Troublesome slaves were given free to VOC The way we were

WHEN Moses of the Cape, 30, slave of the wealthy Widow Groenewald of Jonkershoek, was prosecuted in April 1775 for hurling his knife and fatally injuring a fellow slave named Januarij (who was slow on the uptake because he didn’t understand the local languages), he claimed it was an accident.*

The case is interesting because it hints at the range of learned languages (creole Portuguese, Malay and simplified Dutch) spoken by Cape slaves in addition to their mother tongues, and also reveals something about working conditions during the Stellenbosch grape harvest.

The six slaves who formed the picking team on the fateful day were apparently working without the supervision of a knegt (overseer) or mandoor (slave foreman), who would have been expected to quell the spontaneous argument that arose about harnessing the oxen to the wagon containing the grapes.

Januarij’s inability to understand what Moses wanted of him caused the latter to explode – a telling example of how the frustrations and indignities suffered by slaves could cause them to “boil over”.

It’s also noteworthy that Moses came to his senses and the others kept their cool when they saw their comrade lying on the ground with blood spurting from his leg.

Instead of running away, Moses took off his kerchief and tried to bind the wound, and the team loaded him on to a wagon and took him to the house of their owner, where he lingered for some days.

The members of the Court of Justice did not believe it was an accident, however, and Moses was sentenced to be severely scourged and perform hard labour on Robben Island for 25 years (generally a life sentence), meanwhile assuming responsibility for the legal costs of his investigation and trial.

Slaves were not allowed to accumulate money or goods, so this liability fell to the Widow Groenewald. Having lost the services of two fit labourers as a result of Moses’s hot temper, she had no intention of increasing her deficits by paying his legal costs.

She therefore petitioned the Council of Policy to take him into VOC service as a Company slave and absolve her of further financial liability.

Her request was granted in July 1775, and was apparently not unusual.

Other burghers are known to have offered troublesome or dangerous slaves to the VOC free, knowing that they would be more closely watched by the Company slave mandoors than was possible on most rural holdings.

This was the case with the Widow Soermans, who believed that her slave Geduld of Boegis had evil intentions and petitioned the Company in 1780 to take him over so that she could be free of dread. Such offers were usually accepted, provided the slave was capable of hard work.

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