The Environment and Slave Resistance in the Cape Colony

Worden, Nigel

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-70028-1_5

Nigel Worden³

Part of the book series: Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies ((IOWS))

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Abstract

This chapter explores the ways in which the physical environment of the Cape Colony provided opportunities for individual or small-scale group desertion by slaves during the heyday of Dutch colonial rule in the eighteenth century. In so doing, it identifies a slave geography, that is, a landscape perceived and used by slaves in ways different from those of their owners. However, the slave uprising in 1808 and the forms of slave resistance in the subsequent decades marked the attempted conquest of those parts of the Cape’s environment hitherto dominated by the slave owners rather than an escape from it. The environment itself did not change, but the ways in which slaves used and perceived it did.

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Notes

1.
Most notably in R. Ross, Cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa (London: Routledge, 1983) and N. Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Chap. 9. For a more recent summary, see N. Worden, “Revolt in Cape Colony Slave Society,” in Resisting Bondage in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, ed. E. Alpers , G. Campbell, and M. Salman (London: Routledge, 2007), 10–23.
2.
L. Guelke, “Freehold Farmers and Frontier Settlers, 1657–1780,” in The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, 2nd ed., ed. R. Elphick and H. Giliomee (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1989), 69–73.
3.
S. Newton-King, Masters and Servants on the Cape Eastern Frontier, 1760–1803 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); N. Penn, The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the Eighteenth Century (Athens, OH, and Cape Town: Ohio University Press and Double Storey Books, 2005).
4.
J. Armstrong and N. Worden, “The Slaves, 1652–1834,” in The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, 157.
5.
N. Penn, “Fugitives on the Cape Frontier, c.1680–1770,” in Rogues, Rebels and Runaways: Eighteenth-Century Cape Characters (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999), 79–81.
6.
Ross, Cape of Torments, 44.
7.
Penn, “Fugitives,” 75–77.
8.
Cited in Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa, 125.
9.
K. Schoeman, Early Slavery at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1717 (Pretoria: Protea, 2007), 277.
10.
Western Cape Regional Archives, Cape Town (hereafter CA), CJ 785, pp. 12–55. A selection of these records is transcribed and translated in N. Worden and G. Groenewald, Trials of Slavery: Selected Documents Concerning Slaves from the Criminal Records of the Council of Justice at the Cape of Good Hope, 1705–1794 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2005), 101–06.
11.
CA, CJ 357, pp. 7–9.
12.
Testimony of Manika van Bengal , 9 January 1749, CA, 1/STB 3/8, unpaginated.
13.
CA, CJ 784, pp. 102–03.
14.
Penn, “Fugitives,” 90; Stellenbosch Dagregister, 2 July 1748, CA, C 653, pp. 508–09.
15.
N. Vergunst, Hoerikwaggo: Images of Table Mountain (Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 2000).
16.
R. Raven-Hart, Cape of Good Hope 1652–1702: The First Fifty Years of Dutch Colonization as Seen by Callers, vol. 2 (Cape Town: Balkema, 1971), 477; F. Valentyn, Description of the Cape of Good Hope, vol. 1, ed. P. Serton et al. (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1971), 59.
17.
Raven-Hart, Cape of Good Hope, vol. 2, pp. 351, 372; P. Kolb, The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope, vol. 2 (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968), 13; Valentyn, Description, vol. 1, p. 61; O. F. Mentzel, Description of the Cape of Good Hope, vol. 1, ed. H. Mandelbrote (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1921), 93.
18.
E. G. Jordan, “‘Unrelenting Toil’: Expanding Archaeological Interpretations of the Female Slave Experience,” Slavery & Abolition 26, no. 2 (2005), 217–32; E. G. Jordan, “It all Comes out in the Wash: Engendering Archaeological Interpretations of Slavery,” in Women and Slavery, vol. 1, Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic, ed. G. Campbell, S. Miers, and J. C. Miller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 335–57.
19.
Mentzel, Description, vol. 1, p. 90.
20.
CA, CJ 340, pp. 97–103, 223–25.
21.
Resolutions of the Council of Policy, 15 July–19 August 1760, CA, C 138, pp. 348–74. These restrictions were withdrawn after the murderers were caught.
22.
Mentzel, Description, vol. 1, p. 90.
23.
CA, CJ 789, pp. 269–70. Documentation for this case is partially transcribed in Worden and Groenewald, Trials of Slavery, 355–84.
24.
Worden and Groenewald, Trials of Slavery, 139–43.
25.
Worden and Groenewald, Trials of Slavery, 330–36.
26.
Ross, Cape of Torments, 54–72, 122–24. Ross gives the fullest account of Hangklip (pp. 54–72) and an appendix listing 50 maroons known to have lived there (pp. 122–24).
27.
CA, CJ 795, pp. 239–49.
28.
Penn, “Fugitives,” 76.
29.
N. Penn, “Droster Gangs of the Bokkeveld and Roggeveld, 1770–1800,” in Rogues, Rebels and Runaways: Eighteenth-Century Cape Characters, ed. N. Penn (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999), 147–66.
