Too Close for Comfort: Master and Slave Relations in the Colonial Cape
The effects of propinquity on the nature and development of slavery in colonial Cape society were profound. Unlike the large plantations that evolved in parts of the Americas, where enslaved Africans could develop slave cultures without the incessant supervision of whites, close contact between white masters and slaves in the Cape led to constant supervision that created intimately oppressive conditions. Therefore, slavery developed into an institution of extreme regulation and monitoring of slaves for social control with the appearances of benign paternalism, which was weaker in Cape Town than in the countryside. These aforementioned intimately oppressive conditions entailed a form of slavery mixing physical and psychological forms of domination, domestic affection and the threat of violence, and paternalism and overseers to ensure slave subordination while also creating conditions for more cultural and racial mixing.
Conditions of white supervision varied for slaves in both Cape Town and rural areas, depending on various factors. The similarities persist, however, for all of the above in several key ways. First, in both the countryside and Cape Town, the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, never enforced its laws against concubinage, so white males and ‘black’ female slaves produced mixed-race children throughout the colonial period, partly because of the uneven sex ratios for whites. But despite the prevalence of miscegenation, there was no “mulatto escape hatch” for Cape slaves and slave children of white fathers, meaning few slave women gained freedom from relationships with white males. Few of their children with white males were manumitted or given burghership. Nevertheless, the frequency of interracial sex between white men and slaves exemplifies another use of white males controlling the bodies and sexual freedom of female slaves, adding another layer of force for social control, which can be seen in Willem Menssink’s penchant for sex with his slave women. Like many other male settlers, it was not unusual to have sex with slave women, although the church never condoned it. In addition to sex, white males often controlled their slaves across the Cape because the household slept under the same roof. A shortage of living space led to higher amount of intimacy between slaves and masters, rural and urban. Indeed, even in Cape Gentry homes, slaves often lived inside the house. Thus, slaves were not only vulnerable to slaveholders’ sexual power, but also within reach of them and their families, decreasing chances for autonomy and, especially in rural areas, limiting socialization with other enslaved peoples on neighboring small farms. Moreover, slaves in both rural areas and Cape Town were vulnerable to physical violence and the threat of it, although slaveholders who took the law into their own hands with cruel punishments of their slaves instead of relying on the VOC to chastise them could be shunned by Cape society and penalized by the Company. Despite the shared characteristics of slavery in Cape Town and rural areas, the peculiar institution developed differently from slavery in Cape Town in multiple ways. For instance, slaves on Cape farmsteads outside of the arable southwest, on the frontier or small estates, were often very few in numbers on their plantations. These Cape slaves on small estates would then mostly socialize with their white masters who oversaw them personally or had a knecht or mandoor. Regardless, slaves on these small farms outside of the arable Cape were very close with their masters, and, in some cases, with Khoikhoi laborers and women, often the only available sexual partners for the mostly male enslaved workforce. As mentioned previously, the mixed-race offspring of slaves and their masters were usually not freed, but a Creole culture based on the Indische culture of VOC holdings in the Indian Ocean world and European culture developed on larger estates. This was aided by the larger estates featuring more slaves from common origins, facilitating communication and socialization among slaves and developing a unique slave culture influenced by European culture, too. Larger estates also featured more skilled slave craftsmen, likely better treated. While being spread out in small numbers with their white masters and some Khoikhoi workers, rural slaves also lacked privacy needed to maintain their own family units, being seen as part of the patriarchal family unit as perpetual children in need of white paternalism. Despite cases intense domestic affection that could arise from paternalism between master and slave, their membership in the family included the master’s children having the right of beating slaves, indicating the unequal and hierarchical structure of master-slave relations embedded within the family. Rural slave resistance, and slave resistance generally throughout the Cape, was likely undermined by slave diversity, since the population came from all over the Indian Ocean and linguistic hurdles and ethnic rivalry may have caused slave resistance to take on a more individualized form. However, some forms of group resistance appear in slaves running away beyond the frontier to join Khoikhoi groups or to inaccessible areas to form small maroon bands, which are just some of the options available to rural slaves. Drosters, or gangs of fugitive slaves, such as the one Pieter of Madagascar was part of in early 18th century Land van Waveren, were also common forms of slave resistance on the frontier. Overall, slaves in the countryside, unfortunately, were mostly concentrated in smaller farms, slept in the same home with the master, and because central authority weakened the further away from Cape Town one was, slaveholders could use more violence or brutality as they saw fit without much control from VOC authority. Unlike their urban counterparts or those in bondage on large estates, their options for socialization were primarily with European masters and Khoikhoi, so slaves and trekboers both adopted elements of Khoi culture, such as a pastoralist economy, or their Khoi-styled shelters. The overly close quarters