Casting off the shackles
A group of dedicated scholars at Stellenbosch University has compiled a database that gives a detailed picture of the Cape slave population, thus enabling for the first time the descendants of slaves to trace their histories, writes
In the peak of summer in 1834 a slave named Sabina watched through the window as an official-looking man in a top hat arrived at the house where she worked. He announced he was there to do a “slave valuation” and took down the bare details of her life. She was 48 years of age, F for female, and worked as a housemaid in the Cape District in the Cape Colony. In the Somerset District, the labourer recorded only as Maart was also inscribed into the records. The man wrote “age 22” in his book and the value attached to Maart was 150 pounds. In just a few months, more than 37,000 slaves would fall under the gaze of the “appraisers”, who moved about the Cape Colony from household to household, farm to farm. Their job was to attach “valuations” to the thousands of slaves in the colony who were on the brink of having their legal status changed to that of apprentice.
In theory, they would still work for their former “owners” for four years — but as unpaid apprentices — while the former owners would receive compensation based on those valuations.
Back in 1652, weeks after Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape to open a rest station for ships trading in the East, he began writing letters pleading with the Heeren XVII, his bosses back in Amsterdam, to get him slaves.
The local Khoi people, who were nomadic, refused to be subjugated by the European settlers who had invaded the land which they needed for grazing. Uprisings ensued and the Europeans decided it was too volatile to try enslave the local populations.
He asked for permission to procure slaves through the international trade in human labour, and thus began a brutal era at the Cape Colony: many died en route on crowded ships, while those who arrived on the shores of the Cape had every aspect of their lives controlled by their owner. Given a new name, told where to sleep, what to eat and what hard labour to perform, harsh physical punishment became a part of daily life.
Emancipation in the Cape came in 1838, four years after the valuations of Sabina and Maart. Fast-forward almost 200 years, and a group of dedicated scholars at Stellenbosch University has — after painstaking work that took a decade — created the first-ever slave emancipation data set from the former Cape Colony.
Sifting through slave valuation rolls and slave registers stored in the Cape Archives and compensation data held by the University College London, the team generated data that provides the first overview of 37,411 slave valuations and a detailed picture of the Cape slave population’s demographic composition. It also uncovers the “uneven allocation of compensation” and how this shaped the economy thereafter — shifting capital from the countryside to the city.
They could be obtained and brought very cheaply from Madagascar, together with rice, in one voyage
Jan van Riebeeck
On obtaining slaves
The data set, created by academics Kate Ekama, Johan Fourie, Hans Heese and Lisa-Cheree Martin, forms part of the Biography of an Uncharted People project at LEAP, which is the university’s Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past.
“What’s exciting about the data set is that it is micro-level data, based on the individuals who were enslaved,” Ekama told the Sunday Times this week.
This deep-dive into the demographics of the slave population at the time of emancipation creates scope for more fascinating research.
One of the most striking changes that the database reveals is that by the time emancipation occurred, the majority of the slaves at the Cape had been born in the Cape. The population was “self-reproducing”.
At the time of emancipation, more than 80% of slaves were recorded as born in the Cape. Tracing Cape slave origins in the 17th century and early 18th century shows that the Dutch East India Company was, back then, relying on the importation of enslaved people who are given place names from destinations like Ceylon, Bengal and Batavia.
In 1807, though slave labour was not abolished, the international slave trade across the ocean was. Because by then most of the slaves were born in the Cape, the youthfulness of the population becomes clearer in the records, with a large proportion of children and youths. The medians also reflect youthfulness: the women have a median age of 18 and the men a median of 25.
The newly captured database also reveals the stereotypes that prevailed and the resultant impact this had on valuations.
“The slave owners had a hierarchy and some were considered more valuable than others due to their skills. There was, for example, this idea of the ‘Malay artisan’.”
Many slaves brought to the Cape were skilled artisans, such as silversmiths, milliners, cobblers, singers, masons and tailors. Others were captured and sold as slaves as punishment for their political views.
