People Of Bondage The Quest For Freedom

All slaves yearned for freedom but few managed to escape. They could run away to places where fugitive slaves hid. There were such maroon societies at Faure, Hangklip, and on Table Mountain itself. Several small, stable maroon societies in the colony offered succour to runaway slaves, and these havens survived throughout the period. The 60-slave Hangklip community that lived in a cave lasted for a century, virtually undisturbed until slavery ended in 1834.

The other route to freedom was through manumission and becoming a free black. Freedom was not a right conferred by the state, but a favour granted within the household. Manumitted people were termed vrijzwarten, free blacks, even if descended from a European parent. The manumission regulations were framed more in cultural than legal terms. The ability to understand, speak and write Dutch headed the established list of manumission requirements.

From 1715 to 1791 the Council of Policy received a total of 1 075 manumission requests, of which only 81 involved Company slaves. The manumission rate in the colony was low, indeed extremely low. The average per year was only 0.165% of the slave force. The figure for Brazil and Peru was six times higher than that at the Cape. The fact that the proportion of the free population at the Cape remained very small in the 1820s and 1830s, except in Cape Town, had momentous consequences for future race relations. Virtually all people who were desperately poor and had no status were black; all the richer people were white. An association between whiteness and success arose.

Freed male slaves at the Cape began their freedom with a combination of formidable disadvantages. Among these were prejudice, poverty, the inability to obtain credit, and also the extreme difficulty of obtaining gainful employment. Free blacks were excluded from most occupations as early as 1727. Burgher councillors even forbade free blacks to sell such pathetic sundries as ‘toast and cakes’ on the streets. Many were forced to turn to the precarious occupation of fishing the most dangerous waters of the South Atlantic. Although some freed slaves had to be helped by the poor fund of the Church, most found succour among the sympathetic free black Muslim community, many of whom owned slaves themselves and were regular manumitters.