between slave and free ultimately developed into the perfect conditions for the use of paternalism as well as brute force to discipline and subordinate slaves in the Cape. Similar to conditions of slavery in the rural Cape, urban slaves, who comprised a significant portion of all slaves in the Cape, were also under close regulation by colonial society. Brutality, public beatings, and widespread abuse of slaves were common, particularly for Company slaves housed in the Slave Lodge, which also functioned as a brothel. Company slaves, however, were not representative of all slaves in the Cape, particularly because of the draconian measures taken by the Company to control them with overseers since they were organized into large work gangs for various forms of labor in Cape Town. Company slaves gradually became a very tiny proportion of the total slave population, hitting rock-bottom by 1795, the year of the first British occupation, with almost all reported slaves being privately owned. Before the Company’s decline, the VOC managed their slaves through overseers, often slaves themselves. The Company also relied on Kaffers, Eastern convicts from their Asian possessions, imported as slaves to monitor, police, and apprehend Cape Town’s slave population. Like rural areas and privately-owned slaves, miscegenation at the Lodge was also frequent. In fact, an estimate for mixed-race children born there in 1671 was ¾ having mixed ancestry. The case of slaves at the Lodge, however, were slightly different in that sex ratios approached a balance, so these additional women were targets for European bachelors and sailors employed by the VOC. Despite the increased surveillance of the Company’s slaves, they were still able to interact with each other and socialize with other urban populations, such as males seeking prostitution, or with other slaves and residents of Cape Town, so their enslavement differed in some key respects from the rural slaves’ on small estates living inside the homes of their masters. Besides the Company’s slaves in Cape Town, the rest of the urban slave population enjoyed comparatively much more freedom. Though attempts to limit and monitor their movement and keep them under the paternalistic slave-master relationship were utilized, urban slaves were often rented by their masters, giving them a degree of mobility and autonomy from their masters. Slaves in Cape Town hired out were also more likely to pay for their own accommodation, providing additional distance between themselves and the paternalism of domestic slavery associated with living in the same home as slaveholders. Predictably, these urban slaves had far more opportunities to mingle with others in Cape Town’s markets and their various types of work led to increased chances of socialization and occasions for horizontal acculturation with other subordinate peoples in Cape society. These relatively mobile, unfettered Capetonian slaves also did not have to deal with an efficient or strong police force in Cape Town, allowing another degree of relative freedom. Furthermore, slaves’ relative autonomy surfaced in the frequency of slave theft of white property and forming their own sub-cultures and spaces within the city visiting taverns. Urban slaves also resisted attempts under British rule for Christian conversion and moral education, preferring Islam, which spread rapidly because the port received Muslim slaves, exiles and convicts from India and Southeast Asia, exemplifying the cosmopolitan culture of Cape Town and slave society. Naturally, there were multiple measures taken by Cape Town’s slaveholders and the government to curtail the freedom of movement enjoyed by urban slaves. For instance, Cape Town’s curfew laws attempted to reduce slave autonomy and retain control of the streets for European authority. The aforementioned Kaffers served as auxiliary police as well, assisting in the maintenance of the social order and symbolizing slave disunity and internal stratification. The threat of sale and the public military rituals and presence in Cape Town also served as deterrents to slave autonomy and resistance in the city, showing the powers of colonial authority authority in urban space. The threat of violent punishment and public beatings strengthened white authority by adding spectacle to what in the countryside would have been largely private affairs of disciplining slaves. Although the authority of slaveholders was augmented in some ways in the city, slaveholders of Cape Town lacked direct political power because of elite divisions and British colonialism introduced ameliorative legislation to limit the extent of cruel punishment, thereby improving the lot of slaves in the 19th century. In summation, slavery in both rural and urban Cape society clearly depended on the degree of propinquity to imbue it with alternative forms of social control. The high degree of paternalism, evident in the smallholdings of rural Cape society, was one form of social control that also continued to rely on physical coercion and intimidation. The Company slaves in Cape Town received less paternalism and more of the direct, constant physical, sexual, and supervision that characterized slavery on the large plantations of the Caribbean or the American South, partly because of the large numbers of slaves organized into specific work crews. Other urban slaves, exemplified by those whose labor slaveholders rented out, were more likely to live outside of their master’s accommodations and socialize with other slaves and urbanites across the city, further developing slave sub-cultures influenced by the diversity of slave origins as well as European culture. However, in all areas of slave distribution in the Cape, cultural and racial miscegenation occurred, extending to the creation of a new language, Afrikaans, a development that could only arise from oppressively close relations and contact between the masters and the slaves. Thus, the close relations of master and slave imbued slavery in the Cape with a façade of benevolence and ensured widespread miscegenation and cultural mixing through paternalism and factors such as location in the Cape.
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