Slaves and Free Blacks in VOC Cape Town, 1652–1795

Abstract

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):

A dietary assessment of colonial Cape Town’s enslaved population

“…Colonial Cape Town was a significant node in both the Indian and Atlantic oceanic slave trades from the seventeenth to nineteenth century AD. A significant body of historical work exists for this period (Armstrong 1979;De Kock 1950;Groenewald 2010;Ross 1983;Worden 1985); however, it remains difficult to fully explore individual life histories. This is due in part to the nature of the archives available for enquiry in which enslaved persons are only mentioned in passing, the lack of material culture that can be associated with enslaved persons' spaces, and the lack of narratives written by the enslaved and formerly enslaved to describe their experiences.…”

Osteological, multi-isotope and proteomic analysis of poorly-preserved human remains from a Dutch East India Company burial ground in South Africa

“…Moreover, those who were displaced into the Cape after childhood, both voluntarily and involuntarily, would create a population with more diverse origins than a fully local population. Therefore, comparing demography with geographical origins to understand more about the population is highly meaningful, given the potential VOC context and the complex history of colonisation in the region 16 – 18 .…”

Slave Trade and Colonial Expansion Resulted in Strong Sex-Biased Admixture in South Africa

“…The colonial period in southern African began when Dutch colonists settled in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 and Europeans slowly expanded geographically over the next 250 years (Penn 2005). The Dutch East India Company and other traders brought slaves to the Cape from Madagascar, southeast Africa, South Asia and Indonesia numbering ~63,000 individuals (Groenewald, 2010). Communities with multiple ancestries emerged in the Cape Colony, derived from the European colonists, imported slaves, as well as indigenous Khoekhoe laborers.…”