Indian Ocean slaves in Cape Town, 1695-1807

Journal of Southern African Studies ISSN: 0305-7070 (Print) 1465-3893 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjss20 Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town, 1695–1807 Nigel Worden To cite this article: Nigel Worden (2016) Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town, 1695–1807, Journal of Southern African Studies, 42:3, 389-408 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2016.1171554 Published online: 23 May 2016. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjss20 Download by: [Nigel Worden] Date: 23 May 2016, At: 22:34 Journal of Southern African Studies, 2016 Vol. 42, No. 3, 389–408, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2016.1171554 Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town, 1695–1807 NIGEL WORDEN Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 (University of Cape Town) The most immediate and visible connection of early colonial Cape Town to the Indian Ocean world lay in its sizeable slave population. This article will examine new data from household inventories to enumerate in more precise ways than has previously been possible the Indian Ocean origins of slaves imported into the town in the 18th and early 19th centuries. In particular, it identifies the importance of south Asian sources in the earlier parts of the 18th century and the shift to the African coast in the later 18th and 19th centuries. Both of these regions are neglected in current academic and popular perceptions of the origins of slaves in the city. Comparisons will be made throughout with slavery in other colonial Indian Ocean port cities of the period. It is only since about 2007 that South Africa’s place in the historical networks of the Indian Ocean world has begun to be recognised by South African and Indian Ocean scholars influenced by transnational approaches.1 The process is far from complete, but has been especially influential among historians of early colonial Cape Town. For in the 17th and 18th centuries Cape Town’s administrative, trading, demographic and cultural connections were at least as strongly linked to the Indian Ocean as to the Atlantic and European worlds, or indeed to its continental African hinterland.2 Nowhere is this more evident than in the origins of Cape Town’s slave population. This has of course long been recognised not only in academic scholarship but also in the memory of slave descendants and in wider popular awareness, through the identification of Cape Islam and ‘Cape Malays’, with a heritage from south-east Asia.3 Yet this is only part of the story, since Cape Town’s slave population came from a much wider geographical range than south-east Asia. 1 For South Africa’s Indian Ocean connections, see, most notably, I. Hofmeyr, ‘South Africa’s Indian Ocean’, History Compass, 11, 7 (2013), pp. 508–12, and P. Gupta, I. Hofmeyr and M. Pearson (eds), Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (Pretoria, UNISA Press, 2010). Cape Town’s early colonial links to the Indian Ocean are highlighted especially in K. Ward, ‘“Tavern of the Seas”?: The Cape of Good Hope as an Oceanic Crossroads during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in J. Bentley, R. Bridenthal and K. Wigen (eds), Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu, Hawaii University Press, 2007), pp. 137–52; K. Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009); N. Worden, ‘VOC Cape Town as an Indian Ocean Port’, in H.P. Ray and E.A. Alpers (eds), Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 142–62. Recent examples of the growing awareness of Cape Town by Indian Ocean specialists include P. Larson, Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009); C. Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012). Meg Samuelson also made important initiatives with a series of workshops – ‘Indian Ocean Africa’ and ‘Thinking Africa from the Cape’ – held at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, in 2011. 2 For the most recent scholarship on these themes, see N. Worden (ed.), Cape Town between East and West: Social Identities in a Dutch Colonial Town (Johannesburg and Hilversum, Jacana and Verloren, 2012). 3 The literature on this is now extensive. Notable examples are R. Ross, Cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa (London, Routledge 1983); N.Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985); R. Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838 (Hanover and Johannesburg, Wesleyan University Press and Wits University Press, 1994). For the more recent growth of public and popular awareness of this heritage, see N. Worden, ‘The Changing Politics of Slave Heritage in the Western Cape, South Africa’, Journal of African History, 50, 1 (2009), pp. 23–40. © 2016 The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 390 Nigel Worden Existing accounts of slavery in the town during the period of Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company – VOC) rule in the 17th and 18th centuries have not matched the detail and focus of Andrew Bank’s magisterial analysis of urban slavery in the period of British rule between 1806 and 1834.4 There is a good reason for this. Bank was able to draw on detailed slave registers that were kept in the decades of amelioration leading up to slave emancipation, initiated by the British authorities to check on the illegal importation of slaves into the colony after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. No such registers exist for the preceding centuries. The only relatively complete set of data for slaves in the VOC period are the opgaaf tax rolls, but these do not distinguish urban residents in Cape Town from farmers in the surrounding grain lands of the Cape district, nor do they list slaves by name and toponym (a geographical identifier, such as Philida van Mozambique or Januarij van Timor), which is necessary to derive places of origin.5 A few random lists of Cape Town slave numbers exist from the 18th century, but they also do not provide names or toponyms.6 A pioneering account of slave origins was published in 1978, which drew on samples of slave names from official transfers, Council of Policy records and estate inventories, but these were small in size and none was able to distinguish urban slaves from those in the rest of the colony, a limitation which was equally the case in later and more comprehensive published quantitative analyses of Cape slave origins.7 This article therefore offers a more extensive analysis of the origins of Cape Town’s slave population than has hitherto been possible. It uses the database of Cape household inventories recently compiled in a four-year project by a team of seven full-time professional transcribers.8 These list slaves usually with their names and toponyms. The advantages of such a resource are manifold. The database includes household inventories in an extensive series that runs from 1695 to 1825, and so covers a much larger demographic range than any of the other samples hitherto used by researchers. Moreover, the inclusion of data about the location of properties means that for the first time it is possible to identify slaves who were living in Cape Town, rather than the surrounding farms and villages, thus giving an urban precision that even Bank was unable to do from the sources available to him. This identification of urban slave origins and their changing pattern over the course of the 18th and early 19th centuries enables us to consider the ways in which the town was connected to a wide range of Indian Ocean regions. It also invites comparisons with other VOC ports in the Indian Ocean, in all of which, unlike Cape Town, slaves were more numerically significant than in their surrounding areas.9 As Remco Raben has commented of early modern south-east 4 A. Bank, The Decline of Urban Slavery at the Cape, 1806–1843, Communications, No. 22 (Cape Town, Centre for African Studies, UCT, 1991). For work on urban slavery in the VOC period, which includes slave total numbers extracted from the few available sources, see R. Ross, ‘The Occupations of Slaves in Eighteenth Century Cape Town’, in C. Saunders and H. Phillips (eds), Studies in the History of Cape Town (Cape Town, Centre for African Studies, UCT, 1984), pp. 1–14; and parts of N. Worden, E. van Heyningen and V. Bickford-Smith, Cape Town: The Making of a City (Cape Town, David Philip, 1998). 5 For a discussion of the nature of archival sources on Cape slaves, see N. Worden, ‘Cape Slaves in the Paper Empire of the VOC’, Kronos, 40 (2014), pp. 23–44. 6 For example, Nationaal Archief, The Hague, Collectie Radermacher 507, for a record of the town’s inhabitants in 1731; Cape Archives Depot, C 2764, Taxatielijst van de slaven, 19 July 1762, pp. 8–29. 7 F. Bradlow and M. Cairns, The Early Cape Muslims (Cape Town, Balkema, 1978). Later analyses include Shell, Children of Bondage and N. Worden, ‘Indian Ocean Slavery and its Demise in the Cape Colony’, in G. Campbell (ed.), Abolition and its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (Abingdon, Routledge, 2005), pp. 29–49. 