A slave ‘Afrikaner’, known as Jonker Afrikaner. The offspring of European and slave liaisons born at the Cape were the most sought after as slaves. The British (but not the burghers) called these people the Afrikanders, or Afrikaners.
The most prominent group of slaves was those who belonged to the Company. Almost all were housed in the Slave Lodge. The Company used hundreds of slaves for various tasks, such as running the Company’s market garden plantation, working in the hospital, building the port’s considerable fortifi cations and performing the town’s unattractive chores, such as removing slurry to the beach. Slaves called ‘Caffers’ (see A different kind of police force) acted as a police force, dispensing rough justice. After a century the Company’s slave force had grown to 1 000.
The Lodge, usually called the Loots or Logie, was a large, windowless building. It was located at the top of the main thoroughfare, next to the Company’s nine-acre vegetable garden, and across the street from the large Company hospital. The Lodge was virtually a fortress run by Company officials on a military system.
The two-storey Slave Lodge in Cape Town housed most of the slaves the Company owned. It was located at the top of today’s Adderley Street, close to the Company Gardens and the hospital.
Few Europeans entered the Lodge by choice, except during one hour each night when it became an active brothel for the local garrison. There were almost as many slave women as men in the Lodge, sometimes more. A couple from the Slave Lodge could get permission to be placed on the ‘marriage list’, but the Dutch Reformed Church never sanctioned or even recorded such slave marriages. Slaves owned by the colonists were not permitted to marry until 1823.
Mortality for the slaves of the Lodge was high. Throughout the period of slavery there was a clear excess of deaths and runaways over births among the Lodge slaves. It was nothing short of a demographic sinkhole.
Some of the slaves in private hands qualified as artisans. The three leading trades were those of mason, blacksmith and carpenter. Most of the owners lived in Table Valley and owned small businesses there.
Life was particularly tough for slaves who worked on the farms near Cape Town that were intensively cultivated, with wine, wheat, rye and barley being the predominant crops. Hard work throughout the year was the slaves’ lot. So indispensable was slave labour to these farms that it was generally thought the economy would collapse if slavery were abolished.
Slaves lived out their lives on wine and wheat farms, separated from each other and rarely visiting the few towns and villages of the
interior. Katie Jacobs, a slave born in the Malmesbury district in the nineteenth century, was separated from her Malagasy-speaking mother by sale to an owner in the next valley and neither saw nor heard from her again. There were also a few slaves to be found on extensive sheep and cattle farms that the colonists carved out in the eighteenth century. Typically on such a farm, an overseer or the son of the owner supervised a few Khoikhoi herdsmen, or a few older slaves who had been ‘farmed out’ would be there on their own. Here they lived out their lives in great isolation.
