Slavery In South Africa

Captive Labor On The Dutch Frontier

Elizabeth Eldredge, Fred Morton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000311556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica africana

South African slavery differs from slavery practiced in other frontier zones of European settlement in that the settlers enslaved indigenes as a supplement to and eventually as a replacement for imported slave labor. On the expanding frontier, Dutch-speaking farmers increasingly met their labor needs by conducting slave raids, arming African slave

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Slavery and South African Historiography

Fred Morton

Though attention to south African slavery began more than a half century ago with the appearance of Isobel Edwards' Towards Emancipation: a Study of South African Slavery, scholars have yet to determine the extent to which the institution was practiced. By and large, the study of slavery has been restricted to the western Cape, where in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Dutch East India Company imported slaves from other parts of Africa, Madagascar, and the East Indies to work for company employees and private grain and wine estate owners. The most recent, and substantial, published studies of south African slavery are concerned with slaves imported into the Cape under Dutch rule and conclude with the abolition of legal slavery (1834) under British rule.¹ The possibility that slavery existed outside the western Cape on any significant scale, or that south Africans themselves were systematically enslaved, has not been entertained until recently.² Yet, the studies in this volume demonstrate that thousands in the interior were indeed captured, traded, or held as chattel. On the expanding "Dutch frontier,"³ slave raiding was part of a process of dispossessing indigenes of their cattle and land for commercial gain. Frontier slaving began at least a century before legal abolition and continued decades after. As early as the 1730s, commandos captured Khoisan on the western Cape frontier and bound them to servitude; and as late as the 1870s on the fringes of the Transvaal, slave raids on SeTswana-, SeSotho-, and Nguni-speaking peoples were conducted. Along the moving horizon of the "Great Trek," peoples living in the eastern and northern Cape, Orange Free State, and Natal were attacked and seized. Most of the slave raiders were Boers aided by African allies, and most of the Africans they captured were children. Young captive laborers, often bound to Boer households and raised to adulthood without parents or kin, helped to sustain and consolidate the advancing Dutch frontier. They served as herders, hunters, artisans, farmers, drivers, domestics, messengers, and in some cases even as raiders themselves. The neglect of their history deserves comment in its own right, especially given that information about slavery on the frontier has long been available in published sources.

A volume such as this is overdue in part because the literature on slavery has limited itself in comparing the Cape only with other European colonies. Since the 1950s a growing literature on comparative slavery has described how slaves, especially as plantation laborers, were integrated into the mercantile system.⁴ Once Cape slavery itself began to receive systematic scrutiny with the appearance of studies by Greenstein (1973), Böeseken (1977), and Armstrong (1979), discussion emphasized the Cape's similarities with the southern United States, where plantation slave labor made possible the development of an expanding frontier of white settlement.⁵ Cape slavery seemingly lacked a parallel in Africa, notwithstanding a few articles to the contrary by Shell, and attention to the growing literature on African slavery was thus averted.⁶ In certain respects, Cape slavery was like slavery in other contemporary European colonies and unlike slavery in other parts of the African continent. For example, plantation slaves were imported there by water rather than by land, and slaves were rarely brought from the interior for plantation work or for export. Yet, though slavery in the environs of Cape Town resembled plantation slavery elsewhere, slavery on the Cape frontier did not. For, as will become apparent, the Cape's Dutch-speaking frontiersmen and settlers captured and traded indigenes, rather than imported slaves from overseas. And, in contrast to the Western Hemisphere, where conquistadores, planters, and mine developers readily enslaved or drove off Amerindians as they seized their territories, south Africa's frontier was entered initially by Dutch-speaking hunters, traders, and pastoralists, who moved and settled often amidst equally, if not more, powerful African communities. In order to satisfy their demand for slave labor, they promoted conflicts among Africans and cultivated African allies rather than depended on a strategy of outright conquest. Behind the settled western Cape, slavery expanded along the frontier as an African institution.