8 Transcribed from Cape Archives Depot, MOOC 8/1–8/40, Master of the Orphan Chamber, Inventories: General Series, 1673–1825, available at http://databases.tanap.net/mooc/, retrieved 1 August 2008. These data have already provided a major stimulus to a new quantitative approach to the 18th-century Cape, led by Stellenbosch economic historians: see J. Fourie, ‘The Quantitative Cape: A Review of the New Historiography of the Dutch Cape Colony’, South African Historical Journal, 66, 1 (2014), pp. 142–68. 9 R. van Welie, ‘Patterns of Slave Trading and Slavery in the Dutch Colonial World, 1596–1863’, in G. Oostindie (ed.), Dutch Colonialism, Migration and Cultural Heritage (Leiden, KITLV Press, 2008), pp. 217–18. Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town 391 Asia, ‘cities were allegedly the most greedy consumers of human slaves’, and his study of VOC Batavia and Colombo show that it was these European trading ports that were true ‘slave societies’, drawing on a range of trading networks in Indian Ocean and south-east Asian waters, rather than supplies from their agrarian hinterlands.10 Hendrik Niemeijer has similarly noted that slavery was the ‘dominant characteristic’ of 17th-century Dutch Batavia, although he adds that bonded labour in the town not only included chattel slaves owned by Europeans but also a wide range of debt-bondsmen and indentured people under the control of European, Chinese and indigenous Javanese residents.11 As Kate Ekama’s account of slavery in Dutch Colombo demonstrates, VOC slaves in urban Ceylon were as closely connected to south-east Asia and the islands of the Indian Ocean as they were to the south Asian subcontinent.12 These studies thus all suggest that slavery in VOC Asian towns was part of a complex network and that its character was shaped by forces that lay far beyond its own territorial boundaries. Analysis of slavery in Cape Town can learn much from these approaches, and not only in a comparative manner. As was the case in VOC city ports in Asia, the composition of Cape Town’s slave population was profoundly influenced by the shifting patterns of trade and exchange that took place throughout the Indian Ocean world. Kerry Ward has shown, through an analysis of the experience of convicts and exiles, how VOC Cape Town was embedded in complex demographic and cultural networks. Similar processes are evident in the ways in which slavery developed in the port. It did not exist or develop in isolation but continued to be part of a wider system of Indian Ocean bonded labour. These connections explain some major shifts that took place in the character of urban slavery in the course of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Cape Town’s establishment as a VOC garrison and refreshment station in the mid 17th century came several decades after the founding of Batavia in 1619, and its population of free burghers, Company employees and officials was always much less than that of the Company’s headquarters in Java. Nevertheless the total of its Company employees (which included the administration, garrison and workshop artisans) exceeded that of the VOC’s secondlargest settlement in Ceylon by the 1750s, while the number of its free burgher households increased markedly during the course of the 18th century.13 However, unlike the VOC’s Asian establishments, Cape Town did not possess a significant indigenous population. Although some Khoe were always present in the town, they were few and far between.14 There was a small Chinese community of convicts and free exiles, stemming from the Chinese diasporic trading population of Batavia, some 60 of whom, James Armstrong has shown, were slave owners, as well as other south and south-east Asian exiles, many of whom owned slaves, but this was no equivalent to the sizeable indigenous free populations of VOC south and south-east Asian port cities.15 As a result, Cape Town was always a relatively small port town within the VOC empire, albeit one whose strategic and geographical position as a halfway house between Europe and Asia gave it a particular significance. 10 R. Raben, ‘Cities and the Slave Trade in Early-Modern Southeast Asia’, in P. Boomgaard, D. Kooiman and H. Schulte Nordholt (eds), Linking Destinies: Trade, Towns and Kin in Asian History (Leiden, KITLV Press, 2008), p. 119; and R. Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo: The Ethnic and Spatial Order of Two Colonial Cities, 1600–1800’, doctoral thesis, University of Leiden, 1996, p. 119. 11 H. Niemeijer, Batavia: Een Koloniale Samenleving in de 17de Eeuw (Amsterdam, Uitgeverij Balans, 2005), pp. 50–64. 12 Kate Ekama, ‘Slavery in Dutch Colombo: A Social History’, MA dissertation, Department of History, University of Leiden, 2012. 13 For accounts of Cape Town in this period, see Worden et al., Cape Town: The Making, and Worden (ed.), Cape Town Between East and West. For comparisons of VOC personnel with other VOC establishments, F. Lequin, Het Personeel van de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie in Azië in de 18e Eeuw, Meer in het Bijzonder in de Vestiging Bengalen (2nd edn., Alphen aan het Rijn, Canaletto/Repro Holland, 2005), table A.26, pp. 238–43. 14 Worden et al., Cape Town: The Making, pp. 66–7. 15 J. Armstrong, ‘The Chinese Exiles’, in Worden (ed.), Cape Town between East and West, pp. 115–17. Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 392 Nigel Worden The overwhelming predominance of colonial employees and settlers in the town, a large proportion of whom owned at least one slave, meant that Cape Town was every bit as much a slave society as its Indian Ocean counterparts. For example, in 1731, one of the few years for which we have a complete demographic profile of the town, the slaves formed 42.2 per cent of its population, with VOC employees making up 30.3 per cent, free burghers 18.5 per cent and freed slaves and convicts 9 per cent.16 By 1806, slaves formed 55 per cent of the town’s inhabitants, although these population figures excluded government employees.17 Slaves were either owned directly by the Company itself or else by Company employees and free burghers in a private capacity. The absence of a significant indigenous slave-owning population also ensured that slavery in the town entailed chattel bondage as enshrined in Roman Dutch law, with no evidence of the range of forms of unfree labour and debt peonage of the kind that existed in the VOC’s south and south-east Asian settlements.18 As Table 1 indicates, the total number of privately owned Cape Town slaves increased steadily throughout the period to 1806, and especially after 1749, while Table 2 shows that the number of Company slaves remained lower and more constant. This situation differed markedly from the decades after 1806. Andrew Bank has characterised urban slavery in these years as an institution in decline, marked by the ending of the slave trade in 1807 and an increasing number of manumissions and slave sales into the farming regions, to be replaced by indentured and free labour.19 The number of Company- (now government-) owned slaves dwindled sharply. None of this is apparent in the VOC period, least of all in its closing decades. But this was not the only change. There were also significant shifts in the regions of the Indian Ocean with which Cape Town’s slaves were connected. Table 1. Total number of privately owned slaves in Cape Town year no. 1727 1731 1749 1774 1806 1822 1827 742 767 1,038 2,373 9,367 7,160 6,222 Source: Figures from Ross, ‘Occupation of Slaves’, Appendix I, p. 14; Worden et al., Cape Town: The Making, p. 50; Bank, Decline of Urban Slavery, p. 236. Table 2. Total number of Company-owned (government-owned) slaves year no. 1693 1731 1752 1784 1807 1826 337 566 506 625 283 171 Source: Armstrong and Worden, ‘The Slaves, 1652–1834’, p. 124; Worden et al., Cape Town: The Making, p. 50. The fullest data for Company slaves is R. Shell, From Diaspora to Diorama: The Old Slave Lodge in Cape Town, CD Rom (Cape Town, Ancestry 24, 2005). 16 Worden et al., Cape Town: The Making, p. 50 17 Bank, Decline of Urban Slavery, p. 236. This includes both privately owned and government slaves. 18 For example, Niemeijer, Batavia, pp. 63–4, and, for a broader discussion of the impact of European colonial use of slaves in south-east Asia, K.Ward, ‘Slavery in Southeast Asia, 1420–1804’, in D. Eltis and S. Engerman (eds), The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Volume 3, AD 1420–AD 1804 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 179–81. 19 Bank, Decline of Urban Slavery. Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town 393 Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 The Data The data for privately owned urban slaves is taken from the household inventories preserved in the archives of the Master of the Orphan Chamber (MOOC). These do not provide by any means a complete listing of the slave population of the colony, nor of Cape Town. There were many slave owners whose possessions were not recorded at all, or whose estates were listed in other records, such as wills.20 Only 10,676 slaves are recorded altogether for the period up until the ending of the slave trade in 1807. We have no complete records to show the total number of privately owned slaves that existed in the colony, but Robert Shell has estimated that approximately 63,000 were imported, and to this must be added the considerable and increasing number who were born at the Cape.21 Census opgaaf records give annual totals for the whole colony, which show a rise from 337 in 1692 to 29,861 in 1806.22 The database thus includes only a small proportion of the total slave population. None the less the Orphan Chamber inventories include a much wider range of households than any other series hitherto used by researchers, both in chronological span and in wealth distribution. They include the estates of some of the wealthiest inhabitants of the town, such as Jan Daniel Herhold, who owned 50 slaves in 1807, alongside many who owned only one slave. The main advantage of this data is that the recording of the location of the properties means that researchers can now identify truly urban households from rural and semi-rural ones. For the purposes of this study, inventories that list both rural and urban properties have been excluded. This has removed many slaves who may well have been living in the town, but, since there is no way of telling exactly where they were located, their inclusion would skew the overall picture. The database therefore includes only a relatively small sample of urban slaves, but we do know for certain that they were living in Cape Town, and they seem to be broadly representative of a range of urban households. When extracted from the rest, there are 2,266 clearly identifiable Cape Town slaves in the data for the years between 1695 and 1807. Of these, 132 were repeated in inventories that were duplicated, leaving a total of 2,134. Table 3 shows the distribution of these slaves by gender and by date of inventory, in three broad categories corresponding to differing periods of the town’s history: up to 1749, when Cape Town was still in a relatively early stage of growth, from 1750 to the eve of the end of VOC rule in 1795, and the years of political transition and change between 1795 and the ending of the slave trade in 1807. More specific periodisation is problematic, since the date of each inventory reflects the chance factor of the timing of death of the owner rather than any specific chronological information about the slaves in the estate. There is a danger of over-interpreting these raw figures. Since they represent only a selection of Cape Town slaves – those who happened to be listed in deceased estate inventories – their numbers cannot be said to be representative of the total size of the urban slave population in any of the periods demarcated. It is unsurprising none the less that there are more than double the number of slaves listed for the period 1750–94 than for the preceding 60 years, given both that the number of inventories increased during that time and that the size of Cape Town’s population, both free and enslaved, grew considerably in the decades after the 1750s. 20 The Orphan Chamber inventoried estates of owners who died intestate, who nominated the Chamber as executors or who did not specify an executor, or who left unmarried heirs under 25 years old or living outside the colony. The MOOC inventories do, however, ‘form the single most cohesive record of privately owned slaves at the Cape’, TEPC Transcription Team, ‘Introduction to the Inventories of the Orphan Chamber at the Cape of Good Hope’, available at http://databases.tanap.net/mooc/, retrieved 1 August 2014, pp. 34, 49. 21 Shell, Children of Bondage, p. 40. There are no estimates of locally born slave totals, although Shell has calculated that their number exceeded imported slaves (the ‘moment of creolisation’) in the 1760s and 1770s, and again after 1810; see pp. 47–8. 22 J. Armstrong and N. Worden, ‘The Slaves, 1652–1834’, in R. Elphick and H. Giliomee (eds), The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, second edition (Cape Town, Maskew Miller Longman, 1989), pp. 129–32. 394 Nigel Worden Table 3. Number of Cape Town slaves in MOOC database by period and gender period Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 1695–1749 1750–1794 1795–1807 TOTAL male 346 863 228 1,437 female 106 313 108 527 male:female ratio 3.26:1 2.75:1 2.11:1 2.72:1 unknown gender 57 63 50 170 Total 509 1,239 386 2,134 What is more revealing is the sex ratio for those slaves whose gender is identifiable, since the randomness of the incidence of inventories would not have affected the overall gender patterns. At no stage did the number of male and female slaves in the town reach equivalence although, as might be expected, the imbalance lessened as time went on and locally born slaves came to form a higher percentage of the total. In this regard, the urban data is almost identical to that for slave sex ratios throughout the Cape colony, which was 3.98:1 (male:female) in 1738 and 1.84:1 in 1806.23 Cape Town did not therefore follow the pattern of Asian port towns, where the slave sex ratio was more balanced – for instance in Batavia ranging from 1.06:1 in 1673 to 1.18:1 in 1797.24 Figures for the Asian ports include slaves owned by indigenous inhabitants, which may explain some of the difference, since female domestic slaves were more frequent in Asian households.25 Overall, it appears that women were a minority in Cape Town’s slave population, as they were in the rest of the colony. Where the data is most revealing is in the geographical information provided by slave toponyms. Here another caveat must be made. Despite the claims of most Cape historians, myself included, the toponyms do not necessarily indicate the place of origin of each slave but rather the region from which they were sold to the Dutch. These were not necessarily exactly the same, although the toponym was usually in the same broad region as the place of origin. Furthermore, in some of the Cape judicial records there are disparities between the toponyms given to the same slave, which reflects the carelessness with which these were recorded by official clerks, although it is likely that there was greater accuracy in the inventories, where issues of inheritance and the value of individual slaves were at stake.26 The full data for slave toponyms is shown in the Appendix. They are grouped into five regional categories: 1. south Asia, including the Indian subcontinent and Ceylon; 2. south-east Asia, primarily Java and the islands of modern Indonesia plus a scattering from Melaka and Macao; 3. Madagascar and a small number from the Mascarenes (Mauritius and Bourbon); 4. mainland Africa, primarily Mozambique but including a few from West African coast and islands, but excluding those born in the Cape; 5. Cape-born. 23 Ibid., p. 133. 24 Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo’, Table 4.14, p. 112. 25 The position of female slaves (as opposed to elite indigenous women) in VOC Asia has only recently been the focus of historical research. See, for example, H.,Niemeijer, ‘Slavery, Ethnicity and the Economic Independence of Women in Seventeenth-Century Batavia’, in B. Andaya (ed.), Other Pasts: Women, Gender and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia (Honolulu, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Hawai’i, 2000), pp. 174–94; E. Jones, Wives, Slaves And Concubines: A History of the Female Underclass in Dutch Asia (DeKalb, Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). 26 For examples of the disparities of Cape slave toponyms, see N. Worden and G. Groenewald, Trials of Slavery: Selected Documents Concerning Slaves from the Criminal Records of the Council Of Justice at the Cape of Good Hope, 1705–1794, second series, Vol. 36 (Cape Town, Van Riebeeck Society, 2005), pp. 5n1, 80n11, 169n1, 189n1, 455n2, 487n1, 609n2, 616n1. Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town 395 Table 4. Number and percentage of Cape Town slaves in MOOC database by regional toponyms, 1695–1807 S Asia SE Asia Madagascar & Mascarenes Africa Cape TOTAL 498 501 87 139 627 1,852 27% 27% 5% 8% 34% 100% Table 5. Number and proportion of imported Cape Town slaves in MOOC database by regional toponyms, 1695–1807 Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 S Asia SE Asia Madagascar & Mascarenes Africa TOTAL 498 501 87 139 1,225 40.6% 40.8% 7.1% 11.3% 100% Some 282 slave names (13 per cent of the total) lacked toponyms. The proportions of toponyms of the remainder in each category are shown in Table 4.27 These indicate that just over onethird of the total were born in the colony, while the remainder were divided between south and south-east Asia, which each formed just over one-quarter of the total, and a smaller proportion from Madagascar–Mascarenes and Africa. When the Cape-born slaves are removed, focusing on those slaves who were imported (see Table 5), the proportions rise to over one-third of the imported slaves from each of south and south-east Asia and the remainder from Madagascar, Mascarenes and Africa. These figures make an interesting comparison to Robert Shell’s estimations of the origins of all slaves imported to the Cape between 1652 and 1808, although his data did not enable him to distinguish Cape Town from the rest of the colony. Shell calculated a proportion of 22.7 per cent for Indonesia, 25.9 per cent for India, 25.1 per cent for Madagascar and the Mascarenes and 26.4 per cent for Africa.28 This may suggest that a higher proportion of south and south-east Asian slaves lived in the town than in the rural areas of the colony, thus lending some credence to Robert Ross’s earlier impression before statistical data was available, that ‘earlier in the century, and especially in Cape Town, Indonesian [slaves] were perhaps the most numerous’.29 However, as Ross’s emphasis also suggests, overall totals conceal important differences when these figures are broken down by period. Figure 1 shows the percentage for each period for all Cape Town slaves, while Figure 2 includes only those imported into the colony. Percentage proportions of the sample are used because the raw figures (given in the Appendix) are dependent on the incidence of inventories and the length of the selected time period rather than the number of slaves in the town. The proportions are thus more reflective of the wider urban pattern than absolute numbers. This breakdown confirms a clear pattern of change over time. Unsurprisingly, the percentage of locally born slaves increases throughout the series, from 23 per cent up to 1749, to 33 per cent in 1750–94 and 46 per cent in 1795–1807. This confirms the increasing dependence on locally born slaves, and indeed Cape Town had almost reached a ‘creolisation moment’ in the decade before the ending of the slave trade. 27 These figures exclude 306 slaves whose toponyms were not recorded (288 names) or were unidentifiable (18 names). 28 Shell, Children of Bondage, Figure 2-1, p. 41. 29 Ross, Cape of Torments, p. 13. 396 Nigel Worden 100% 90% Cape 80% 70% Africa 60% MM 50% 40% SEA 30% 20% SA 10% 0% 1695−1749 1750−94 1795−1807 total Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 Figure 1. Percentage of Cape Town slaves in MOOC database by toponym and period, 1695–1807. 100% 90% Africa 80% 70% MM 60% 50% 40% SEA 30% 20% SA 10% 0% 1695−1749 1750−94 1795−1807 total Figure 2. Percentage of imported Cape Town slaves in MOOC database by toponym and period, 1695–1807. Once the Cape-born slaves are removed from the sample, the changes in regional origins of imported slaves over time become very evident. Up to 1749, over half of the recorded slaves in Cape Town in the MOOC database were from south Asia. This proportion declined to 30 per cent by the period between 1795 and 1807. The percentage of south-east Asian slaves was less than that of south Asian in the earlier period (34 per cent) but then increased to 46 per cent in 1750–94 before declining to a similar proportion of 29 per cent in 1795–1807. By contrast, the percentage of African imported slaves in the urban inventories increased from 7 per cent and 6 per cent in the VOC period to 38 per cent in 1795–1807. The percentage of Malagasy and Mascarene slaves remained lower throughout, at around 10 per cent or less. These changing patterns over time broadly accord with the picture of slave origins that have been identified for the Cape Colony as a whole, although now we are able to identify the urban component of this population more precisely.30 In particular, we can compare the figures for the period of an open Indian Ocean slave trade with those calculated by Bank for the decades after it ended. Between 1816 and the abolition of slavery in 1834, 71 per cent of all Cape Town slaves were locally born, while only 9.6 per cent came from south-east and south Asia combined. Nineteen 30 For example, Shell, Children of Bondage, pp. 40–46; Bradlow and Cairns, Early Cape Muslims, pp. 118–24; Worden, ‘Indian Ocean Slavery’, pp. 29–38. Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town 397 per cent were from Africa (primarily East Africa and Mozambique).31 The growth of a locally born slave population after the ending of the slave trade is unsurprising, while the predominance of African over Asian slaves in the 19th century is in marked contrast to the VOC period, but an accentuation of the trend observable between 1795 and 1807. Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 Cape Town and Indian Ocean Trading Networks As Gwyn Campbell has stressed, ‘the IOW [Indian Ocean world] slave trade was multidirectional, changed over time and included slaves of many different origins’.32 Slaves brought to Cape Town were a product of these shifting and multidirectional forces in the Indian Ocean and its associated trading regions. It has long been a lament of historians of Cape slavery that we lack information about precisely how individual slaves were obtained. This is a problem for analysis of Dutch slave trading as a whole in the Indian Ocean region, and especially where Dutch trading overlapped with indigenous Asian slaving networks.33 There are few equivalents to the shipping records of transatlantic slavers, since, in the Indian Ocean, ‘slaves rarely constituted a special cargo’.34 Very occasionally, clues are provided from other records, as for example the information given by Ari (no toponym given), a slave prisoner in the Cape Town castle in 1706, that ‘during his childhood years [in the area] between Surat and Persia, when he was playing on the beach, he was carried off by the Dutch and was eventually sold as a slave’.35 There is more detailed information about specific slave trading voyages organised by the VOC from the Cape to Madagascar, some of which have recently been published, but these are a small proportion of the total.36 Similar problems face historians of slavery in other VOC port towns. However, a consideration of the patterns of trade and policy in the wider Indian Ocean arena of VOC activity reveals how dependent Cape Town was on these networks and how typical it was of Asian VOC settlements. The predominance of slaves from India and Ceylon in the first part of the 18th century is a feature of Cape Town that is little appreciated today. The focus in both academic and popular writing on south-east Asian slaves, and especially on their contributions to the influence of Islam, language and cuisine, has obscured the equal, and in earlier decades greater, dependence on regions of south Asia for slave imports into the town. South Asian sources of slaves were particularly important for VOC trading posts in both India and south-east Asia in the 17th century, and this continued well into the subsequent decades and was reflected in the slave composition of Cape Town.37 A recent publication by the Indian scholar Ansu Datta has drawn attention to the number of Bengali slaves at the Cape, although he admits that ‘detailed information is lacking as to how slaves were acquired from Bengal’.38 We do know that in the earlier 17th century Arakanese raiders captured slaves from Bengali coastal villages and traded some of them to the Dutch on the Burmese coast. The Company also used Indian slave 31 Bank, The Decline of Urban Slavery, p. 232. Bank’s figures drawn from the slave registers include the surrounding arable Cape district, and so are not directly comparable with the solely urban data used here. 32 G. Campbell, ‘The Question of Slavery in Indian Ocean World History’, in A. Sheriff and E. Ho (eds), The Indian Ocean: Oceanic Connections and the Creation of New Societies (London, Hurst Publishing, 2014), p. 125. 33 Van Welie, ‘Patterns of Slave Trading’, pp. 185–6. 34 Campbell, ‘Question of Slavery’, p. 127. 35 Worden and Groenewald, Trials of Slavery, p. 8. 36 P. Westra and J. Armstrong, Slave Trade with Madagascar: The Journals of the Cape Slaver Leijdsman, 1715 (Cape Town, Africana, 2006); D. Sleigh and P. Westra, The Taking of the Slaver Meermin, 1766 (Cape Town, Africana, 2013). 37 M.Vink, ‘“The World’s Oldest Trade”: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of World History, 14, 2 (2003), pp. 140–3. 38 A. Datta, From Bengal to the Cape: Bengali Slaves in South Africa (Bloomington, XLibris, 2013), p. 40. Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 398 Nigel Worden labour in its Burmese trading posts between the 1630s and the 1670s.39 A precedent was thus established for Indian slave usage that was extended to other VOC settlements. Remco Raben has shown that in Batavia ‘from the beginning, the Company had claimed most of the slaves imported from the Indian subcontinent’, and Hendrik Niemeijer has argued that the VOC deliberately distanced itself from local slave trading in Java by turning to south Asian slave supplies, following Portuguese precedents that had made Melaka a ‘collecting place for Indian slaves’.40 Such slaves were brought both by Indian and Dutch trading vessels carrying a variety of goods such as rice, saltpetre and silk to Batavia from the Bay of Bengal, and from VOC trading posts on the Coromandel coast. Many Cape Town Indian slaves were likely to have been transferred from Batavia and to have been owned there before being taken to the Cape on the numerous vessels of the return fleets. This may explain in part why their Indian cultural and linguistic background was submerged in the more prominent south-east Asian characteristics of the Asian Cape slave population. However, sometimes the transfer from south Asia was more direct. One of the rare detailed cases we know about illustrates such a route: a 10-year-old girl named China was sold by her mother ‘because of her utter poverty and lack of means of livelihood’ to a VOC employee in the trading post at Nagapattinam, and, after three transfers of ownership and a change of name, was finally shipped to the Cape, where she ended up as ‘Rosa’ working at Groot Constantia wine estate outside Cape Town.41 Vink has stressed that slave supplies from the Coromandel coast in the 17th century were often directly connected to a ‘famine–slave cycle’, by which slaves were obtained through sale at a time of economic and social crisis.42 China-Rosa’s case indicates that such trends continued into the 18th century. Slaves from the Malabar coast were also prominent among the urban population of Colombo and Galle, and some were then exported to the Cape on ships travelling directly from Ceylon to Cape Town, although slaves from other regions of India as well as Batavia were found in Colombo, and some reached the Cape via this route.43 The Cape Town slaves with ‘Ceylon’ as toponyms could thus equally well have originated from the Indian mainland or even from south-east Asia. These patterns of intra-Asian slave trading in the VOC ports account for the predominance of south Asian slaves in Cape Town in the earlier 18th century and their continued presence to the end of VOC rule. They also explain the declining proportion of such slaves in the subsequent periods. Although Bengali and Malabari slaves continue to regularly appear in the Cape Town inventories in equal numbers, they were subsequently outnumbered by slaves from south-east Asia. This matched the pattern in Batavia, where south-east Asians increasingly replaced Indian slaves. These came especially from Bali and Sulawesi, where Dutch control over the Goa sultanate after 1667 led to ‘the grafting of the Makassarese slaving network to the Batavian trade system’.44 Although supplies to Batavia from these areas were sometimes circumscribed in the 18th century, they came to dominate the town. Meanwhile slave imports from India to Dutch Java lessened when VOC trading in Bengal and the Coromandel coast diminished in the face of rivalry from other European traders, especially in the period after the 1770s. At the same time, the number of ships sailing directly from Ceylon to the Cape declined markedly, since most were now directed to Batavia as part of the VOC’s involvement in intra-Asian 39 R. Eaton, ‘Locating Arakan in Time, Space and Historical Scholarship’, in J. Gommans and J. Leider (eds), The Maritime Frontier of Burma: Exploring Political, Cultural and Commercial Interaction in the Indian Ocean World, 1200–1800 (Leiden, KITLV Press, 2002), pp. 227–8; W. Dijk, Seventeenth-Century Burma and the Dutch East India Company, 1634–1680 (Singapore, NIAS Press, 2006), pp. 140–2. 40 Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo’, p. 122; Niemeijer, Batavia, p. 53. 41 Cape Archives Depot, Miscellaneous 49, Serrurier papers, file (n), transfer deeds of slaves, 1763–6. This is a single rare example of a record detailing the gradual movement of a slave to Cape Town. 42 Vink, ‘“The World’s Oldest Trade”’, p. 142. 43 Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo’, p. 131; Ekama, ‘Slavery in Dutch Colombo’, p. 13. 44 Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo’, p. 122. Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town 399 trade. This, as Shell has persuasively argued, was a key reason for the declining importation of Indian slaves to the Cape. He maintains that it was only the activities of Danish traders from Tranquebar that maintained a supply of south Asian slaves to the colony.45 The dependence of Cape Town on Asian slave-trading patterns is still further revealed by the data for south-east Asian slaves. These slaves were brought to the Cape directly from Batavia on the return fleets and so were a filter from the larger slave population of the VOC’s Asian administrative and trading centre. Not only do their number and proportion increase markedly in the second half of the 18th century, but their toponyms closely reflect VOC activities in the region. As Kerry Ward has emphasised, the names of south-east Asian slaves did not necessarily indicate the precise place of origin, ‘especially if we consider how mobile the archipelagic seafaring, trading and refugee populations were’.46 None the less, the Cape Town database names for south-east Asian slaves are a clear reflection of the directions that Batavian trading took in the course of the 18th century. ‘Boegies’ or ‘Makassar’ toponyms predominate, forming half of the total of south-east Asians for the whole sample. This was the result of the VOC’s active slave trading and raiding in the Sulawesi region from the late 17th century, which drew on the existing activities of indigenous slave traders.47 Although there were periodic restrictions on the importation of such slaves from the eastern regions of the Indonesian archipelago, Makassar, as Raben has argued, ‘remained the nodal point in an extended slaving network’ and continued to be the main region of Batavian slave imports from the late 17th century, forming over 40 per cent of the total.48 Their visibility in Cape Town and its surrounds was equally marked. The Bugis language was spoken – and written – in Cape Town, and the combination of Bugis slave literacy and adherence to Islam was a cause of considerable concern to the Cape authorities.49 Secondary regions of importance for Batavian slave supplies also figure in the Cape Town data. These include Bali, another ‘axis’ of slave trading, not only from the Balinese kingdoms themselves but also from islands further to the east.50 Sumbawa, an island to the east of Bali and part of its catchment area, was specified for a number of Cape Town slaves. The islands of Timor and Ternate, both further removed from Batavia, were also important sources, incorporated into the wider Makassarese network by the 1700s. The long tentacles of slave trading into the islands of the eastern Indonesian archipelago were thus extended via Batavia to the other end of the Indian Ocean. The shift from south to south-east Asian sources of slaves in Cape Town was gradual and never complete, but it was the product of a changing pattern of slave trading in VOC Asia, over which the Cape authorities had little control. Such imports continued to the end of the VOC period, despite some attempts by the Batavian authorities to limit the transportation of male slaves from Asia to Cape Town in the late 1760s as part of a move to prevent private slave trading by Company officials returning to Europe.51 The other regions of slave origins in Cape Town stemmed from the very different character of trading in the south-western Indian Ocean. Throughout the 18th century, Malagasy slaves appear in relatively small numbers in the inventories. Madagascar was a major provider of slaves to a range of European powers between the 17th and 19th centuries, notably to the sugar 45 46 47 48 49 Shell, Children of Bondage, pp. 43–4. K.Ward, ‘Southeast Asian Migrants’, in Worden (ed.), Cape Town Between East and West, p. 86. Van Welie, ‘Patterns of Slave Trading’, pp. 196–7. Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo’, p. 125. Worden and Groenewald, Trials of Slavery, pp. 355–84, 537–56; R. Ross and S. Koolhof, ‘Upas, September and the Bugis at the Cape’, Archipel, 70 (2005), pp. 281–308. 50 Raben, ‘Batavia and Colombo’, p. 125. 51 Van Welie, ‘Patterns of Slave Trading’, p. 206; Shell, Children of Bondage, p. 43 n. 8. 