30.
Penn, “Fugitives,” 98.
31.
Nationaal Archief, The Hague (hereafter NA), VOC 4073, p. 584, Q. 5.
32.
3 October 1709, CA, 1/STB 18/155, unpaginated.
33.
For examples of such incorporations, see Ross, Cape of Torments, 81–95.
34.
CA, CJ 786, p. 194.
35.
CA, CJ 788, p. 59.
36.
CA, CJ 795, p. 377.
37.
For an example, see Worden and Groenewald, Trials of Slavery, 21–42.
38.
H. Thom, ed., Journal of Jan van Riebeeck, vol. 2 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1954), 355, cited in Schoeman, Early Slavery, 65.
39.
CA, CJ 786, pp. 220–22.
40.
CA, CJ 354, part 2, pp. 464–67.
41.
CA, CJ 2488, pp. 56–57.
42.
P. Truter, “The Robben Island Rebellion of 1751: A Study of Convict Experience at the Cape of Good Hope ,” Kronos: Journal of Cape History 31 (2005): 42.
43.
CA, CJ 786, pp. 216–17.
44.
NA, VOC 4135, p. 153. This emerged when a runaway was captured in a raid after neighbours complained of riotous noise.
45.
CA, CJ 33, pp. 31–33.
46.
CA, CJ 34, pp. 28–30.
47.
Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa, pp. 124–26.
48.
Worden and Groenewald, Trials of Slavery, pp. 355–84; M. Cairns, “The Smuts Family Murders: 14.7.1760,” Cabo 2, no. 3 (1980): 13–16.
49.
CA, CJ 373, testimony of Isaac van Boegies, 4 August 1760.
50.
For further analysis of this case, see N. Worden , “Forgotten Revolutionaries: Slave Resistance at the Cape, 1760–1808,” in L’Atlantique révolutionnaire: une perspective ibéro-américaine, ed. C. Thibaud et al. (Les Perséides: Bécherel, 2013), pp. 421–46.
51.
Their route and the names of farms attacked are mapped out in CJ 515, C, Marsch route der rebellen onder commando van Louis, pp. 40–41.
52.
CA, CJ 516, pp. 76–77.
53.
CA, CJ 516, pp. 201–02.
54.
For a development of this argument, see N. Ulrich, “Abolition from Below: The 1808 Revolt in the Cape Colony,” in “Humanitarian Intervention” and Changing Labour Relations: Long-Term Consequences of the British Act on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807, ed. M. van der Linden (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), 193–222.
55.
N. Worden , “‘Armed with Swords and Ostrich Feathers’ : Militarism and Cultural Revolution in the Cape Slave Uprising of 1808,” in War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830, ed. R. Bessel, N. Guyatt, and J. Rendall (London: Palgrave, 2010), pp.121–38.
56.
CA, CJ 515, p. 327. On the humiliation (and pain, if the horses kicked their heels) of being driven in front of a horse, see G. Sekoto’s depiction of Prisoner Being Led in Front of a Mounted Horse (ball point on paper, ca. 1960), reproduced in G. Sekoto, My Life and Work (Johannesburg: Viva Books, 1995), p. 6.
57.
CA, CJ 515, p. 327.
58.
CA, CJ 515, pp. 286–87; CA, CJ 516, p. 662.
59.
Ross, Cape of Torments, 102. Ross argues that “property rather than persons suffered most.”
60.
CA, CJ 802, p. 749; CA, CJ 515, p. 265; CA, CJ 515, p. 330.
61.
P. Scully, The Bouquet of Freedom: Social and Economic Relations in the Stellenbosch District, c.1870–1900 (Cape Town: Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, 1990), pp. 80–82.
62.
CA, CJ 515, p. 248.
63.
CA, CJ 516, pp. 737–38, 745.
64.
CA, CJ 516, pp. 25, 133.
65.
CA, CJ 515, pp. 60–61, 64.
66.
G. Theal, Records of the Cape Colony, vol. 20 (London: Clowes Printers for the Government of the Cape Colony, 1904), pp. 314–15.
67.
P. G. Warnich, “Die Toepassing en invloed van slawewetgewing in die landdrosdistrik Tulbagh-Worcester, 1816–1830” (PhD diss., University of Stellenbosch, 1988), Chaps. 2–3.
68.
J. Mason, “The Slaves and their Protectors: Reforming Resistance in a Slave Society: The Cape Colony, 1826–1834,” Journal of Southern African Studies 17, no. 1 (1991): 103–28.
69.
For example, J. Mason, “Hendrik Albertus and his Ex-Slave Mey: A Drama in Three Acts,” Journal of African History 31 (1990): 423–45.
70.
For the argument that Cape slaves by the nineteenth century developed a network of communication which took advantage of the structures of the ameliorative system, see F. Vernal, “Discourse Networks in South African Slave Society,” African Historical Review 43, no. 2 (2011): 1–36.
71.
N. Worden , “Adjusting to Emancipation : Freed Slaves and Farmers in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Western Cape,” in The Angry Divide: Social and Economic History of the Western Cape, ed. W. James and M. Simons (Cape Town: David Philip, 1989), pp. 31–39; P. Scully, Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823–53 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997).

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University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
Nigel Worden

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Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
Gwyn Campbell

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Worden, N. (2018). The Environment and Slave Resistance in the Cape Colony. In: Campbell, G. (eds) Bondage and the Environment in the Indian Ocean World. Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70028-1_5

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70028-1_5
Published: 11 January 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-70027-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-70028-1
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