By emancipation, Cape-born slaves were assigned a higher value. This finding that slaves from Southeast Asia were assigned lower valuations than Cape-born slaves stands in contrast to the findings of earlier literature, say the researchers.
Their work also shows how patterns of capitalism changed: “The largest capital owners before emancipation — the slave owners and the mortgage owners — lost substantial amounts as a result of the compensation payment system. The middlemen,
Cape Town merchants, who facilitated the payment process, seem to have been the biggest beneficiaries.”
With such valuable information to be gleaned from the records, why did it take so long before historians collated the information on every individual slave? There are two reasons for this, says Ekama.
The one is technological. Historians are now able to process data “in ways that were unthinkable not even that long ago”, says Ekama. “Computing power has made an enormous shift.”
The other reason is the way history has been portrayed in the past. The way history is written has changed dramatically; before there were only Van Riebeecks, no Sabinas and Maarts. “There has been a major change in ideas of who is included in history.”
The new data set opens doors to many other potential research papers and how emancipation really changed the lives of former slaves.
History has portrayed 1834 as the instant liberation of people in bondage, but as the four-year “apprenticeship” era began, little actually changed for slaves other than their legal status.
“On December 1 1834 the enslaved in the British Cape Colony were formally manumitted. This important date did not, however, bring them immediate freedom,” note the researchers.
“Formal slavery ended, but the period of apprenticeship that followed was hardly distinguishable from what had come before.”
From 1834 to 1838 the slaves continued to labour for their former masters with no pay and could be bought and sold in much the same way as before.
On December 1 1838 the apprenticeship period ended and from then on they could move at will, leaving their former masters if they wished and selling their labour to whomever they chose.
A few moved to mission stations but most had little choice of work other than the kind they had done when enslaved — and little or no opportunity to purchase land.
“There is a lot of scope to better understand how the system of slavery ended,” says Ekama.
“It had lasted for almost 200 years at the Cape and then it was dismantled by the British in only a few years.”
In the transition period from slavery ending and wage labour beginning, patterns were set that shaped the development of capitalism in the country.
The enslaved had been used as collateral on mortgages. “They were considered capital that could be pledged to raise a loan,” says Ekama.
From 1834, when the status of slave changed to that of apprentice, they were no longer “property”.
According to the dean at St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town, Michael Weeder, writing on forced removals and the roots thereof in 1823, the sum of money sourced from slaves that served as collateral was 12,357,000 guilders. In that same year, 4,089 slaves were pledged.
“Yet, while the slave body was an item of fiscal value, the management of a slave-based economy utilised the gruesome concept of punishment as a spectacle,” he writes. “The power of the colonisers was literally inscribed on the bodies of slaves by the branding of runaway slaves; or by hanging from the gallows or by the various ingenious means of public torture.
“The Slave Code regulated the visibility (and invisibility) of slaves by the stipulation of a curfew.”
Slaves were treated as property in inheritance and territorial acquisitions, too.
For author Jackie Loots, who wrote several newspaper columns and a book on slavery, the new research is part of a welcome zeitgeist of growing awareness of slave history at the Cape.
She told the Sunday Times this week: “I have always been aware of the limitations in trying to trace one’s slave origins. It’s always been only a lucky few because of a similarity in a name, but generally there is a lack of family trees and this is obviously going to help.”
Weeder says the transatlantic slave trade has received far more prominence.
“Academics and the people of Harlem in America have had so much agency in embracing their stories, so the transatlantic slave trade has dominated the narrative,” he says. “But the slave trade across the Indian Ocean and the slave history of Cape Town has been underplayed.”
The new data set might go a long way to changing that. Says Ekama: “What we’re hoping is that it’s a resource for people who are tracing their history — finding ancestors and pursuing family history and genealogy.”
Some were considered more valuable than others due to their skills. There was, for example, this idea of the ‘Malay artisan’