Too Close for Comfort: Master and Slave
Relations in the Colonial Cape
The effects of propinquity on the
nature and development of slavery in colonial Cape society were profound.
Unlike the large plantations that evolved in parts of the Americas, where
enslaved Africans could develop slave cultures without the incessant supervision
of whites, close contact between white masters and slaves in the Cape led to
constant supervision that created intimately oppressive conditions. Therefore,
slavery developed into an institution of extreme regulation and monitoring of
slaves for social control with the appearances of benign paternalism, which was
weaker in Cape Town than in the countryside.
These aforementioned intimately oppressive conditions entailed a form of
slavery mixing physical and psychological forms of domination, domestic affection
and the threat of violence, and paternalism and overseers to ensure slave
subordination while also creating conditions for more cultural and racial
mixing.
Conditions of white supervision
varied for slaves in both Cape Town and rural areas, depending on various
factors. The similarities persist, however, for all of the above in several key
ways. First, in both the countryside and Cape Town, the Dutch East India
Company, the VOC, never enforced its laws against concubinage, so white males
and ‘black’ female slaves produced mixed-race children throughout the colonial
period, partly because of the uneven sex ratios for whites.[1]
But despite the prevalence of miscegenation, there was no “mulatto escape
hatch” for Cape slaves and slave children of white fathers, meaning few slave
women gained freedom from relationships with white males. Few of their children
with white males were manumitted or given burghership.[2] Nevertheless,
the frequency of interracial sex between white men and slaves exemplifies another
use of white males controlling the bodies and sexual freedom of female slaves,
adding another layer of force for social control, which can be seen in Willem
Menssink’s penchant for sex with his slave women.[3] Like
many other male settlers, it was not unusual to have sex with slave women,
although the church never condoned it.[4]
In addition to sex, white males often
controlled their slaves across the Cape because the household slept under the
same roof. A shortage of living space led to higher amount of intimacy between
slaves and masters, rural and urban.[5] Indeed,
even in Cape Gentry homes, slaves often lived inside the house.[6] Thus,
slaves were not only vulnerable to slaveholders’ sexual power, but also within
reach of them and their families, decreasing chances for autonomy and,
especially in rural areas, limiting socialization with other enslaved peoples
on neighboring small farms.[7]
Moreover, slaves in both rural areas and Cape Town were vulnerable to physical
violence and the threat of it, although slaveholders who took the law into
their own hands with cruel punishments of their slaves instead of relying on
the VOC to chastise them could be shunned by Cape society and penalized by the
Company.[8]
Despite the shared characteristics
of slavery in Cape Town and rural areas, the peculiar institution developed
differently from slavery in Cape Town in multiple ways. For instance, slaves on
Cape farmsteads outside of the arable southwest, on the frontier or small
estates, were often very few in numbers on their plantations.[9]
These Cape slaves on small estates would then mostly socialize with their white
masters who oversaw them personally or had a knecht or mandoor.
Regardless, slaves on these small farms outside of the arable Cape were very
close with their masters, and, in some cases, with Khoikhoi laborers and women,
often the only available sexual partners for the mostly male enslaved
workforce.[10]
As mentioned previously, the mixed-race offspring of slaves and their masters
were usually not freed, but a Creole culture based on the Indische culture of VOC holdings in the Indian Ocean world and
European culture developed on larger estates. This was aided by the larger
estates featuring more slaves from common origins, facilitating communication
and socialization among slaves and developing a unique slave culture influenced
by European culture, too.[11] Larger
estates also featured more skilled slave craftsmen, likely better treated.[12]
While being spread out in small numbers
with their white masters and some Khoikhoi workers, rural slaves also lacked
privacy needed to maintain their own family units, being seen as part of the
patriarchal family unit as perpetual children in need of white paternalism.[13]
Despite cases intense domestic affection that could arise from paternalism
between master and slave, their membership in the family included the master’s
children having the right of beating slaves, indicating the unequal and
hierarchical structure of master-slave relations embedded within the family.[14] Rural
slave resistance, and slave resistance generally throughout the Cape, was
likely undermined by slave diversity, since the population came from all over
the Indian Ocean and linguistic hurdles and ethnic rivalry may have caused
slave resistance to take on a more individualized form.[15] However,
some forms of group resistance appear in slaves running away beyond the
frontier to join Khoikhoi groups or to inaccessible areas to form small maroon
bands, which are just some of the options available to rural slaves. Drosters, or gangs of fugitive slaves,
such as the one Pieter of Madagascar was part of in early 18th
century Land van Waveren, were also common forms of slave resistance on the
frontier.[16]
Overall, slaves in the countryside,
unfortunately, were mostly concentrated in smaller farms, slept in the same
home with the master, and because central authority weakened the further away
from Cape Town one was, slaveholders could use more violence or brutality as
they saw fit without much control from VOC authority. Unlike their urban
counterparts or those in bondage on large estates, their options for
socialization were primarily with European masters and Khoikhoi, so slaves and
trekboers both adopted elements of Khoi culture, such as a pastoralist economy,
or their Khoi-styled shelters.[17]
The overly close quarters between slave and free ultimately developed into the perfect
conditions for the use of paternalism as well as brute force to discipline and
subordinate slaves in the Cape.
