a journalist in 1910.

Artists at the time preferred to paint landscapes rather than people, and there are few pictures of slaves.

A kitchen girl or a wet nurse working inside the house might have a better life or better conditions than someone working outside in the fields. On the other hand, those who did not relish being under the feet of the master's wife might have preferred outside duty under an overseer. The wife, as we will later see, was someone to be reckoned with. Her treatment of female slaves depended very much on the looks and age of the slave girl.

Nevertheless, there are clues from other sources. Many slaves were charged with committing crimes and brought to trial. Court records are a good way to catch a glimpse into the lives of some slaves. There are details of the crime, of other slaves, of the owner and his family, of living conditions, and a sense of the time in which they lived. But trial records have their limitations. Interrogation is stressful. A slave in court was either there as a witness or on trial, defending himself. The courthouse was not the best environment for accurate information, or even for obtaining all of the facts.

How did slaves respond to their status?

Slavery was a cruel and violent system. Did the slaves ever retaliate? In spite of the seemingly unlimited power of slave owners, slaves did not entirely accept their condition. They resisted their enslavement in various ways.

Throughout the Dutch period at the Cape, no major rebellions took place. Two small-scale uprisings did take place, however. The first happened in 1808 when two slaves persuaded 300 farm slaves from the Koeberg region to march to Cape Town and demand their freedom. The second took place in 1825 on a remote farm in the Bokkeveld, when a number of slaves led by Galant van der Caab killed the farmer and some members of his family.

These events marked an important change. Unlike the slave, Reijnier (see Chapter 2) and many of his counterparts, who had chosen to run away, these slaves remained in the Cape and demanded their rights. We know from the quotation at the beginning of this chapter about the reasons that Galant van der Caab and other slaves revolted. Rather than slavery itself, they complained about ill treatment by their master and his failure to provide them with food and clothes.

The reasons there were no larger rebellions included the difficulty of planning without being detected, the dispersal of slaves throughout the colony, and the differences in the languages spoken by the slaves. The minor revolts referred to above never amounted to much, as the details were betrayed at the last minute by fellow slaves. Nor was the rarity of rebellions unique to the Cape slave society. In general, open rebellion has not been the most common form of resistance to slave conditions, or other forms of domination and oppression for that matter.

Other than outright rebellion, though, there were other and more common forms of resistance to slavery. They included setting fire to the crops and property of slave owners, as well as physical attacks on owners and overseers. In other instances, slaves protested their conditions by stealing from the masters or by committing suicide and thereby denying the master the use of their labour. Resistance might also be in the form of breaking farm equipment. Food poisoning of masters was an important form of resistance among domestic slaves.

Running away was the most common form of resistance. It is recorded that as early as March 1655, a slave from Madagascar escaped and was never recaptured. In return for tobacco, the Khoi sometimes brought backthe escapees. In this case, however, promises of a large amount of tobacco and some copper did not convince the Khoi to search for the escaped slave. Although in some instances slave escapes were comments against slavery in general, often they were related to specific events such as too much work or excessive punishment.

Some escaped slaves were not very lucky. They were recaptured and faced a variety of punishments for running away. Indeed, running away carried huge risks for escapees. Fugitives had to contend with the hot pursuit of those who sought to claim the rewards placed on their heads. Death was also a distinct possibility, not only because the environment to which they ran was unfamiliar, but also because the land was dry and inhospitable and offered little to survive on. On the whole, however, it was only a minority of slaves, under certain conditions, who braved the risks of running away.

As runaways, slaves had several difficult choices to make in order to survive. One option was to leave the Cape entirely and join with other groups living on the boundaries of the colonial society. As the colony expanded, runaway slaves became part of a group of fugitives who for one reason or another were on the run from the colony. Cases of slaves stowing away on ships to faraway destinations were not uncommon.

In other instances, runaway slaves created maroon communities of their own at the edge of the colony, though never escaping entirely. (See Chapter 2 for a definition of maroon.) Probably one of the most well-known communities was established at Hangklip in the early nineteenth century. Here, the fugitives lived inside a cave to which there were only two openings, both of them difficult to reach. One of them was almost inaccessible, as the entrance was surrounded with rocks and the tide washed into it. The community lived off what they could find in the sea, and were well acquainted with weather conditions and low and high tides, which would give them the best times to enter or leave the cave. Boats approached from time to time, and the maroons were sometimes joined by sailors and explorers who might have brought provisions with them. In order to survive, however, they were still somewhat dependent on the slave colonial society and were therefore never completely cut off from it. Protected by the inaccessibility of the cave, this maroon community survived for over a century until the formal abolition of slavery.

