During the past three decades, historians of the Cape Colony during the period of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) rule have transformed our view of the role of slavery. Slavery has moved from an issue of marginal importance to one which is now considered central to the establishment and growth of a colonial society in South Africa. Most of this work, however, focused on the agrarian areas of the colony, and there has, until recently, been relatively little attempt to plumb the uniqueness of the experience of slaves and free blacks in VOC Cape Town. This topic deserves interest because of the cosmopolitan nature of the urban environment and its links with the wider world of the Indian Ocean. This article is a synthesis of the most important recent research on the experience of slaves and free blacks in Cape Town. It shows that although there is general agreement about the origins and development of slavery, its demographic nature and its economic significance, Cape historians have yet to fully utilise the available sources to trace the cultural and social history of urban slavery. This article indicates some of the areas -such as family history, the role of religion, material culture and the creation of meaning -which are in need of research, and suggests some of the sources and approaches which could be utilised.The 'black people' were of course slaves, the omnipresence of whom made a huge impression on the Lammens sisters. 3 This short cameo reveals much about how unusual slavery was in Cape Town during the reign of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Between 1652 and 1795, Cape Town was a cosmopolitan colonial city which, because of its favourable position on the cross-oceanic networks, annually received large numbers of transient visitors. 4 There were almost no indigenous people living in Cape Town, whose population was made up of people who came from elsewhere or, over time, their descendants. VOC Cape Town was also exceptional (certainly from an Atlantic perspective) in that, for most of this period, the majority of its population were slaves. In general, owners and slaves in the Cape Colony had closer contact with each other than those on the plantations of the New World. 5 Yet as the Lammens sisters indicated, this propinquity between slave and master seemingly did not have a great impact on the lifestyle of the History Compass 8/9 (2010):
Perhaps one of the saddest consequences of the demise of traditional Khoikhoi societies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the loss of their languages. Contemporary reports by visitors abound with references to how difficult the Khoi language was to learn, while at the same time commending the Khoikhoi for their ability to learn European languages. By about 1700, only half a century after Dutch colonisation, most Khoikhoi living in the colonised areas of the Western Cape could speak some form of Dutch in addition to their own language. However, the rapid spread of European settlers deeper into the interior, on the one hand, and the acculturation of the Khoikhoi and their inclusion in the colonial polity and economy, on the other hand, meant that by the end of the eighteenth century Khoi was spoken only on the fringes of the Cape colony. Cape Khoi was increasingly replaced by (a form of) Dutch as the first language of the native inhabitants of the Cape. Thus, on his tour of Southern Africa in 1803-1806, Heinrich Lichtenstein could observe that ‘on the borders alone are some Hottentots to be found who speak their own lariguage; but among them several foreign words are introduced, spoken with the Hottentot accent and snort’. Cape Khoi was by this stage rapidly dying out.
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