‘The Dutch mode of punishing the Khoikhoi slaves by fl ogging them until he has smoked as many pipes of tobacco as he might judge the magnitude of the crime to deserve.’ The practice of using pipes as timing devices during fl oggings was recorded in the Dutch Indonesian possessions. In this case the owner (on the left) had decided the crime warranted a ‘four pipe’ punishment.
The main method private owners used to control their slaves, especially the slaves in the household, was by incorporating them into their extended families in a system the historians of slavery call paternalism. The household, or the ‘family’, provided the only ‘home’ there was for slaves who had been uprooted from their own culture and kin. The slave remained an outsider in all civic and legal matters, but the slave owner always insisted that the slave was part of the larger ‘family’, which was presented to the slave as a poor but tangible consolation.
Two ‘prize slaves’ painted by Thomas Baines. Prize slaves were slaves ‘liberated’ by the British ships, and who served as indentured labourers at the Cape.
Travellers to the Cape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries increasingly referred to this phenomenon. In the final years of the eighteenth century Lady Anne Barnard, a newly arrived English socialite, wrote that she was unsure whether she should give a necklace to a slave woman who belonged to her hosts before handing out gifts to the natural members of their family. When she asked, they both laughed and cried aloud: ‘Not to think anything of that – that she [the slave woman] had been born in the house, and was a sort of child of the family – and that if I had the beads, to give her them.’ The phrase ‘born in the same house’ invariably referred to a slave’s special status in the slave-owning family. Cape slave owners went to considerable lengths to keep slaves, especially female slaves, as ‘part of the family’. To sell such slaves to outsiders would have perverted the paternalism. The slaves of deceased slave owners tended to go to relatives, not strangers.
Paternalism never entailed equality with other members of the household. Even the young daughters were allowed to punish adult household slaves. At some point in every slave’s life, usually at the young master’s or mistress’s maturity, there arose a simultaneous realisation that while the master or mistress was bound for adulthood, the slave – in the settlers’ eyes – was scheduled for perpetual childhood and dependence, and the demeaning obscurity that went with that fate. No matter what their age – or status – all Cape slaves remained ‘boys’ or ‘girls’.
