The freedom of Marseille

GUEST POST: How research is recovering the stories of the enslaved at the Cape

Today, 1 December, is a day to commemorate the emancipation of enslaved people in South Africa, to recognise their resilience and acknowledge the wrongs perpetrated against them. It is also an appropriate moment to consider where South Africa is in dealing with this difficult history, its legacies, and the role of academic research in addressing these issues.

In 1817, a young enslaved girl named Marseille was entered into the Cape Town and District slave registers. She was thirteen years old at the time and had been born into slavery, the child of an enslaved woman. The requirement that slaveowners register enslaved people was introduced by the British in 1816, as a way to regulate and enforce the boundaries between slavery and freedom. Marseille was one among more than 22,000 entries made in the Cape Town and District registers over the following years, enumerating the enslaved population, sales and transfers between owners, births, deaths and manumissions. When her name was written into the register in March 1817, she was not the only enslaved person of that name entered. An older woman named Marseille was entered into the register too; she was 47 years old and recorded as a housemaid. It is quite possible that the elder Marseille was the younger’s mother. We can imagine that everyone in the household knew exactly what kinship ties existed within it, but these went unrecorded. The two Marseille women were part of a slaveholding which in 1817 included 26 enslaved people. They were the property of AF Gous junior, presumably a son of AF Gous senior and his wife A Mostert.

The slave register includes in the remarks that both Marseilles were freed from slavery through the formal process of manumission, the younger Marseille in October 1827, and the elder in June 1830. And both therefore also appear in the manumission registers for Cape Town. Between 1825 and 1834, 1,266 enslaved people achieved manumission in Cape Town, and as many as a third of them did so by purchasing their own freedom or having it purchased on their behalf. Changes to manumission regulations during the period of amelioration in the 1820s meant that enslaved people had the right to purchase their own freedom. Manumission by purchase had always been dependent on the slaveowner setting the price; the new regulations required a fair price and created umpires to adjudicate in disputes. The office of the Guardian of Slaves was established in the same Ordinance 19 of 1826. Yet manumission by purchase remained dependent on access to funds, including credit, to be achieved.

The younger Marseille’s manumission cost £112 10s. A formerly enslaved man named Fredrik of the Cape paid the sum that secured her freedom. Her youth, being about 24 years old by 1827, was surely part of the reason for the high price. A few years later, the elder Marseille achieved manumission. She was then about 60 years old and had secured the necessary sum to purchase her own freedom, which she did in 1830.

Manumissions did not always go smoothly, so enslaved people used the Guardian of Slaves office to lodge their complaints and petitions. It is these cases which are the focus of my current work on understanding manumission as a window into enslaved people’s financial lives. Their legal activism, as Max Mishler has recently argued, played an important role in shaping emancipation debates in England – the Guardians in the colonies reported to their superiors in London on cases brought to them, and these were picked up by abolitionists, filtered into parliamentary debates as well as abolitionist publications.¹ This is one of the ways in which enslaved people themselves contributed to the ending of slavery in the British Empire. 

Following decades of anti-slavery activity, which had picked up again in the 1820s with calls for immediate emancipation, compensated emancipation in the British Empire was a compromise. The 1833 Act for the Abolition of slavery promised an end to legal slavery to be implemented the following year, accompanied by compensation paid to slaveowners, and followed by what in the end turned out to be four years of forced labour for emancipated people.

The process of valuing or appraising enslaved people generated something of a census of slave ownership, by which we have records of 36,000 enslaved people across the colony. This forms the basis of the artisanal Slave Emancipation Dataset.² Appraisers travelled from farm to farm, assigning values to the human property who stood before them. These records were used in the calculation of compensation payments – how much the British Government would pay out to slaveowners, including those resident in the Cape Colony. According to the Legacies of British Slaveownership database, A Mostert, widow of AF Gous senior, was one of the largest recipients of compensation in the Colony – she received over £1,500 in compensation for 41 enslaved people. Her claim was one of about 6,600 from slaveowners across the districts of the colony.

But slaveowners were not the only ones to receive compensation, as the publicly available Legacies database makes clear. Enslaved people were used as assets, and as such were committed to loan agreements as security. In a 2021 article, I showed that before the proliferation of commercial banks in South Africa from the 1830s, slave mortgages were agreed between individuals, and continued after de jure emancipation in 1834.³ The way in which the British Government organized compensation – cash payments as well forced labour in a four-year ‘apprenticeship’ – meant that new mortgages were agreed between 1834 and 1838 too.