Similar to conditions of slavery in the
rural Cape, urban slaves, who comprised a significant portion of all slaves in
the Cape, were also under close regulation by colonial society.[18] Brutality,
public beatings, and widespread abuse of slaves were common, particularly for
Company slaves housed in the Slave Lodge, which also functioned as a brothel.[19]
Company slaves, however, were not representative of all slaves in the Cape,
particularly because of the draconian measures taken by the Company to control
them with overseers since they were organized into large work gangs for various
forms of labor in Cape Town.[20]
Company slaves gradually became a very tiny proportion of the total slave
population, hitting rock-bottom by 1795, the year of the first British
occupation, with almost all reported slaves being privately owned.[21] Before
the Company’s decline, the VOC managed their slaves through overseers, often
slaves themselves.[22]
The Company also relied on Kaffers, Eastern convicts from their Asian
possessions, imported as slaves to monitor, police, and apprehend Cape Town’s
slave population.[23]
Like rural areas and privately-owned slaves, miscegenation at the Lodge was
also frequent. In fact, an estimate for mixed-race children born there in 1671
was ¾ having mixed ancestry.[24]
The case of slaves at the Lodge, however, were slightly different in that sex
ratios approached a balance, so these additional women were targets for
European bachelors and sailors employed by the VOC.[25]
Despite the increased surveillance of the Company’s slaves, they were still
able to interact with each other and socialize with other urban populations,
such as males seeking prostitution, or with other slaves and residents of Cape
Town, so their enslavement differed in some key respects from the rural slaves’
on small estates living inside the homes of their masters.
Besides the Company’s slaves in Cape
Town, the rest of the urban slave population enjoyed comparatively much more
freedom. Though attempts to limit and monitor their movement and keep them
under the paternalistic slave-master relationship were utilized, urban slaves
were often rented by their masters, giving them a degree of mobility and
autonomy from their masters.[26] Slaves
in Cape Town hired out were also more likely to pay for their own
accommodation, providing additional distance between themselves and the
paternalism of domestic slavery associated with living in the same home as
slaveholders.[27]
Predictably, these urban slaves had far more opportunities to mingle with
others in Cape Town’s markets and their various types of work led to increased
chances of socialization and occasions for horizontal acculturation with other
subordinate peoples in Cape society.[28]
These relatively mobile, unfettered Capetonian slaves also did not have to deal
with an efficient or strong police force in Cape Town, allowing another degree
of relative freedom.[29] Furthermore,
slaves’ relative autonomy surfaced in the frequency of slave theft of white
property and forming their own sub-cultures and spaces within the city visiting
taverns.[30] Urban slaves also resisted attempts under
British rule for Christian conversion and moral education, preferring Islam,
which spread rapidly because the port received Muslim slaves, exiles and
convicts from India and Southeast Asia, exemplifying the cosmopolitan culture
of Cape Town and slave society.[31]
Naturally, there were multiple measures
taken by Cape Town’s slaveholders and the government to curtail the freedom of
movement enjoyed by urban slaves. For instance, Cape Town’s curfew laws
attempted to reduce slave autonomy and retain control of the streets for
European authority.[32]
The aforementioned Kaffers served as auxiliary police as well, assisting in the
maintenance of the social order and symbolizing slave disunity and internal
stratification.[33]
The threat of sale and the public military rituals and presence in Cape Town
also served as deterrents to slave autonomy and resistance in the city, showing
the powers of colonial authority authority in urban space.[34]
The threat of violent punishment and public beatings strengthened white
authority by adding spectacle to what in the countryside would have been
largely private affairs of disciplining slaves.[35] Although
the authority of slaveholders was augmented in some ways in the city,
slaveholders of Cape Town lacked direct political power because of elite
divisions and British colonialism introduced ameliorative legislation to limit
the extent of cruel punishment, thereby improving the lot of slaves in the 19th
century.[36]
In summation, slavery in both rural and
urban Cape society clearly depended on the degree of propinquity to imbue it
with alternative forms of social control. The high degree of paternalism,
evident in the smallholdings of rural Cape society, was one form of social
control that also continued to rely on physical coercion and intimidation. The
Company slaves in Cape Town received less paternalism and more of the direct,
constant physical, sexual, and supervision that characterized slavery on the
large plantations of the Caribbean or the American South, partly because of the
large numbers of slaves organized into specific work crews. Other urban slaves,
exemplified by those whose labor slaveholders rented out, were more likely to
live outside of their master’s accommodations and socialize with other slaves
and urbanites across the city, further developing slave sub-cultures influenced
by the diversity of slave origins as well as European culture. However, in all
areas of slave distribution in the Cape, cultural and racial miscegenation
occurred, extending to the creation of a new language, Afrikaans, a development
that could only arise from oppressively close relations and contact between the
masters and the slaves. Thus, the close relations of master and slave imbued
slavery in the Cape with a façade of benevolence and ensured widespread
miscegenation and cultural mixing through paternalism and factors such as
location in the Cape.