Three generations of frontier historians have passed over the slavery question, combing as they were the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for incipient forces that ultimately shaped modern South Africa. Europeanization, race and ethnicity, liberalism, Afrikaner nationalism, African resistance, capitalism, and class formation have in rough sequence claimed priority, all without noting the causes, patterns, and extent of frontier enslavement.⁷ Throughout the literature on preindustrial south Africa, neglect of this important dimension of frontier history is revealed in the eerie consistency with which captive laborers are referred to as "apprentices" and "servants," even by such disparate and eminent scholars as Macmillan, Marais, Marks, and Elphick.⁸ Discomfort in accounting for a sizable coerced element in frontier societies has been present at least since Legassick's monumental study of Transorangia began italicizing these terms.⁹ Nowadays, in the wake of the neo-Marxist debate, captive laborers are also referred to as "serfs," "dependents," or "unfree servants," but apart from indicating what position in a given class structure they occupied, their presence in frontier societies generally remains at best only partially accounted for. Typically, Legassick's own evolving interpretation of nineteenthand twentieth-century south Africa reflects in his terminology a persistent ambivalence about captive laborers on the frontier, drifting as it does from "apprentices" to "proletarians" to "dependents," terms he some-times uses interchangeably.¹⁰ And Legassick, as with others who note their common presence on the frontier, can state with reference to Khoisan "dependents" that such persons were "[seized] as captives...subordinated...or distributed or sold...," that "obtaining [arms and powder] generally meant selling cattle, or selling 'apprentices,'" and that "it seems reasonable to suppose that the 'normal' position of the Khoi was seen as slavery [by persons living in the Cape]."¹¹

Historians who acknowledge that "virtual slavery," at least, existed on the frontier have for some time argued nevertheless that it resulted from "individual acts of violence and brigandage" rather than from what this volume shows was part of a process of expansion and consolidation.¹² At first glance, Giliomee appears to have defined this process. "The trekboers of the eighteenth century," he comments, "brought to the interior the cultural tradition of slavery and were gradually able to transform free indigenous peoples into unfree laborers."¹³ But for Giliomee the "cultural tradition of slavery" did not result in the extension of slavery into the interior, and Giliomee does not mean by "unfree laborers" that Africans were as a rule captured, bonded, and sold. He refers instead to individual Africans and African groups who in varying degrees were coerced into providing labor, up to and including the establishment of mining labor compounds. Giliomee distinguishes between what he terms the "open" frontier, the scene of 'local coercion" of labor, and the "closing" frontier, "where the state and the market played a growing part in providing labor." Only in the former were raiding and indentureship "resorted to" by frontiersmen, who because of a 'lack of market opportunities...did not make a concerted effort to find long term solutions to their labor problems," whereas in the "closing" frontier the "central government...sought to harness the labor of Africans more effectively...[in response to] commercial opportunities." Thus 'local coercion" (indenturing children) gave way to "institutional coercion" (taxation, tenancy, and pass laws).¹⁴

Yet, at least insofar as captive labor was concerned, the distinction between open and closing frontiers was in practice indiscernible. For, in areas controlled by a Boer central government, just as in areas contested by Boer frontiersmen and indigenous African polities, captive laborers remained in demand. Raids for captives were commanded by elected state officials as often as they were by local frontiersmen. State builders and frontiersmen alike raided for slaves because captive labor was needed in order to take advantage of market and commercial opportunities. As Etherington notes, commodity production was "prominent on the agenda of the Trekkers," no less than of their successors, and recognizing this fact affords a needed corrective to the established image of the Voortrekkers as "precapitalist, eighteenth-century white nomads in flight from modernizing British rule."¹⁵ Ross makes a similar point with reference to the Griqua, among the earliest Dutch-speaking communities to occupy the frontier, and who, as noted by Eldredge, were engaged in slave raiding.¹⁶ Rather than simply a "cultural tradition" that influenced Boer attitudes toward African labor, slavery was commonly practiced on the frontier, and not exclusively by Boers, as a proved means to economic ends.