Many slaveowners were indebted at the time of emancipation, including a relative of A Mostert and the man who had claimed ownership of the two women named Marseille. He had committed seven enslaved people – Martha, Japie, Dirk, Camonie, Jacob, Spasie, and Theresa – to a loan. At the time of emancipation, there were numerous open mortgages secured on enslaved people as property. As a consequence, mortgage holders also received compensation. A whole business developed in Cape Town connecting these slaveowners and mortgageholders to the National Debt Office in London, where the compensation claims were adjudicated and paid out.

In a newspaper article earlier this year, Christi van der Westhuizen made the point that enslaved people’s labour was the backbone of the Cape of Good Hope economy in the 16^th to 19th centuries. We know this thanks to excellent research, which gained momentum in the 1980s. It is no coincidence that historians then were asking questions about the formation of racialised identities and class structures, violent oppression and resistance, and coercive labour practices. The Struggle against apartheid was ongoing and shaped their questions about South Africa’s past.

But there remains much work to be done to understand how slavery shaped South African society. Researchers at LEAP are addressing a variety of questions to contribute to a deeper understanding of historical slavery and its afterlives. Historian Karl Bergemann, who successfully defended his PhD earlier this week, is studying runaways, including enslaved people who fled sites of enslavement. His work, based on newspaper advertisements placed for their recapture, shows who these runaways were and reveals where and why they fled. Enslaved people had been finding ways to free themselves from slavery as early as the first arrival of a shipment of enslaved people in Table Bay in 1658, including through desertion.

Another way was through manumission, which is the focus of Lauren Stevens’ PhD research in Economics. Also in Economics, Lisa Martin is recovering the choices enslaved people made about their futures, in particular where to live following de facto emancipation in 1838. Masters student in history Benjamin Crous is bringing to light the stories of Recaptured Africans – people who had been enslaved in places like Mozambique and Madagascar, embarked onto slave ships, and then were captured by the British anti-slavery squadron before they reached their destinations across the Atlantic. They were ‘liberated’ by special courts in British colonies. However, liberation was not freedom: Recaptured Africans were bound to lengthy apprenticeships in places they did not choose, including the Cape Colony. My own current research focuses on manumission, and in particular manumissions by purchase like the two women named Marseille achieved. I focus on the role of enslaved people in freeing themselves and the ways in which they mobilised networks of support and credit to achieve freed status.

Such studies rely on the rich written records of enslaved people in the Cape Colony – from registers to petitions, baptism records to probate inventories, newspaper advertisements to colonial legislation and correspondence. These records are preserved across various institutions in South Africa and abroad: foremost among them the Western Cape Archive and Records Service in Cape Town, the Dutch Reformed Church Archive in Stellenbosch, and the National Archives in London and The Hague. As researchers, we are keenly aware that while the records we work with are about the enslaved, they were almost never created by them. This certainly poses challenges, but nevertheless, the records remain of vital importance to understanding South Africa’s slave past.    

It is crucial that this work is not only published in academic journals and books, and discussed at conferences. Forensic visual artists Dr Kathryn Smith and Pearl Mamathuba worked with Karl Bergemann on a series of portraits of enslaved and coerced workers who ran away from the people who claimed authority over them – and ownership, in the case of the enslaved. Together, they have visualised the faces of these fugitives, resulting in moving portraits of young men whom we otherwise have no visual record of. These pieces hang in the Stellenbosch University Museum. I highly recommend a visit (and if you can’t get there in person, you can see them online at Uncharted People). It is an excellent example of the kinds of collaborative projects which can connect us to the past in moving, confronting, and productive ways.

‘The freedom of Marseille’ was first published on Our Long Walk. Support more such writing by signing up for a paid subscription. The image was created with Midjourney v5.2.

1. Mishler, Max. ‘ “Improper and Almost Rebellious Conduct”: Enslaved People’s Legal Politics and Abolition in the British Empire.’ The American Historical Review 128, no. 2 (2023): 648-684.

2. Ekama, Kate, Johan Fourie, Hans Heese, and Lisa-Cheree Martin. ‘When cape slavery ended: introducing a new slave emancipation dataset.’ Explorations in Economic History 81 (2021): 101390.

3. Ekama, Kate. ‘Bondsmen: Slave Collateral in the 19th-Century Cape Colony.’ Journal of Southern African Studies 47, no. 3 (2021): 437-453.