The coming of the British provided an injection to both the Cape economy and the institution of slavery. Britain was the leading trading nation of the world and was rapidly on its way to becoming the world’s industrial powerhouse. As a colony of Britain, the Cape was much better integrated with the world’s trading networks. The local market expanded strongly, resulting in a voracious demand for slave labour to produce wheat and wine.
The picture shows slaves being sold by auction. Although Britain banned the slave trade, close to 40% of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein farmers used only slave labour in 1806. Slave labour enabled production of wheat and wine in the Cape Colony to treble between the 1790s and 1820s.
With slaves one of the most important forms of property in the Cape Colony, any attack on the institution would severely damage their owners’ financial prospects. On the arable farms slaves represented 13–17% of the total value. They were the principal mortgageable assets in the colony. Although slavery did not ordinarily adapt well to cities, Cape Town was an exception where hiring out slave artisans yielded a return of 18% in the 1820s. Pressure for the abolition of the slave trade had built up sufficiently in Britain for the new British government at the Cape to seek an opinion on ending the importation of slaves into the colony. In 1797 it turned to Willem Stephanus van Ryneveld, a progressive thinker, and asked him a simple question: could the colony survive without further importing slaves?
Van Ryneveld recognised that slavery had made the burghers ‘lazy, haughty and brutal’, but argued that it had become ‘a necessary evil’, which could not be removed without sacrificing ‘the Colony and perhaps the poor slaves that are in it’. Ending slavery would ultimately be the work ‘not of years, but as it were of centuries’. ‘Slavery,’ he concluded, ‘is hard of itself, but it has become a necessary evil in the colony.’ In 1808 Britain banned the slave trade. Despite this, the production of both wheat and wine in the Cape Colony trebled between the mid-1790s and the mid-1820s, with close to 40% of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein farmers using only slave labour in 1806. Slaves now became much more expensive and had to work much harder.