Bibliography
Armstrong,
J. and Worden, N. “The Slaves, 1652-1834,” in Elphick and Giliomee (eds), The Shaping of South African Society ( 2nd
ed., Cape Town, 1989).
Bank,
Andrew. The Decline of Urban Slavery at
the Cape, 1806-1843 (Cape Town, 1991).
Elphick,
R. and Shell, R. “Intergroup Relations: Khoikhoi, settlers, slaves and free blacks,
1652-1795,” in Elphick and Giliomee (eds), The
Shaping of South African Society (Cape Town, 1989).
Penn,
Nigel. “The Fatal Passion of Brewer Menssink: Sex, beer and politics in a Cape
family, 1694-1722,” in Rogues, Rebels and
Runaways (Cape Town, 1999).
“The
wife, the farmer and the farmer’s slaves: adultery and murder on a frontier
farm in the early eighteenth century Cape,” Kronos:
Journal of Cape History, 28, Nov. 2002.
Ross,
Robert. Cape of Torments: Slaves and
Resistance in South Africa (London, 1983).
Shell,
Robert. “The Family and Slavery at the Cape, 1680-1808,” in W. James and M.
Simons (eds), The Angry Divide: Social
and Economic History of the Western Cape (Cape Town, 1989).
“The
Tower of Babel: The Slave Trade and Creolization at the Cape, 1652-1834,” in E.
Eldredge and F. Morton, (eds), Slavery in
South Africa: Captive Labour on the Dutch Frontier (Boulder, Colorado,
1994), pp.11-39.
Worden,
Nigel. Slavery in Dutch South Africa (Cambridge,
1985).
[1] R. Elphick and R. Shell,
“Intergroup Relations: Khoikhoi, settlers, slaves and free blacks, 1652-1795,”
in Elphick and Giliomee (eds), The
Shaping of South African Society (2nd ed., Cape Town, 1989),
194.
[2] Ibid, 203.
[3] Nigel Penn, “The Fatal Passion
of Brewer Menssink: Sex, beer and politics in a Cape family, 1694-1722,” in Rogues, Rebels and Runaways (Cape Town,
1999), 18.
[4] Ibid, 19.
[5] Robert Shell, “The Family and
Slavery at the Cape, 1680-1808,” in W. James and M. Simons (eds), The Angry Divide: Social and Economic
History of the Western Cape (Cape Town, 1989), 26.
[6] Ibid, 25.
[7] Ibid.
[10] Elphick and Shell, “Intergroup
Relations: Khoikhoi, settlers, slaves and free blacks, 1652-1795,” 200.
[15] Robert Shell, “The Tower of
Babel: The Slave Trade and Creolization at the Cape, 1652-1834,” in E. Eldredge
and F. Morton, (eds), Slavery in South
Africa: Captive Labour on the Dutch Frontier (Boulder, Colorado, 1994), 21.
[16] Nigel
Penn, “The wife, the
farmer and the farmer’s slaves: adultery and murder on a frontier farm in the
early eighteenth century Cape,” Kronos:
Journal of Cape History, 28, Nov. 2002, 14.
[17] Elphick
and Shell,
“Intergroup Relations: Khoikhoi, settlers, slaves and free blacks, 1652-1795,” 227-228.
[19] Elphick and Shell, “Intergroup
Relations: Khoikhoi, settlers, slaves and free blacks, 1652-1795,”195.
[21] J.
Armstrong and N. Worden, “The
Slaves, 1652-1834,” in Elphick and Giliomee (eds), The Shaping of South African Society (2nd ed., Cape
Town, 1989), 129.
[24] [24] Elphick
and Shell,
“Intergroup Relations: Khoikhoi, settlers, slaves and free blacks, 1652-1795,”
195.
[25] Ibid, 198.
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