During the early years, the situation was fluid enough for some children born outside wedlock from unions of non-European parents to be accepted into the European community. The slave Armosyn Claasz gave birth to the children of four different fathers in the Company’s Slave Lodge, some described as halfslag (half-caste), which means that the father was white. Many of these children and their descendants were absorbed into what became prominent Afrikaner families.
During his 1685 visit to the Cape, High Commissioner H.A. van Reede prohibited marriages between Europeans and heelslag, or full-blooded slave women (that is, of pure Asian or African origin). He did, however, permit marriages with halfslag women, with the intention of assimilating such half-castes into the European population. Fathers generally would not own up to their liaisons with slaves, and therefore they did not help their children by slave mothers to gain their freedom – a fact of Cape life that Van Reede’s regulations were meant to address.
In the period of Company rule, just over 1 000 ex-slave and native women married free burghers of European descent (and only two male ex-slaves married free women of European descent). When one considers that 65 000 slaves were imported into the Cape and almost an equal number were born into slavery, it is clear that the chances of a slave’s entering the ranks of colonial society were small and highly gendered, and, moreover, that they declined with time as the price of slaves rose. No one could marry a slave: she first had to be manumitted. At the end of the eighteenth century Willem Klomphaan tried to manumit his slave mistress and his two children but died before he could pay the full sum.