400 Nigel Worden Table 6. Identified Company slave toponyms from death records, 1719–1789 1719–1749 S Asia SE Asia Madagascar Rio de la Goa Mozambique 36 24 96 219 2 1750–1789 29 38 601 70 415 Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 Source: Data drawn from Iziko Slave Lodge database of Company slave deaths, derived from Cape Archives Depot, C 2432-2652, Attestatien, 1719–1789. plantations of French Bourbon and Mauritius.52 The VOC in Cape Town also relied on the island for slave supplies, sending between 33 and 38 ships to Madagascar.53 Although it thus had greater control over the way in which it could obtain slaves from this region than was the case for Asian slaves, it was singularly unsuccessful in establishing a regular source of supply to satisfy its requirements, often lamenting the competition from other European powers, particularly the French and English, as well as high prices, low number and ‘poor quality’ of the slaves that were offered to them by Malagasy local polities. Shell has argued that some 25 per cent of all Cape slaves were imported from Madagascar, a figure considerably higher than the 2,870 estimated by Armstrong or 3,753 by Ravell.54 It is also higher than the percentages shown in the MOOC database. However, Malagasy slaves also formed a large proportion of the slaves owned by the Company, as enumerated in Table 2, who were not recorded in the MOOC inventories. Records of the deaths of Company slaves indicate that very many were from Madagascar, as Table 6 indicates. Moreover, the figures for Madagascar are a considerable under-estimate, since a large proportion of the toponyms that could not be precisely identified appears from their spelling to be Malagasy names. All in all, at least half of the total number of Company slaves was imported from Madagascar. There were chronological variables in the flow of the Malagasy slave trade that these overall figures only partially reveal. Up to the 1720s, Madagascar was the main source of Company slaves, but when the VOC held a trading post at Rio de la Goa between 1721 and 1730 the southeast African coast became more a significant source of supply. After the abandonment of Rio de la Goa, the slaves held there by the VOC were brought back to Cape Town, thus explaining the high number of such slaves in the period 1719–49. Supplies from Madagascar resumed between 1740 and 1785, although trading with Mozambique grew markedly in this period, while the Malagasy slave trade tailed off with the decline of the VOC from the late 1780s.55 Not all Company slaves worked in Cape Town, although the majority were housed in the Slave Lodge in the centre of the settlement and would have formed an important part of the urban population. However, the visibility of both Company- and privately owned slaves from Madagascar declined in the 19th century, as the number of mainland African slaves in the town increased. None the less, as Pier Larson has argued, they formed a higher proportion of the slave population of Cape Town than that of the colony’s rural districts, and there is evidence 52 J-M. Filliot, La Traite des Esclaves vers les Mascereignes au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, ORSTOM, 1974); D. Scarr, Slaving and Slavery in the Indian Ocean (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1998); M.D. North-Coombes, ‘Labour Problems in the Sugar Industry of Ile de France or Mauritius, 1790–1842’, MA dissertation, University of Cape Town, 1978, especially Ch. 2. 53 The figures differ slightly because of divergent lists by the key historians of the trade: Armstrong and Worden, ‘The Slaves’, p. 112; J. Ravell, ‘The VOC Slave Trade between Cape Town and Madagascar’, unpublished paper, Bilthoven, 1979. 54 Armstrong and Worden, ‘The Slaves’; Ravell, ‘The VOC Slave Trade’; Westra and Armstrong, Slave Trade, p. 9. 55 N. Worden, ‘Slavery and Amnesia: Towards a Recovery of Malagasy Heritage in Representations of Cape Slavery’, in I. Rakoto (ed.), L’esclavage à Madagascar: Aspects Historiques et Résurgences Contemporaines (Antananarivo, Institut de Civilisations – Musée d’Art et d’Archéologie, 1997), p. 54. Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town 401 of the continued use of Malagasy in the town and its environs by slaves and their descendants until at least the 1840s.56 For it was the mainland African continent that became the primary source of slave imports towards the end of the VOC period and into the final years of the legal slave trade under British and Batavian authorities. In the earliest years of the VOC Cape settlement in the 1660s and 1670s, a few slaves were imported from the Dutch West India Company’s regions of influence in Angola and Guinea, but this was halted after West India Company protests against VOC infringement of their trading monopoly, and only one of them survived into the Cape Town inventories that start in 1695.57 Subsequently the VOC trading post at Rio de la Goa had provided a source of slaves for the Company, and especially after the transfer of the slaves from there when it was shut down in 1730, but very few of these ended up in private hands. The major replacement of the town’s slaves by African imports came rather with the development of private slave trading from the colony in the 1790s and with the availability of slaves transported by Portuguese traders en route from south-east Africa to Brazil and later by Brazilian traders directly. Both of these developments have recently come under focus, providing a wholly new perspective on the integration of the Cape into the south-west Indian Ocean–south Atlantic slave trade. Michael Reidy has shown how private traders operated from Cape Town in the period of the first British occupation, after VOC slaving operations had ended in the late 1780s. Their sources were the coast of Mozambique and Mozambique Island, thus leading to Cape mercantile participation in the burgeoning slave trade of the region. Reidy’s research continues, but his earlier work demonstrated that despite the diffidence of the British authorities at the Cape, who were aware of the growing anti-slave trade sentiments in London, some 7,200 slaves were imported into the colony by Cape merchants or purchased in the town from passing Portuguese traders between 1797 and 1808.58 Patrick Harries’s recent research, some of which is published in this issue, has also exposed the existence of a ‘middle passage’ from Madagascar, Mozambique and the east African coast, which he traces back to French, Spanish and Portuguese traders who brought slaves to Cape Town from the 1770s, a trade in forced labour that continued well into the decades after 1808 and indeed after the ending of slavery itself in the 1830s.59 His work reminds us that foreign traders also played a part in bringing slaves into Cape Town in earlier decades, although there has been little research into these activities. In addition, there were the ‘prize negroes’ or slaves captured after 1808 by British patrols and indentured at the Cape. There is currently much research under way on these, and on the ways in which they provided an important supplement to the unfree labour pool of the colony after the ending of the slave trade. A further possibility, although one as yet completely unresearched, is that some African slaves were brought to the Cape as part of the regular shipping trade that existed between Mauritius and Cape Town in the last decades of the 18th century. It is likely that slaves were in this way brought from the active east African–Malagasy–Mascarenes slaving networks to Cape Town, where they were sold by traders who returned with Cape agrarian produce needed to feed the rapidly increasing number of slaves on the Mauritian sugar plantations.60 There are 56 Larson, Ocean of Letters, p. 244. 57 Van Welie, ‘Patterns of Slave Trading’, p. 203. 58 M. Reidy, ‘The Admission of Slaves and “Prize Negroes” into the Cape colony, 1797–1818’, MA dissertation, University of Cape Town, 1997, p. 111. 59 P. Harries, ‘Middle Passages of the Southwest Indian Ocean: A Century of Forced Immigration from Africa to the Cape of Good Hope’, Journal of African History, 55, 2 (2014), pp. 173–90; P. Harries, ‘Slavery, Indenture and Migrant Labour: Maritime Immigration from Mozambique to the Cape, c.1780–1880, African Studies, 73, 3 (2014), pp. 323–40. 60 I owe this observation to one of the anonymous readers of this article, for which I am most grateful. 402 Nigel Worden relatively few slaves in the inventories with toponyms from Mauritius, although one famous example is Louis van Mauritius, leader of the 1808 Cape slave revolt, who was brought from the Mascarenes as a young boy in the late 1780s.61 A number of slaves of Malagasy and east African origin could also have been imported in this way via the Mascarenes. The result of these shifts for the composition of Cape Town’s slave population was striking. By the period of British rule, this was coming more to resemble Port Louis in Mauritius, with its predominance of slaves of Malagasy and Mozambican origin, rather than the VOC ports of south and south-east Asia.62 Cape Town’s slave networks were now detached from their Asian roots and instead firmly embedded in the African and south-west Indian Ocean nexus. Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 Indian Ocean Slavery and the Politics of Race These shifts, firstly from south to south-east Asia, then from the Asian to the African Indian Ocean, have been noted by historians of Cape slavery, but their implications for the social history of the town are still little appreciated. A historiographical focus on the survival and growth of south-east Asian elements, particularly Islam, in Cape Town has instead predominated. This has more recently taken a transnational turn, notably in the research of Kerry Ward, who has shown how not only south-east Asian slaves but also freed slaves, exiles and convicts played a key role in cementing Cape Town’s links to Asian networks within the VOC empire.63 New work on free black kinship and contacts is now beginning to show the ways in which south Asian connections were also maintained in the 18th-century town, while the continued meshing of Cape Town and Robben Island in the convict system of the 19th-century Indian Ocean and the migrations that accompanied it are also receiving attention.64 This article indicates that similar research needs to be undertaken on the social and cultural effects of the Africanisation of Cape Town’s slave population, especially in the light of Patrick Harries’s and Michael Reidy’s exposure of its scale and character. Pier Larson’s study of the linguistic and cultural connections that drew Cape Town into the Malagasy diaspora of the early 19th century provides an important blueprint for such work. Such approaches will need to confront not only academic but also popular beliefs about the character of slavery in Cape Town. For both the south Asian and the African components of Cape slave history have been obliterated in public memory and in heritage representations. This amnesia has a long history, which can be traced back to the period of slavery itself. By the beginning of the 19th century, contemporary visitors and commentators described the ethnic composition of the slave population at the Cape in ways that excluded, or at least submerged, the variety of regions of origin that this article has identified. This was not the case in the 18th century. Otto Mentzel, one of the most perceptive writers about the colony, who lived at the Cape in the 1730s and wrote his three-volume account of the colony in 1785, gave a reasonably full description of the range of Indian Ocean origins of Cape slaves and the changing patterns of importation: 61 N. Worden, ‘“Armed with Ostrich Feathers”: Cultural Revolution and the Cape Slave Uprising of 1808’, in R. Bessel, N. Guyatt and J. Rendall (eds), War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830 (London, Palgrave, 2010), pp. 121–38. 62 There is now a thriving literature on Mauritian slavery, but, as at the Cape, very little of this specifies the character of Port Louis as distinct from the plantations of the island where most of the slaves laboured. For an earlier comparative study of both ports, see N. Worden, ‘Cape Town and Port Louis in the Eighteenth Century’, in G. Campbell (ed.), The Indian Ocean Rim: Southern Africa and Regional Co-operation (London and New York, Routledge Curzon, 2003), pp. 42–53. 63 Ward, Networks of Empire; Ward, ‘Southeast Asian Migrants’. 64 S. Newton-King, ‘Family, Friendship and Survival among Freed Slaves’, in Worden (ed.), Cape Town between East and West , pp. 153–75; Anderson, Subaltern Lives. Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town 403 [t]he first slaves were brought from Madagascar, but the French afterwards put a stop to this traffic, and importations were made from India and the East Indies, from Bengal, Amboina, Ternate, Tutegrin, Negapatam, Trincomali, Java, Kandy, Surat, Malabar, and also from the Portuguese settlements. All these races live indiscriminately together … but one type of slave is regarded as inferior and has to be kept apart. These have been brought from the land of Terletan, situated on the Rio de la Goa [Mozambique] …65 By the 19th century, however, the shifting nature of slave importation meant that contemporary observers simplified their characterisation of Cape slaves into two categories: ‘Malay’ and ‘Mozambique’. Thus an anonymous writer of 1806 commented that, ‘The Malay and Mosambique slaves principally compose those of the Cape’. He continued by entrenching racial stereotypes in this division, with Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 the former … distinguished by their copper colour; and the latter by a jet black and thick lips. The Malay, cruel and revengeful in his disposition, is allowed to possess a better capacity for instruction, and when taught a trade becomes a source of profit to his master. The Mosambique slave has a dull, inanimated appearance strongly stamped upon him, indicating, as it were, an inferiority of intellect.66 This crude, racially stereotyped division of slaves into ‘Malays’ and ‘Mozambicans’ became the standard fare of early 19th-century commentators. Thus the administrator John Barrow’s detailed description of the Cape divided ‘Malay’ slaves from ‘the negroes of Mozambique and Madagascar’, and the British traveller William Burchell commented that ‘the Mozambique and Madagascar slaves are at once distinguished from the Malays by their black colour, woolly hair and negro countenance’. William Bird, the Customs Controller in Cape Town in the 1820s, divided slaves at the Cape ‘into three classes: the Negro, the Malay and the Africander’ (locally born slaves).67 In this simplified and bifurcated racial hierarchy, the complexity of Indian Ocean origins was lost to sight. In particular, the south Asian component of Cape Town’s slave population, which had been so significant in the earlier 18th century, and which continued to be evident in the inventories into the 19th century, was completely obliterated, and continues to be so to this day. The nomenclature ‘Malay’, a term that came to define Muslim slaves in Cape Town in particular, was instead swiftly associated with the geographical region of south-east Asia, although it is highly probable that at least some Cape slaves from India and Sri Lanka were also Muslims, and that a number of south-east Asian slaves were not. The close ties of south and south-east Asia in the trading networks of the VOC, and the likelihood that many Indian slaves came to the Cape via Batavia, further elided the distinctiveness of a south Asian Cape slave memory. Only with more recent scholarship has the importance of regions such as Bengal, Malabar and Coromandel to Cape Town’s demographic composition become evident.68 The ending of slavery in 1834 brought a further perceptual redefining of its racial characteristics, which has also continued to the present. The racial order of the postemancipation Cape came to define ex-slaves, along with the Khoe and San inhabitants of the Cape, as ‘coloured’, in opposition not only to the descendants of ‘white’ colonists but also to the indigenous African population of the colony. Thus masters and servants legislation proposed by the Cape legislative council in 1839 defined emancipated slaves as ‘persons of colour’ in 65 O. Mentzel, A Complete and Authentic Geographical and Topographical Description of the Famous and (All Things Considered) Remarkable African Cape of Good Hope, Vol. II (Cape Town, Van Riebeeck Society, 1925), p. 125. 66 Anon., Gleanings in Africa (London, Cundee,1806), p. 58. 67 J. Barrow, An Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa in the Years 1797 and 1798, Vol. I (London, Cadell and Davis,1801), p.108; W. Burchall, Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa (London, Longman, Hirst Rees, Orme and Brown, 1822), p. 33; F. Krauss, ‘A Description of Cape Town and its Way of Life, 1838–40’, Quarterly Bulletin of the South African Library, 21, 1 (1966), p. 5. For further discussion of these sources in relation to their representation of Malagasy slaves, see Worden, ‘Slavery and Amnesia’, pp. 57–9. 68 Datta, From Bengal to the Cape. Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 404 Nigel Worden contrast to ‘native’ Africans.69 As Vivian Bickford-Smith has argued, the term ‘coloured’ was used in mid–later 19th-century Cape Town as an antonym to ‘white’, and could refer to all black Capetonians, including Africans. However, it was also increasingly used in distinction from ‘native’ Africans, to include the categories ‘Malays’ and ‘Mixed and others’, as used in the 1871 census, but excluded other Africans.70 As eastern Cape migrant workers came to Cape Town to work on the harbour from the 1870s, the division between ‘coloured’ and ‘native’ was further entrenched. Cape Town’s slave descendants were in this context perceived as ‘coloured’, in particular as ‘Malay’, rather than ‘African’. As early as the 1850s, and certainly by the 1870s, a distinct Malay ethnicity, associated with the south-east Asian roots of Cape Islam, had emerged. Celebrations of slave emancipation day on 1 December were marked with picnics and parades, at which distinctive ‘Malay’ dress, dancing and music predominated. Cape Town slavery was now associated firmly with an Asian rather than an African past. This contrasted with the situation in the rural hinterland, where, as Patrick Harries has argued, the descendants of African slaves, as well as more recent migrant farm workers, were known as ‘Mozbiekers’ in the mid to late 19th century.71 The politics of coloured identity in 20th-century Cape Town did little to change this perception. One trend was to accentuate the differences between ‘coloured’ and African Capetonians, and in the