You are on page 1of 21

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, 16951807

Nigel Worden

To cite this article: Nigel Worden (2016) Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town, 16951807, 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, 389408, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2016.1171554

Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town, 16951807


Nigel Worden
(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.
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

It is only since about 2007 that South Africas 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 Towns 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 Towns 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 Towns slave population came from a much wider geographical range than south-east Asia.

1For South Africas Indian Ocean connections, see, most notably, I. Hofmeyr, South Africas Indian Ocean,
History Compass, 11, 7 (2013), pp. 50812, and P. Gupta, I. Hofmeyr and M. Pearson (eds), Eyes Across the Water:
Navigating the Indian Ocean (Pretoria, UNISA Press, 2010). Cape Towns 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. 13752; 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. 14262. 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, 17901920 (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.
2For 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).
3The 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, 16521838 (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. 2340.

2016 The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies


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 Banks 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
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

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 Towns 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

4A. Bank, The Decline of Urban Slavery at the Cape, 18061843, 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. 114; and parts of N. Worden, E. van Heyningen and V. Bickford-Smith, Cape Town:
The Making of a City (Cape Town, David Philip, 1998).
5For 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. 2344.
6For example, Nationaal Archief, The Hague, Collectie Radermacher 507, for a record of the towns inhabitants in
1731; Cape Archives Depot, C 2764, Taxatielijst van de slaven, 19 July 1762, pp. 829.
7F. 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. 2949.
8Transcribed from Cape Archives Depot, MOOC 8/18/40, Master of the Orphan Chamber, Inventories: General
Series, 16731825, 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. 14268.
9R. van Welie, Patterns of Slave Trading and Slavery in the Dutch Colonial World, 15961863, in G. Oostindie
(ed.), Dutch Colonialism, Migration and Cultural Heritage (Leiden, KITLV Press, 2008), pp. 21718.
Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town391

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 Ekamas 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 Towns
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
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

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 Towns 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 Companys
headquarters in Java. Nevertheless the total of its Company employees (which included
the administration, garrison and workshop artisans) exceeded that of the VOCs second-
largest 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 VOCs 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.

10R. 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, 16001800,
doctoral thesis, University of Leiden, 1996, p. 119.
11H. Niemeijer, Batavia: Een Koloniale Samenleving in de 17de Eeuw (Amsterdam, Uitgeverij Balans, 2005), pp.
5064.
12Kate Ekama, Slavery in Dutch Colombo: A Social History, MA dissertation, Department of History, University
of Leiden, 2012.
13For 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 Azi 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. 23843.
14Worden et al., Cape Town: The Making, pp. 667.
15J. Armstrong, The Chinese Exiles, in Worden (ed.), Cape Town between East and West, pp. 11517.
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 towns
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 VOCs 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
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

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 Towns slaves were connected.
Table 1. Total number of privately owned slaves in Cape Town

year no.
1727 742
1731 767
1749 1,038
1774 2,373
1806 9,367
1822 7,160
1827 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 337
1731 566
1752 506
1784 625
1807 283
1826 171
Source: Armstrong and Worden, The Slaves, 16521834, 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).

16Worden et al., Cape Town: The Making, p. 50


17Bank, Decline of Urban Slavery, p. 236. This includes both privately owned and government slaves.
18For example, Niemeijer, Batavia, pp. 634, and, for a broader discussion of the impact of European colonial use
of slaves in south-east Asia, K.Ward, Slavery in Southeast Asia, 14201804, in D. Eltis and S. Engerman (eds),
The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Volume 3, AD 1420AD 1804 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
2011), pp. 17981.
19Bank, Decline of Urban Slavery.
Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town393

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
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

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 towns 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 175094 than for the preceding 60 years,
given both that the number of inventories increased during that time and that the size of Cape
Towns population, both free and enslaved, grew considerably in the decades after the 1750s.

20The 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.
21Shell, 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. 478.
22J. Armstrong and N. Worden, The Slaves, 16521834, in R. Elphick and H. Giliomee (eds), The Shaping of
South African Society, 16521840, second edition (Cape Town, Maskew Miller Longman, 1989), pp. 12932.
394 Nigel Worden

Table 3. Number of Cape Town slaves in MOOC database by period and gender

period male female male:female ratio unknown gender Total


16951749 346 106 3.26:1 57 509
17501794 863 313 2.75:1 63 1,239
17951807 228 108 2.11:1 50 386
TOTAL 1,437 527 2.72:1 170 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
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

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 Towns 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.

