On January 18, 1826, Thomas Jefferson, the third president of America, wrote to his long-time friend, the diplomat William Short:
on the subject of emancipation I have ceased to think …. the plan of converting the blacks into Serfs would certainly be better than keeping them in their present condition.
Jefferson would die a few months later, on July 4, exactly fifty years after the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. The Declaration, of course, promised that ‘all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’. And yet, for the nearly 600,000 slaves in the 1820s USA, this half-century-old document was nothing more than an empty promise. It would take a civil war forty years later to ensure freedom for all.
Across the Atlantic Ocean at the southern tip of Africa, however, things were starting to change. In the Cape Colony, on the same day that Jefferson wrote his letter, the slave Sophia finally obtained her freedom. After being registered as the slave of her owner Gebhard in 1823, she became the first to be freed from his estate upon his death. But Sophia didn’t stop there. Over the next few months, Sophia was responsible for a remarkable number of manumissions. She paid £195 to free her mother Flora, father Dampie, and three of her young children, Clara, Louisa, and Elizabeth. Together with Georgina, who was also freed by Gebhard’s estate, by the end of 1826, three generations of her family were able to find free status in Cape Town.
The study of slavery generates widespread interest. In America, especially, there is a lot of interest in the history and consequences of slavery; attend any history conference, and it’s striking how many books are published on the subject. Slavery is also widely discussed in popular media. A month or so ago, California passed several bills to atone for the State’s role in oppressing black Americans, but although the task force’s proposals would cost a few hundred billion dollars, they have had to settle for a formal apology only.
The interest in slavery is not limited to America. Last year, Dutch King Willem-Alexander apologised for the Dutch role in slavery. (There was some criticism – valid, in my opinion – that he didn’t mention the Cape; it was seemingly an apology for Dutch slavery in the Caribbean Islands.) Several large research projects at various Dutch universities are now seeking to better understand this history of slavery. The same is true for France, England, and Sweden. The history of slavery in the Indian Ocean is also gaining more attention; unlike the Atlantic slave trade, which only began after Columbus made America accessible to Europeans, the Indian (and Red Sea) trade routes have much older roots.
It is, therefore, ironic that the history of slavery in South Africa receives so little attention today. It wasn’t always this way. By the 1970s, there was a group of young historians who delved into the archives to unravel our understanding and legacy of slavery – and perhaps also the apartheid idea of distinct racial groups. People like Hans Heese, Robert Ross, JL Hattingh, Robert Shell, Nigel Worden, Karel Schoeman, Dan Sleigh, Andrew Bank and Wayne Dooling were eager to uncover the rise, extent, and complexity of the Cape’s slavery history, and perhaps also to shed light on how these deep-rooted social and economic institutions persist to this day.
With one or two exceptions, that generation of historians is no longer active researchers.
A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at the Stellenbosch heritage community eBosch. I started by discussing the research that my team and I are doing to continue the work of that generation, now with the help of new datasets and, especially, new methods and technology. Large quantities of census records, estate documents, and slave trade registers enable us to better understand the lives and decisions of individual slaves. With the help of advanced techniques such as machine learning, we can now identify patterns that were previously invisible.
Sophia’s story is one such example. In a new article in the journal Slavery & Abolition, postdoc Kate Ekama analyses the 1,266 slaves in Cape Town who were manumitted between 1825 and 1834. Ekama shows that 38% of these transactions involved slaves who bought their freedom or had someone purchase it for them. This leaves us with two questions: who provided the funds for these emancipations, and how did the slaves who self-purchased gather the funds? Wage income was one possibility, of course, but there were also other options, such as inheritance money, loans, and work agreements where future labour ‘paid’ for freedom. One example of this is when some slaves continued working for their former owners with the understanding that they could earn their (and perhaps their family members’) freedom this way. In other cases, community networks pooled their savings to buy someone’s freedom. Philanthropic organisations also bought many ‘gifts’ of freedom, but this typically required the beneficiary to continue working. There was thus a close relationship between labour and freedom; slaves’ work was not only a means to gain freedom but also a condition for it.
Some slaves were simply unable to buy their freedom and found it in other ways. In his PhD study completed last year, Karl Bergemann uses runaway slave advertisements from two colonial newspapers from the 1830s to investigate the movements and motivations of runaway slaves. He finds that, unlike runaways in the eighteenth century, by the 1830s, runaways were more likely to flee to Cape Town rather than the countryside. The reason: in Cape Town, they could more easily “disappear” into the new communities of freed slaves and carve out a new life for themselves.
There are still many unanswered questions. Why did the black farmers of Jonkershoek lose their farms in the 1710s? Paul van der Linde, now a PhD student in the Netherlands and affiliated with LEAP, argues that it was due to the black farmers’ close ties with the Van der Stels. When Willem Adriaan was ousted, the black farmers lost their political ally. (I think there are also valid alternative hypotheses: by the time slave women were freed, they were too old to have children. Slave families were, therefore, much smaller than settler families, and they quickly became a shrinking proportion of the population.)
Another question: where did former slaves migrate to after their official emancipation in 1838? Lisa-Cheree Martin, a LEAP Economics PhD student, shows that it was primarily skilled slaves who migrated to the mission stations. Lisa’s results show that one cannot ignore the selection effects when studying the impact of mission stations.
Such innovative research is needed to better understand our Cape history. It’s a pity there isn’t more of it. Of course, there are sporadic efforts to bring Cape slavery back into the spotlight. Eunice Visser’s cultural-historical history of the Cape slaves, published by Protea in 2022, is a massive book (and a prizewinner). But as Gerald Groenewald points out in a review in the South African Journal of Cultural History, large parts of it are severely outdated (because it’s based on her MA thesis from 2002 and ignores most of the literature since then), and, unfortunately, it also repeats old myths without historical evidence. Patric Mellet’s The Truth About Cape Slavery is another recent contribution. We share the same goal: that Cape slavery deserves more attention. But our methods and motivations differ.
In short, there’s much work to be done to bring stories like Sophia’s to light. One would hope that the History Departments of universities like Cape Town or Stellenbosch – districts where most Cape slaves would have lived and worked, and where many descendants still long for a better understanding of their history – would notice and address this gap. But while historians at the world’s top universities are scrambling to document these histories in their own contexts, South African historians remain firmly tied to the twentieth century. This is perhaps where alumni dedicated to preserving our Cape heritage could play a bigger role.
This is an edited and translated version of my monthly column, Agterstories, on Litnet. The images for this post were created using Midjourney v6.