process to link slavery further to an Islamic and south-east Asian heritage that ignored its African components. This was evident in the conscious construction of a ‘Malay’ heritage and culture in the 1940s and 1950s and was accentuated by the separation of ‘black’ African and ‘Malay’ culture and history in the racial schema of the apartheid era, although the emphasis of this segregated ‘Malay’ heritage lay on the romanticized stories of Muslim exiles and princely rulers rather than on the realities of chattel slavery.72 In opposition to this, a radical and antisegregationist tradition emphasised the unity of working-class struggles that rejected racially determined distinctions, but in the process the legacy of Cape slavery was also played down, since it could not be linked to the broader history of indigenous land dispossession and the migrant labour system of the bantustans.73 The ending of apartheid led to a major recovery of awareness of the importance of slavery to the heritage of Cape Town, marked by popular publications, a variety of cultural outputs, and museum and heritage memorialisations.74 Yet while the diversity of the Indian Ocean roots of the city’s slave past was often celebrated and acknowledged in all of this, the emphasis remained on south-east Asia, while the African elements of Cape slavery were usually neglected. There are several reasons for this. The ‘Malay’ tradition, so strongly emphasised since the mid 19th century, is deeply rooted in public consciousness and has continued to be a focus of celebration and attention. One of the first major public heritage events to be held at the time of apartheid’s collapse in 1994 was a commemoration of ‘300 years of Islam’ held at Cape Town’s Castle, which was accompanied by books and museum exhibits stressing the Muslim background of Cape slaves and political exiles from south-east Asia. Although a wider focus included India 69 T. Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Cape Town, David Philip, 1996), p. 125. 70 V. Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 31. 71 P. Harries, ‘Making Mozbiekers: History, Memory and the African Diaspora at the Cape’, in B. Zimba, E. Alpers and A. Isaacman (eds), Slave Routes and Oral Tradition in Southeastern Africa (Maputo, Filson, 2005), pp. 91–123. 72 S. Jeppie, ‘Historical Process and the Constitution of Subjects: I.D. du Plessis and the Reinvention of the “Malay”’, BA (Hons) dissertation, University of Cape Town, 1986–7; L. Witz, Apartheid’s Festival: Contesting South Africa’s National Pasts (Bloomington and Cape Town, Indiana University Press and David Philip, 2003), pp. 178–9. 73 K. Ward and N. Worden, ‘Commemorating, Suppressing and Invoking Cape Slavery’, in S. Nuttall and C. Coetzee (eds), Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 208–9. 74 Worden, ‘The Changing Politics of Slave Heritage’. Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town 405 and Madagascar, this emphasis on Islam excluded slavery from the African mainland.75 As Pumla Gqola has recently pointed out, Cape Malay identity has now recovered its slave roots, but the ‘African’ dimension of Cape creolisation, in which slavery formed such an important part, is still neglected.76 Instead slaves from Africa are firmly associated in school textbooks, museum displays and popular publications with the transatlantic slave trade, in which the Cape and South Africa played no part. There is, by contrast, a lack of awareness of the use of African slaves in the Indian Ocean trade, which included supplies to the Cape. This was apparent when the South African government, with no sense of irony, joined the demand for reparations and compensation for the export of slaves from Africa at the Durban World Conference Against Racism in 1991. The neglect of the African and (to a lesser extent) south Asian elements of Cape Town’s slave heritage is a highly politicised issue in the context of the contested contemporary politics of the Western Cape region of South Africa. As the only province without a majority Africanspeaking population, and without an African National Congress local government, many see the region as distinct in its historical and social character from the rest of the country. Africans, it is widely believed, came to Cape Town only in the 20th century, or, at the earliest, with the migrant dockworkers of the late 19th century. To stress the African elements of Cape Town’s slave past would thus not only challenge the dominant public perceptions of urban slave heritage as Muslim and Asian, but also emphasise that Africans have an equally long-standing place in the city’s history. To appreciate the full implications of Cape Town’s past thus requires greater awareness of the complexities of the Indian Ocean Asian and African slave-trading networks, an issue which academic work needs to continue to address. NIGEL WORDEN Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, 7701, South Africa. E-mail: [email protected] 75 K. Ward, ‘The “300 Years: Making of Cape Muslim Culture” Exhibition, Cape Town, April 1994: Liberating the Castle?’, Social Dynamics, 21, 1 (1995), pp. 96–131. The exhibition was organised by the Sheikh Yusuf Tercentenary Commemoration Committee, led by the historian and linguist Achmat Davids. The main research publication associated with this was Y. da Costa and A. Davids (eds), Pages from Cape Muslim History (Pietermaritzburg, Shooter and Shuter, 1994). 76 P. Gqola, What is Slavery to Me?: Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2010), pp. 140–1. Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 406 Appendix: Cape Town slaves listed in MOOC database, 1695–1807 Bengal Malabar Cust’ /Kust Westcust Madras Nagapatnam Surat Coromandel or East coast Trancquebar Tuticorin Pulicat Goa Cochin Manjeri Ceylon Sub-total 1695–1749 M F 41 29 5 12 1 3 F U M 99 99 16 10 1 26 12 2 6 24 21 1 1 2 3 4 1 2 12 107 2 19 1 1695–1749 F 2 1 2 5 10 15 2 4 1 2 4 2 3 3 U 4 9 6 1 18 257 M 19 1 5 21 27 4 117 36 6 2 3 18 13 U 4 1 1 3 46 1750–1794 F 3 1 1 3 3 1 12 8 3 1 1 1 5 2 7 2 53 U 3 M 15 5 1 1 3 6 2 4 15 4 3 1 2 1 6 1795–1807 F 10 1 TOTAL 215 162 24 10 2 3 3 5 7 8 1 0 19 1 38 498 1 2 3 3 1 TOTAL F 1 1 1 1 8 M 12 1795–1807 M 2 SOUTH-EAST ASIA Batavia Bantam Java Madura Bali Sumbawa Bima/ ‘Dima’ Bougies Macassar Mandaar Bouton Ambon Banda Timor Ternate 1750–1794 U 0 U 2 1 1 TOTAL 60 2 17 0 32 39 5 172 70 16 6 4 2 25 24 M F 164 149 22 10 1 2 2 4 6 7 1 0 16 1 32 417 42 13 2 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 3 0 6 71 TOTAL M F 46 5 1 1 6 2 0 0 24 3 35 3 4 1 142 24 55 12 8 3 6 0 3 1 1 1 21 1 19 5 U 9 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 10 U 9 0 9 0 5 1 0 6 3 5 0 0 0 3 0 Nigel Worden SOUTH ASIA Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 Banjar Banjarmasin Palembang Padang Sumatra Nias Macao Malakka Sub-total 1 1 2 61 MADAGASCAR & MASCARENES M Mauritius Bourbon Madagascar Sub-total 13 13 AFRICA M 5 1 2 8 1695–1749 F 2 2 1695–1749 F 7 13 U 0 U 1 16 1 3 294 M 2 1 42 45 M 4 27 1 1 44 25 1750–1794 F 17 17 1750–1794 F 5 12 41 U 2 M 1 2 4 4 5 U M 1 51 11 1795–1807 F 0 1795–1807 F 4 U 1 1 U 10 7 0 1 32 17 0 52 21 0 Unknown Total non-Cape Cape born Total Total known 119 191 36 346 227 41 36 29 106 65 35 16 6 57 22 35 628 200 863 828 12 124 177 313 301 16 36 11 63 47 9 151 68 228 219 5 38 65 108 103 10 5 35 50 40 21 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 63 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 42 TOTAL 6 1 80 87 TOTAL M F 3 0 1 0 59 19 63 19 U 3 0 2 5 TOTAL 22 112 2 0 1 0 1 1 139 TOTAL M F 10 12 79 33 2 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 94 45 U 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 282 1,225 627 2,134 1,852 0 0 1 1 1 18 1 3 396 163 970 304 1,437 1,274 58 198 271 527 469 61 57 52 170 109 Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town Rio de la Goa Mozambique [Terra de] Natal Angola Guinea Cape Verde St Jago/Santiago Sao Tome Sub-total 0 0 1 1 1 20 1 3 501 407 Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016 1695-1749 F U M 1750-1794 F U M 1795-1807 F U TOTAL TOTAL M F U 31% 18% 4% 3% 34% 10% 55% 18% 8% 2% 7% 39% 27% 34% 5% 23% 0% 0% 61% 11% 28% 30% 34% 5% 4% 4% 23% 73% 15% 14% 5% 5% 4% 57% 40% 11% 40% 6% 0% 25% 17% 57% 23% 18% 2% 23% 4% 30% 66% 6% 10% 0% 19% 5% 60% 35% 0% 8% 2% 0% 20% 70% 10% 23% 23% 4% 7% 13% 29% 57% 29% 28% 4% 7% 11% 21% 68% 13% 12% 4% 9% 11% 51% 38% 6% 25% 3% 0% 36% 31% 34% % OF KNOWN TOPONYMS % S Asia % SE Asia % Madagascar & Mascarenes % Africa % Cape born % Non-Cape born 47% 27% 6% 4% 16% 84% 29% 12% 3% 11% 45% 55% 14% 59% 0% 0% 27% 73% 31% 36% 5% 4% 24% 76% 15% 15% 6% 6% 59% 41% 15% 53% 9% 0% 23% 77% 24% 19% 2% 24% 31% 69% 6% 11% 0% 20% 63% 37% 0% 10% 3% 0% 88% 13% 27% 27% 5% 8% 34% 66% 33% 31% 5% 7% 24% 76% 15% 13% 4% 10% 58% 42% 9% 39% 5% 0% 48% 52% % M/F in period known total % M/F Cape born in period 78% 55% 22% 45% 73% 53% 27% 47% 68% 51% 32% 49% Nigel Worden OVERALL % % S Asia % SE Asia % Madagascar and Mascarenes % Africa % Unknown % Cape born % Non-Cape born 408 M