The Truth about Cape Slavery
Patric Tariq Mellet, The Truth about Cape Slavery: The Foundations of Colonial South Africa (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2024)
CAPE slavery has often been described as relatively benign, a sideshow to the main drama of South African history. Patric Mellet disputes this interpretation in a book he hopes bridges the gap between academic writing and easy reading. He is a descendant of enslaved people and argues that more of his ilk should be involved in research into slavery at the Cape.
Like other writers, he notes that the Atlantic slave trade and a North American narrative overshadow that of the Indian Ocean, largely enabled by the Dutch. This made Cape Town a focal point of the trade, which fuelled global capitalism and accumulation. He describes the consequences of chattel slavery, summed up in the term ‘black gold’, but his characterisation of it as genocide is hard to swallow. Slaves were wealth, a tradeable asset, and females were encouraged to produce more ‒ child slaves. Would owners knowingly destroy a valuable asset?
The Dutch attempt to introduce white labour to the Cape was a failure. As in Natal, settlers saw themselves as overseers and expected a life free of hard work. Mellet goes into considerable detail about the number of slaves at the Cape. His figure for 1652 to 1870 is 80 000 landed and 30 000 locally born, but he reckons the total figure could be as high as 200 000 due to deficiencies in the official record. Significantly, most South Africa slaves were from other parts of Africa (62%, often referred to as Masbiekers), followed by India and then south-east Asia. The immediate port of departure such as Batavia did not determine origins even though it might be reflected in an individual’s name as a toponym. Many of the slaves from south-east Asia belonged to subaltern groups, converted to Islam only after landing at the Cape by political exiles such as Sheik Yusuf van Makassar who arrived in 1694 and hailed from Sulawesi.
Mellet points out that there were many routes to slavery including drought, war and sheer misfortune, although in general the enslaved were from the ‘edges of society’ (p. 104). Yet most of the skilled artisans at the Cape were enslaved and a few of them such as Jan Smiesing were better educated than many Europeans. Release from slavery came through manumission, increasing the population of Free Blacks. A large percentage were women who spoke Dutch and were Christian. Free Blacks made an impact on fishing and viticulture: Anna de Koningh (died 1734) was one of the wealthiest inhabitants at the Cape. Free Blacks involved in viticulture were squeezed out by a French narrative, so Banghoek became Franschhoek; a literal case of whitewashing history. Who was civilised; and who was not? And who built the Western Cape?
The Dutch colony was highly controlled, but nonetheless within four generations creolisation had begun. It was the Oorlam Afrikaners, Khoe and Free Blacks, who adopted Afrikaans, later appropriated by the Boers. But nuance is not a strong point of this book. The Dutch and British roles in Cape slavery are decidedly different. For all its contradictions, Cape liberalism can be clearly distinguished from the reaction of the Boers to abolition in December 1834 when they trekked northwards to export and expand slavery to the republics in various guises such as the apprentice system (inboekstelsel).
Under British rule, the term coloured was used to define who qualified for the vote and it was later misleadingly adopted as an ethnic category. Mellet suggests that Cape Malay was constructed identity to remove the stigma of slavery. De facto slavery lingered after abolition in December 1834 through apprenticeship, after which ‘prize’ slaves were landed at the Cape. No slave received reparation, although their owners were compensated through a complex system. Emancipation, while still celebrated as an event, was a process that continued to disadvantage the enslaved.
Highly interesting though this book might be, it has weaknesses. There is a great deal of repetition, which gives an impression of propaganda rather than research. In demolishing, in convincing fashion, the notion of relative benevolence at the Cape, Mellet makes the point that slavery is slavery; then neglects non-European slave systems such as the Islamic. Slavery has been endemic throughout history, but European nations made an enormous economic success of it.
The idea that ‘almost every social problem and impact of inequality experienced today [in South Africa] is rooted in the Cape slavery system.’ (p. 44) seems wildly speculative. Mellet lists substance abuse, poor education and low skills, sub-standard housing, gang criminality, and inadequate social services (pp. 231‒232) but all these ills have roots more complex than a system officially abolished nearly two hundred years ago even if there are historical echoes. And it renders a group of people as permanent victims while many individuals have courageously risen above major disadvantages.
A similar question mark lingers over the idea that slavery was foundational to apartheid. While the latter’s origins lie in the Dutch Reformed Church, which was tainted by slavery, the racial capitalism of the diamond and gold mines had a major part to play.
Book review by Christopher Merrett, reproduced from his web page, From the Thornveld