23Ibid., p. 133.
24Raben, Batavia and Colombo, Table 4.14, p. 112.
25The 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 Hawaii, 2000), pp. 17494;
E. Jones, Wives, Slaves And Concubines: A History of the Female Underclass in Dutch Asia (DeKalb, Northern
Illinois University Press, 2010).
26For 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, 17051794, second series, Vol. 36 (Cape Town, Van Riebeeck Society, 2005), pp. 5n1, 80n11, 169n1, 189n1,
455n2, 487n1, 609n2, 616n1.
Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town395

Table 4. Number and percentage of Cape Town slaves in MOOC database by regional toponyms, 16951807
S Asia 498 27%
SE Asia 501 27%
Madagascar & Mascarenes 87 5%
Africa 139 8%
Cape 627 34%
TOTAL 1,852 100%

Table 5. Number and proportion of imported Cape Town slaves in MOOC database by regional toponyms,
16951807
S Asia 498 40.6%
SE Asia 501 40.8%
Madagascar & Mascarenes 87 7.1%
Africa 139 11.3%
TOTAL 1,225 100%
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

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 one-
third 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 MadagascarMascarenes 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 Shells 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
Rosss 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 Rosss 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 175094 and 46 per cent in 17951807. 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.

27These figures exclude 306 slaves whose toponyms were not recorded (288 names) or were unidentifiable (18 names).
28Shell, Children of Bondage, Figure 2-1, p. 41.
29Ross, Cape of Torments, p. 13.
396 Nigel Worden

100%

90% Cape

80%

70% Africa

60%

50% MM

40%

SEA
30%

20%
SA
10%

0%
16951749 175094 17951807 total

Figure 1. Percentage of Cape Town slaves in MOOC database by toponym and period, 16951807.
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

100%

90% Africa
80%

70%
MM
60%

50%

40% SEA
30%

20%
SA
10%

0%
16951749 175094 17951807 total

Figure 2. Percentage of imported Cape Town slaves in MOOC database by toponym and period, 16951807.

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
175094 before declining to a similar proportion of 29 per cent in 17951807. 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 17951807. 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

30For example, Shell, Children of Bondage, pp. 4046; Bradlow and Cairns, Early Cape Muslims, pp. 11824;
Worden, Indian Ocean Slavery, pp. 2938.
Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town397

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.

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
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

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

31Bank, The Decline of Urban Slavery, p. 232. Banks 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.
32G. 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.
33Van Welie, Patterns of Slave Trading, pp. 1856.
34Campbell, Question of Slavery, p. 127.
35Worden and Groenewald, Trials of Slavery, p. 8.
36P. 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).
37M.Vink, The Worlds Oldest Trade: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth
Century, Journal of World History, 14, 2 (2003), pp. 1403.
38A. Datta, From Bengal to the Cape: Bengali Slaves in South Africa (Bloomington, XLibris, 2013), p. 40.
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
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

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 famineslave cycle, by which
slaves were obtained through sale at a time of economic and social crisis.42 China-Rosas
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 VOCs involvement in intra-Asian

39R. 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,
12001800 (Leiden, KITLV Press, 2002), pp. 2278; W. Dijk, Seventeenth-Century Burma and the Dutch East
India Company, 16341680 (Singapore, NIAS Press, 2006), pp. 1402.
40Raben, Batavia and Colombo, p. 122; Niemeijer, Batavia, p. 53.
41Cape Archives Depot, Miscellaneous 49, Serrurier papers, file (n), transfer deeds of slaves, 17636. This is a single
rare example of a record detailing the gradual movement of a slave to Cape Town.
42Vink, The Worlds Oldest Trade, p. 142.
43Raben, Batavia and Colombo, p. 131; Ekama, Slavery in Dutch Colombo, p. 13.
44Raben, Batavia and Colombo, p. 122.
Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town399

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 VOCs 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 VOCs active slave trading and raiding in the
Sulawesi region from the late 17th century, which drew on the existing activities of indigenous
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

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

45Shell, Children of Bondage, pp. 434.


46K.Ward, Southeast Asian Migrants, in Worden (ed.), Cape Town Between East and West, p. 86.
47Van Welie, Patterns of Slave Trading, pp. 1967.
48Raben, Batavia and Colombo, p. 125.
49Worden and Groenewald, Trials of Slavery, pp. 35584, 53756; R. Ross and S. Koolhof, Upas, September and
the Bugis at the Cape, Archipel, 70 (2005), pp. 281308.
50Raben, Batavia and Colombo, p. 125.
51Van 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, 17191789

17191749 17501789
S Asia 36 29
SE Asia 24 38
Madagascar 96 601
Rio de la Goa 219 70
Mozambique 2 415
Source: Data drawn from Iziko Slave Lodge database of Company slave deaths, derived from Cape Archives Depot, C 2432-2652,
Attestatien, 17191789.

