Making sense of slave records in WC Archives

AS PROFESSOR Nigel Worden has written, there are many oblique references to slaves among the extensive VOC records housed in the Western Cape Archives, but you have to work hard to make sense of them.*

This is because the VOC (Dutch East India Company) was a commercial company primarily concerned with trade and with the free burgher population it had underwritten since 1657. Slaves were units of labour or inheritable possessions.

The Company’s records were selective and contained what was deemed to be useful. Slaves appear by name in crime records, random slave lodge lists, memorials (usually as candidates for manumission) and as assets in business transactions and inventories. They appear less usefully as numbers in census returns and population statistics.

Kinship links (the names of parents, siblings, children or partners), although occasionally revealed in passing, are generally absent. Another disappointment concerns the records of the fiscal’s office, which were not preserved.

A collection of Slave Office documents in the Roeland Street Archives seems promising but it dates to the British administration, specifically 1816-1834, when slavery at the Cape was 150 years old and had entered a decline. Nevertheless, the large handwritten Slave Office registers contain details about thousands of slaves, some imported from overseas but many born into bondage at the Cape.

Separate registers were compiled for each district, with entries arranged alphabetically under the names of owners. There were columns for the name, sex, birthplace and occupation of every slave in the colony.

The bureaucracy involved in keeping track of the births, deaths, sales, mortgages, transfers and manumissions was time-consuming, and more changes had to be made when owners migrated, married, became insolvent or died. In addition, notes about escapes, judicial decrees and special testamentary provisions were also supposed to be added.

Omissions and discrepancies were bound to occur. Writing about population statistics in 1818, when there were said to be 31 984 slaves in the colony (12 511 of them female), HT Colebrooke noted that while most owners reported births among their slaves to avoid losing them for non-compliance, they didn’t bother when infants died soon after childbirth, skewing data on the fertility of female slaves.

These rates were important, as there had been no new imports of slaves since 1808, much to the colonists’ dismay. They complained that the slave population would decline, while officials insisted that local births would exceed deaths.

The latter were right. Thousands of infant slaves were registered post-1816, boosting slave numbers to more than 36 000 at the time of abolition in 1834.

● N. Worden, Cape slaves in the paper empire of the VOC (Kronos, 40 (1), 2014).