Almost all female slaves lived in the house and were part of the household. Their role was that of servant, cook, nanny, surrogate mother and sometimes wet-nurse as well. Slave women also busied themselves with crocheting, embroidering, sewing, knitting and laundering. In Cape Town the female slaves in the ubiquitous boarding houses ministered to all the needs of the revitalised sailors and officers.
A single slave woman often performed the roles of midwife, wet-nurse and nanny. The slave nurse-nanny was there to assist at the birth; she suckled the child; she carried the settler’s infant to be baptised; and she was the child’s companion when it was time to go to school. ‘Such a slave is very well treated,’ Otto Mentzel, an astute observer, noted. ‘In addition to good food, she gets many presents with the prospect of manumission for good service in the bringing up of several children.’
In this way slave women were not only brought into the bosom of the family, so to speak, but also actually became in a literal sense the bosom of the burgher family. Wetnursing was frowned on in metropolitan Holland at this time, but settler women had slaves to employ to feed their infants. Cape settler women clearly perceived that there was some sort of link between lactation and ovulation. The Cape wet-nurse, by lactating for the biological mother, ensured that the biological mother would be ovulating again sooner than if she were breast-feeding. Therefore the birth intervals between her children would be shorter.
The seventeenth-century Batavian slur that such household slave women were naai mandjes (naai means to sew or to have intercourse; mandje is a basket or basin) also recalls that such activities could serve a dual purpose. So important was the wet-nurse to the slave society that two other terms entered the colonial creole language: minnemoer or mina (love-mother) and aiya (old nursemaid). These words have survived, as has the nanny herself.