What can records of slave trials tell us?

The trial of recaptured slave, Reijnier, in 1749 provides important insights into various aspects of the slave condition and resistance at the Cape. The trial record tells us several things. It speaks first of a relationship between two people, Reijnier and Manika. We know that they had children, but that they were not married.

Slaves in the Cape were not officially allowed to marry until 1823. It must also be remembered that slaves were given no Christian instruction. In the few cases where Christian education was given, it was confined to two commandments - thou shalt not steal, and thou shalt not kill. Slave couples had to be Christian to be married. Slaves also had to have their owner's permission to marry.

Manika's testimony speaks about the cruel treatment of her daughter, Sabina, by the slave owner's wife. According to Manika, the beatings happened without provocation. Why? Was Krugel's wife jealous of the young girl? Could she have caught the eye of the master?

We also know from Reijnier's name that he was from Madagascar, an import to the Cape. As a slave he was someone else's possession and, like most slaves at the Cape, had few rights. But he was also a father whose daughter had been violently assaulted. Whether he spent time at the Hangklip maroon community and moved with the local gangs is unknown. We do know that he hid and lived in the mountains past the Berg River. We also know that he managed to evade his pursuers for 22 years - no small feat for a slave. All these suggest that in spite of the best efforts by slave masters to regard slaves as their property, slaves like Reijnier and others kept reminding them that they were also human.

Did men's and women's experiences of slavery differ?

Cruel mistreatment of young female slaves by owners' wives was not unusual. A master's wife often considered a young female slave, especially if she was of mixed-race parentage or fair-skinned, as a threat to her position. The result was beatings and abuse of the slave.

The brutal death of the young slave woman at the hands of a Stellenbosch farmer's wife raises the general issue of sexual relations between slaves and the non-slave, white population of the Cape. The past is peppered with liaisons between slave owners - both male and female - and their slaves.

Take the case of Maria Mouton, who had an affair with her slave, Titus of Bengal, in 1774. Although this had happened with Maria's consent, Titus was severely punished. By crossing both the slavery and racial boundaries of the colonial society, Titus was sentenced by the Cape Court to be impaled in public.

Scholars of the Cape colonial slave society have shown that European settlers, while punished, were not dealt with as harshly for the same sexual crimes. There is no known case of a European being sentenced to either death or banishment for rape or sexual relations with slaves.

The case of Jan van Batavia and Mrs Bruel is a good example of the racialised colonial slave society. Jan had reportedly had sex with a white girl. He was severely flogged with a sjambok and then banished to Mauritius. In addition to the flogging and banishment, he was to remain chained for 20 years. In contrast, Mrs. Bruel, who had been a willing participant and equally committed an offence by having sex across the colour line, had not faced a criminal proceeding. Instead, she was admonished by the church and was not allowed to partake of the communion. In her case, the affair was considered to be no more than an indiscretion.

How did the situation change after the British took control?

The Cape came under British control in 1806. Laws were passed in London in 1807 to end the slave trade, although it was still legal to own slaves. By the 1820s, under the "amelioration laws" there was a move towards improving conditions for slaves. Laws were passed limiting the number of hours a slave should work. They also set out the amount of clothing and food that slave owners had to provide. Slaves were allowed to marry, and owners were forbidden to sell young children separately from their mothers.

Slaves were given the right to buy their own freedom. Some slaves were also given a basic education. The punishment of slaves was controlled by new laws, and slaves were encouraged to report any abuse of these laws to an official Guardian of Slaves, appointed in 1826 (renamed the Protector of Slaves in 1830). The Guardian worked with assistants in the rural areas to make sure that the laws were obeyed. These laws, however, came too late for a slave like Reijnier. Nor can we know whether the laws worked as well as they were meant to do.

Conclusion

Today, we still see the lingering effects of slavery. Slavery brought together people from diverse backgrounds in an intimate setting. Slaves came from different parts of the world, from different cultures and with different identities. In the home of the settler, master and slave became acquainted with one another. They came to know one another's ways, one another's beliefs and one another's languages. The slaves were the cooks, the seamstresses and the artisans. Today we have a cuisine, an architecture, a music, a poetic language. Many early Afrikaans writings were found in the Arabic script of the slaves.

This legacy also gave rise to the false identity of the Afrikaners, a term that indicates someone who is “locally born”. In the early nineteenth century this term was used for slaves born of European fathers and slave mothers. The term Afrikaner should actually mean everyone born into Cape society, however unpopular that proposition may at first appear.