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
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

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 south-
east 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 171949. 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 colonys rural districts, and there is evidence

52J-M. Filliot, La Traite des Esclaves vers les Mascereignes au XVIIIe Sicle (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, 17901842, MA dissertation, University of Cape Town, 1978,
especially Ch. 2.
53The 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.
54Armstrong and Worden, The Slaves; Ravell, The VOC Slave Trade; Westra and Armstrong, Slave Trade, p. 9.
55N. Worden, Slavery and Amnesia: Towards a Recovery of Malagasy Heritage in Representations of Cape Slavery,
in I. Rakoto (ed.), Lesclavage Madagascar: Aspects Historiques et Rsurgences Contemporaines (Antananarivo,
Institut de Civilisations Muse dArt et dArchologie, 1997), p. 54.
Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town401

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 Companys 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 towns 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
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

perspective on the integration of the Cape into the south-west Indian Oceansouth 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. Reidys 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 Harriess 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 AfricanMalagasyMascarenes 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

56Larson, Ocean of Letters, p. 244.


57Van Welie, Patterns of Slave Trading, p. 203.
58M. Reidy, The Admission of Slaves and Prize Negroes into the Cape colony, 17971818, MA dissertation,
University of Cape Town, 1997, p. 111.
59P. 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. 17390; P. Harries, Slavery, Indenture
and Migrant Labour: Maritime Immigration from Mozambique to the Cape, c.17801880, African Studies, 73, 3
(2014), pp. 32340.
60I 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 Towns 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 Towns slave networks were now detached from their Asian
roots and instead firmly embedded in the African and south-west Indian Ocean nexus.

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
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

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 Towns 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 Towns slave population, especially in the light of Patrick Harriess and Michael
Reidys exposure of its scale and character. Pier Larsons 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:

61N. 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, 17701830 (London, Palgrave, 2010), pp. 12138.
62There 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. 4253.
63Ward, Networks of Empire; Ward, Southeast Asian Migrants.
64S. Newton-King, Family, Friendship and Survival among Freed Slaves, in Worden (ed.), Cape Town between
East and West , pp. 15375; Anderson, Subaltern Lives.
Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town403

[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
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
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

This crude, racially stereotyped division of slaves into Malays and Mozambicans became
the standard fare of early 19th-century commentators. Thus the administrator John Barrows
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 Towns 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 Towns 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 post-
emancipation 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

65O. 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.
66Anon., Gleanings in Africa (London, Cundee,1806), p. 58.
67J. 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, 183840,
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. 579.
68Datta, From Bengal to the Cape.
404 Nigel Worden

contrast to native Africans.69 As Vivian Bickford-Smith has argued, the term coloured was
used in midlater 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 Towns 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
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

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 anti-
segregationist 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 citys 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 apartheids
collapse in 1994 was a commemoration of 300 years of Islam held at Cape Towns 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

69T. Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Cape Town, David Philip, 1996), p. 125.
70V. Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1995), p. 31.
71P. 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. 91123.
72S. 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, 19867; L. Witz, Apartheids Festival: Contesting South Africas
National Pasts (Bloomington and Cape Town, Indiana University Press and David Philip, 2003), pp. 1789.
73K. 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. 2089.
74Worden, The Changing Politics of Slave Heritage.
Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town405

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 Towns
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 African-
speaking 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
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

migrant dockworkers of the late 19th century. To stress the African elements of Cape Towns
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 citys history. To appreciate the full implications of Cape Towns 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: nigel.worden@uct.ac.za

75K. Ward, The 300 Years: Making of Cape Muslim Culture Exhibition, Cape Town, April 1994: Liberating the
Castle?, Social Dynamics, 21, 1 (1995), pp. 96131. 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).
76P. Gqola, What is Slavery to Me?: Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg, Wits
University Press, 2010), pp. 1401.
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

Appendix: Cape Town slaves listed in MOOC database, 16951807

SOUTH ASIA 16951749 17501794 17951807 TOTAL


M F U M F U M F U TOTAL M F U
Bengal 41 12 3 99 26 6 24 4 215 164 42 9
Malabar 29 1 99 12 21 162 149 13 0
406 Nigel Worden

Cust /Kust 5 16 2 1 24 22 2 0
Westcust 10 10 10 0 0
Madras 1 1 2 1 0 1
Nagapatnam 2 1 3 2 1 0
Surat 1 1 1 3 2 1 0
Coromandel or East coast 2 1 2 5 4 1 0
Trancquebar 3 3 1 7 6 1 0
Tuticorin 4 1 3 8 7 1 0
Pulicat 1 1 1 0 0
Goa 0 0 0 0
Cochin 8 2 6 1 2 19 16 3 0
Manjeri 1 1 1 0 0
Ceylon 12 2 18 3 2 1 38 32 6 0
Sub-total 107 19 3 257 46 7 53 6 0 498 417 71 10

