Almost from the start the Cape was a slave society. Bereft of freedom and status, slaves defined the liberties and status of others. They formed the labour force of the colony. In Cape Town the men worked in the market gardens and provided the artisan skills; on the farms they worked in the fields and vineyards. The women served as cooks, nannies and wet-nurses in the house. The children were the playmates of their masters’ children. The incorporation of the domestic slaves in the colonists’ ‘family’ laid the foundation for the kind of society that developed in the colony.
Most slaves were to be found in the urban and periurban areas, and the probability of slaves being sold was always highest in Cape Town, where slaves were sold almost every week in the popular auctions in Church Square. These were held under a large tree, next to the Company’s Slave Lodge and facing the rear of the Dutch Reformed Church. Between 1652 and 1808, when the slave trade stopped, approximately 63 000 slaves were imported. In all, 26.4% of the colony’s slaves were from Africa, 25.1% from Madagascar, and 25.9% were brought from India and 22.7% from Indonesia.
Officials and burghers perceived each group of slaves differently, attributing skills and character to the country of origin and engaging in crude racial and geographical stereotypes. Slaves from Bengal or the Coast of Coromandel, Surat and Macassar, had a reputation as skilful needlewomen and were used in this capacity. Slaves from Mozambique were deemed to be mild and patient but Malays viewed as treacherous and inclined to run amuck. Highly sought-after slaves were Cape-born mulattoes – the offspring of liaisons between Europeans and slaves – who were called Afrikanders by the British. A commentator noted: ‘The Afrikander women are the favourite slaves of the mistress, arranging and keeping everything in order, and are entrusted with all that is valuable – more like companions than slaves; but the mistress rarely and the slave never, forget their relative situations, and however familiar in private, in the presence of another, due form prevails.’
There were four groups of slaves: those in the employ of the Company, those owned by the Company’s officials, and those owned by the colony’s burghers – representing the overwhelming majority of slaves – while a fourth and very minor group of slaves was owned by the free blacks. For more than a century Cape slavery was predominantly urban. As late as 1767, more than 40% of all the colony’s slaves lived in Cape Town.
