Slaves convicted of serious offences – and this included lifting a hand against a master, setting a house on fire or making advances to a European woman – were commonly punished harshly: impaled, branded and quartered. The extreme penalty was death preceded by torture. Convicted slaves were broken alive on the wheel, their flesh was pulled off with red-hot tongs; slaves were mutilated, impaled or slowly strangled. The bodies of the executed were left hanging on gibbets or exposed after mutilation in Cape Town or on farmsteads. By 1727 there were so many disfigured and mutilated living slaves that the government decided to brand escaped slaves on the back in order to spare the feelings of the colonists, particularly pregnant women.
But while these gruesome punishments acted as a kind of deterrent, this does not mean that the masters’ control of slaves depended in the first place on whips and chains. Physical coercion alone can never explain why slavery as a system worked in South Africa. This is particularly true of the isolated farms, far removed from police and military force stationed in Cape Town.
The authorities limited punishment of privately owned slaves to ‘domestic correction’, the same type of punishment a husband and father could apply to his wife and children. Chains and whips were forbidden. The wording of the relevant statute is clear: ‘The owner is allowed, in the case of a slave making a mistake, to correct such a slave with domestic punishment, it is not permitted to set a slave in irons, or worse, to torture or otherwise maltreat the slave.’