SOUTH-EAST ASIA 16951749 17501794 17951807 TOTAL


M F U M F U M F U TOTAL M F U
Batavia 12 2 4 19 3 3 15 2 60 46 5 9
Bantam 1 1 2 1 1 0
Java 1 1 9 5 1 17 6 2 9
Madura 0 0 0 0
Bali 2 21 3 5 1 32 24 3 5
Sumbawa 5 27 3 1 3 39 35 3 1
Bima/ Dima 4 1 5 4 1 0
Bougies 10 2 117 12 6 15 10 172 142 24 6
Macassar 15 3 36 8 2 4 1 1 70 55 12 3
Mandaar 2 6 3 4 1 16 8 3 5
Bouton 4 2 6 6 0 0
Ambon 3 1 4 3 1 0
Banda 1 1 2 1 1 0
Timor 2 18 1 3 1 25 21 1 3
Ternate 4 13 5 2 24 19 5 0
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

Banjar 0 0 0 0
Banjarmasin 0 0 0 0
Palembang 1 1 1 0 0
Padang 1 1 1 0 0
Sumatra 1 1 1 0 0
Nias 2 16 1 1 20 18 1 1
Macao 1 1 1 0 0
Malakka 3 3 3 0 0
Sub-total 61 8 13 294 44 25 41 11 4 501 396 63 42

MADAGASCAR & MASCARENES 16951749 17501794 17951807 TOTAL


M F U M F U M F U TOTAL M F U
Mauritius 2 2 1 1 6 3 0 3
Bourbon 1 1 1 0 0
Madagascar 13 2 42 17 2 4 80 59 19 2
Sub-total 13 2 0 45 17 4 5 0 1 87 63 19 5

AFRICA 16951749 17501794 17951807 TOTAL


M F U M F U M F U TOTAL M F U
Rio de la Goa 5 7 4 5 1 22 10 12 0
Mozambique 1 27 12 51 21 112 79 33 0
[Terra de] Natal 2 2 2 0 0
Angola 0 0 0 0
Guinea 1 1 1 0 0
Cape Verde 0 0 0 0
St Jago/Santiago 1 1 1 0 0
Sao Tome 1 1 1 0 0
Sub-total 10 7 0 32 17 0 52 21 0 139 94 45 0

Unknown 119 41 35 35 12 16 9 5 10 282 163 58 61
Total non-Cape 191 36 16 628 124 36 151 38 5 1,225 970 198 57
Cape born 36 29 6 200 177 11 68 65 35 627 304 271 52
Total 346 106 57 863 313 63 228 108 50 2,134 1,437 527 170
Total known 227 65 22 828 301 47 219 103 40 1,852 1,274 469 109

Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town407
Downloaded by [Nigel Worden] at 22:34 23 May 2016

1695-1749 1750-1794 1795-1807 TOTAL


M F U M F U M F U TOTAL M F U
OVERALL %
% S Asia 31% 18% 5% 30% 15% 11% 23% 6% 0% 23% 29% 13% 6%
% SE Asia 18% 8% 23% 34% 14% 40% 18% 10% 8% 23% 28% 12% 25%
% Madagascar and Mascarenes 4% 2% 0% 5% 5% 6% 2% 0% 2% 4% 4% 4% 3%
% Africa 3% 7% 0% 4% 5% 0% 23% 19% 0% 7% 7% 9% 0%
408 Nigel Worden

% Unknown 34% 39% 61% 4% 4% 25% 4% 5% 20% 13% 11% 11% 36%
% Cape born 10% 27% 11% 23% 57% 17% 30% 60% 70% 29% 21% 51% 31%
% Non-Cape born 55% 34% 28% 73% 40% 57% 66% 35% 10% 57% 68% 38% 34%

% OF KNOWN TOPONYMS
% S Asia 47% 29% 14% 31% 15% 15% 24% 6% 0% 27% 33% 15% 9%
% SE Asia 27% 12% 59% 36% 15% 53% 19% 11% 10% 27% 31% 13% 39%
% Madagascar & Mascarenes 6% 3% 0% 5% 6% 9% 2% 0% 3% 5% 5% 4% 5%
% Africa 4% 11% 0% 4% 6% 0% 24% 20% 0% 8% 7% 10% 0%
% Cape born 16% 45% 27% 24% 59% 23% 31% 63% 88% 34% 24% 58% 48%
% Non-Cape born 84% 55% 73% 76% 41% 77% 69% 37% 13% 66% 76% 42% 52%

% M/F in period known total 78% 22% 73% 27% 68% 32%
% M/F Cape born in period 55% 45% 53% 47% 51% 49%

You might also like