Indian ocean slaves in Cape Town, 1695–1807

Journal of Southern African Studies

Volumn 42, Issue 3, 2016, Pages 389-408

  Worden, Nigel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN   (South Africa)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COLONIALISM; EIGHTEENTH CENTURY; NINETEENTH CENTURY; SLAVE; SLAVERY;

CAPE TOWN; INDIAN OCEAN; SOUTH AFRICA; WESTERN CAPE;

EID: 84975247210     PISSN: 03057070     EISSN: 14653893     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2016.1171554     Document Type: Article

References (120)

1. I. Hofmeyr, 'South Africa's Indian Ocean,' History Compass, 11, 7 (2013), pp. 508-12
2. P. Gupta, I. Hofmeyr and M. Pearson (eds), Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (Pretoria, UNISA Press, 2010).
3. 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
4. K. Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009)
5. 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.
6. P. Larson, Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009)
7. C. Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790-1920 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012).
8. 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.
9. N. Worden (ed.), Cape Town between East and West: Social Identities in a Dutch Colonial Town (Johannesburg and Hilversum, Jacana and Verloren, 2012).
10. R. Ross, Cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa (London, Routledge 1983)
11. N. Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985)
12. 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).
13. N. Worden, 'The Changing Politics of Slave Heritage in the Western Cape, South Africa,' Journal of African History, 50, 1 (2009), pp. 23-40.
14. A. Bank, The Decline of Urban Slavery at the Cape, 1806-1843, Communications, No. 22 (Cape Town, Centre for African Studies, UCT, 1991).
15. 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
16. N. Worden, E. van Heyningen and V. Bickford-Smith, Cape Town: The Making of a City (Cape Town, David Philip, 1998).
17. N. Worden, 'Cape Slaves in the Paper Empire of the VOC,' Kronos, 40 (2014), pp. 23-44.
18. 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.
19. F. Bradlow and M. Cairns, The Early Cape Muslims (Cape Town, Balkema, 1978).
20. Shell, Children of Bondage
21. 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.
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24. 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
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27. Kate Ekama, 'Slavery in Dutch Colombo: A Social History,' MA dissertation, Department of History, University of Leiden, 2012.
28. Worden et al., Cape Town: The Making
29. Worden (ed.), Cape Town Between East and West.
30. 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.
31. Worden et al., Cape Town: The Making, pp. 66-7.
32. J. Armstrong, 'The Chinese Exiles,' in Worden (ed.), Cape Town between East and West, pp. 115-17.
33. Worden et al., Cape Town: The Making, p. 50
34. Bank, Decline of Urban Slavery, p. 236.
35. Niemeijer, Batavia, pp. 63-4
36. 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.
37. Bank, Decline of Urban Slavery.
38. 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'
39. 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.
40. Shell, Children of Bondage, p. 40.
41. 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 pp. 47-8.
42. 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.
43. Raben, 'Batavia and Colombo,' Table 4. 14, p. 112.
44. The position of female slaves (as opposed to elite indigenous women) in VOC Asia has only recently been the focus of historical research.
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47. 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.
48. These figures exclude 306 slaves whose toponyms were not recorded (288 names) or were unidentifiable (18 names).
49. Shell, Children of Bondage, Figure 2-1, p. 41.
50. Ross, Cape of Torments, p. 13.
51. Shell, Children of Bondage, pp. 40-46
52. Bradlow and Cairns, Early Cape Muslims, pp. 118-24
53. Worden, 'Indian Ocean Slavery,' pp. 29-38.
54. Bank, The Decline of Urban Slavery, p. 232.
55. 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.
56. 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.
57. Van Welie, 'Patterns of Slave Trading,' pp. 185-6.
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59. Worden and Groenewald, Trials of Slavery, p. 8.
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66. Raben, 'Batavia and Colombo,' p. 122
67. Niemeijer, Batavia, p. 53.
68. 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.
69. Vink, '"The World's Oldest Trade",' p. 142.
70. Raben, 'Batavia and Colombo,' p. 131
71. Ekama, 'Slavery in Dutch Colombo,' p. 13.
72. Raben, 'Batavia and Colombo,' p. 122.
73. Shell, Children of Bondage, pp. 43-4.
74. K. Ward, 'Southeast Asian Migrants,' in Worden (ed.), Cape Town Between East and West, p. 86.
75. Van Welie, 'Patterns of Slave Trading,' pp. 196-7.
76. Raben, 'Batavia and Colombo,' p. 125.
77. Worden and Groenewald, Trials of Slavery, pp. 355-84, 537-56
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79. Raben, 'Batavia and Colombo,' p. 125.
80. Van Welie, 'Patterns of Slave Trading,' p. 206
81. Shell, Children of Bondage, p. 43 n. 8.
82. J-M. Filliot, La Traite des Esclaves vers les Mascereignes au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, ORSTOM, 1974)
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84. 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.
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96. I owe this observation to one of the anonymous readers of this article, for which I am most grateful.
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98. 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
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120. P. Gqola, What is Slavery to Me?: Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2010), pp. 140-1.