Recent recognition that slavery became part of the Dutch frontier may be seen in the work of Nigel Penn. In his study of labor relations between colonists and Khoisan in the western Cape during the eighteenth century, Penn noted a trend away from attracting Khoikhoi labor and stock onto trekboer farms through cooperative arrangements, to exercising "paternalistic protection" of the same, and toward confiscating the same through commando raids.¹⁷ The commando system, revealing as it did the "expansionist nature of the Trekboers' pastoralist economy," developed especially after 1770 as a means of crushing Khoikhoi resistance and generating women and children captive laborers. It functioned as an official military arm of the colony, conscripted Khoisan of mixed descent (the so-called "Bastaard-Hottentots") into its ranks, and reflected the declining status of Khoisan within the Cape colony. Alongside the capture of women and children there emerged a new category of Ingeboekte Bastard Hottentoten (apprenticed persons of mixed descent), who were liable for bonding to their masters until the age of twenty-five. Apprenticed Khoikhoi children were treated like "Bastaard-Hottentots," and Penn concluded that after 1770 the "status of both free and captive Khoisan differed little from each other, or indeed, from the status of slaves."¹⁸ Penn and other Cape historians, such as Nicholas Southey, have begun to realize that Cape slavery should be viewed alongside indigenous, including apprenticed, labor systems and within the broader context of south African historiography.¹⁹

This volume's reinterpretation of slavery, and its upward revision of the extent to which slavery was practiced in south Africa, was occasioned by (Jobbing's challenge to the AmaZulu-oriented historiography of the mfecane (or difaqane).²⁰ Cobbing asserted that the widespread upheavals in the interior, rather than caused by the rise of a militarized AmaZulu state under Shaka, were the result of slave raiding and slave trading by British missionaries and Griqua in the interior and by Portuguese and British traders on the eastern coast. Generations of European historians, he argued, have concealed these crimes by perpetuating the myth of Shaka, the AmaZulu tyrant. Cobbing undermined his slave-trading case, however, by misusing his evidence, and he overlooked that slave raiding was conducted in the interior by Dutch-speaking frontiersmen.²¹ Cobbing succeeded, nevertheless, in exposing the literature's fixation on the AmaZulu and its neglect of slavery and slave raiding in the interior. One noteworthy consequence was an open debate of Cobbing's thesis at the University of Witwatersrand in September 1991.²² Another was the advent of communication among scholars already engaged in studying slavery in different parts of south Africa.²³ Collaboration led to Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier.

This volume is intended to demonstrate that slavery is of central importance to south African history. Rather than an institution limited to the coastal Cape periphery, slavery spread throughout south Africa, was adapted to fluctuating human and physical environments, and deeply affected the human landscape. It was beyond question an established feature of Boer society. As will also become apparent in this work, slavery remains an underresearched topic. Of the studies to follow, those pertaining to areas outside the Cape have been written by scholars for whom slavery is a recent, secondary research interest. This collection is offered also to suggest the potential for systematic archival and oral field research into areas outside the western Cape. Slavery in South Africa represents the initial volume in what is hoped will be many to address south African slavery in its broadest context, contributing thereby to the reinterpretation of nineteenth-century south African history and to the comparative study of slavery systems in Africa and in other parts of the globe.

Robert Shell (ch. 2) offers the first statistical overview of the ocean-going slave trade into the Cape (1658-1808) and details the provenance of the Cape's unique, polyglot, Afro-Asian, Dutch-speaking population, which included Khoikhoi captured on the frontier. His study of creolization bridges the divide, so commonly encountered in the literature, between "slaves and Khoikhoi." He demonstrates, inter alia, that the Cape's domestic slave culture developed the proto-Afrikaans patois later adopted by slave masters. White domination, much less Dutch cultural hegemony, was by no means absolute, nor is it a coincidence that Afrikaans, the one indigenous language understood by most South Africans and which proved so useful to the Boers in resisting the British, was forged by mainly female slaves of mixed cultural background and free slave-owning women for the purpose of communicating across lines that divided them and resisting those who exploited them.

Nigel Perm (ch. 3) recreates an episode involving drosters (runaways) on the eighteenth century northern Cape frontier that illustrates how Khoikhoi, Bastaards, San, and legally defined slaves shared a single status. Drosters hailed from all enslaved groups. Fugitive Khoikhoi, Bastaard, and San were chased down, as were legally owned slaves, because they were supposed to be bound to their masters. Penn's st...