Eunice Bauermeester, Die Kaapse slawe, 1652-1838: ’n Kultuurhistoriese perspektief
Publisher: Protea Boekhuis, Pretoria, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4853-1128-7
As South Africa is a country known for gold, biltong and brandy rather than sugar, cotton and tobacco, its Cape colonial slave past hasn’t featured prominently in major global histories of slavery. While local modern classics such as Nigel Worden’s Slavery in Dutch South Africa (1985) and Robert Ross’s Cape of torments (1983) are a powerful reminder of the place of slavery in the early era of European colonisation, there really hasn’t been a definitive, total study of Cape slave society to match Eugene Genovese’s magisterial account of slave life in the American South: Roll, Jordan, roll: The world the slaves made (1974). One reason among others for this is the huge difference in scale between South Africa and the slave population of the Atlantic World. Between 1652 and the end of the slave trade in 1808, about 63 000 slaves were shipped to the Cape. By contrast, well over ten million were transported to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Consequently, you’d hardly expect Eunice Visser’s Die Kaapse slawe, 1652-1838 to be a fat local equivalent of Roll, Jordan roll. Yet, at over 700 pages, it is nevertheless a massive monument to the fact that virtually from its colonial beginning, the Cape was a slave society, lock, stock and barrel. In its way, this new book completes a trilogy of dense, exceptionally evocative and empathetic, humane volumes on the history of Cape slavery.
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Yet, at over 700 pages, it is nevertheless a massive monument to the fact that virtually from its colonial beginning, the Cape was a slave society, lock, stock and barrel. In its way, this new book completes a trilogy of dense, exceptionally evocative and empathetic, humane volumes on the history of Cape slavery.
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These are all beautifully produced by Protea Boekhuis, a publisher which continues to maintain the impeccable print standards of the nineteenth century in our plastic screen age of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Die Kaapse slawe merits a spot alongside Karel Schoeman’s preceding Early slavery at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1717 (2007) and his Portrait of a slave society: The Cape of Good Hope, 1717-1795 (2013). Curiously, neither title is listed in the secondary sources of the present book’s heavyweight bibliography.
An independent research scholar, Eunice Visser is a Namibian with South African academic training in cultural history, who has spent part of her life in Hermanus in the Cape’s rural Overberg region, a district which, in its time, naturally had its own small share of slaves, including runaway fugitives from elsewhere. As the introduction to her book stresses, Die Kaapse slawe doesn’t deal with larger economic debates or sociological arguments around unfree labour. Instead, this often painstakingly precise, inch-by-inch study of slave life wears its heart on its sleeve in the form of a touchingly simple manifesto. Slaves are treated here as individual human beings, and not as faceless pieces to be moved across some political or social chessboard.
Thus, the object of this massive 700-odd page exercise in historical recovery is to try to reflect the typical real-life experience of those brought to the Dutch colony as bonded labourers. The focus here falls squarely on the slave and what he or she made of their traumatically confining circumstances upon being thrust into a new social and cultural milieu.
In the manner of a conscientious guide, Eunice Visser takes readers on a well-plotted journey involving a mixture of small and large steps. A brief, early snapshot provides an overall taste of what’s in store. It covers the coming of Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) forced immigrant labourers, mostly from Indonesia, India, Madagascar and the east coast of Africa in proportionately equal numbers. The impact of their relations between one another and their interactions with Dutch, German, Scandinavian and other European owners was profoundly complex. For, over time, they would form an important and richly diverse segment of the greater South African population, spawning “’n unieke Kaapse kultuur” with its trademark “gekreoliseerde” flavour.
The following five chapters comprise the lion’s share of this well-written and superbly illustrated book, with its wide range of contemporary illustrations and modern photographs (of plates of food, buildings and Cape Malay choirs) regularly adding colour and texture to the accompanying prose. No summary of this kind can hope to convey the richness of this account adequately, peopled as it is with an extraordinary cast of historical individuals such as Apollos van Boegies, Tuan Schaapie and Monica da Costa, suggestive of characters drawn from the pages of an eighteenth-century picaresque novel.
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Die Kaapse slawe is almost encyclopaedic in scope, excelling in its depiction of how the free exercised authority and control over the unfree, where and how slaves were bought and sold as naked commodities, and how slaves grappled with and, on occasion, contested their onerous bondage.
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Die Kaapse slawe is almost encyclopaedic in scope, excelling in its depiction of how the free exercised authority and control over the unfree, where and how slaves were bought and sold as naked commodities, and how slaves grappled with and, on occasion, contested their onerous bondage. Eunice Visser also covers the Cape’s varying spheres of menial labour in copious detail, making assured use of numerous sources for the reconstruction of rural and urban existence. Readers will meet the slaves who toiled away on the farms of the south-western Cape, those in Cape Town who worked as the domestic labourers of the burghers and VOC officials, as well as others who were fishermen, artisans or sellers of prepared food on city street corners.
The author has an eye for telling vignettes and, in places, presents these with wry understatement rather than moral indignation at the callous inhumanity of the Cape colonial past. The effect is far more powerful, as in her depiction of the conditions of slave children (automatically the legal property of the owner of their enslaved parents) of the VOC. She points out that, in the 1680s, the company lodge which housed them was overcrowded, the building itself was insanitary and dilapidated, and general living conditions were wretched – rampant sexual promiscuity between “jong slawekindertjies” inside, and seedy liaisons with older free inhabitants outside, were “die orde van die dag”. Eunice Visser reflects that these children had probably not found themselves in the most ideal of conditions, in her words, “nie binne die ideale omgewing bevind nie”.
There’s a fair amount of material that general readers might expect to find in a book on Cape slavery, even if treated here in far greater depth than might be the case elsewhere. This includes fascinating sketches of “Maleise” social rituals, such as burials and weddings, the provision of schooling for elementary slave education, the obvious workings of race and religion, and paternalism. But Die Kaapse slawe serves up a lot more besides, including discussion of illness and disease, the pervasively present influence of a slave society on the planning and construction of Cape settler houses, and the consumption culture of strong drink, tobacco and dagga in lubricating ties of dependence and mutuality.
These ruminations about the complicated, sometimes random, and mostly messy interactions between the top dogs and the underdogs of the colonial order take us down any number of paths, including the way in which ethnic divisions and ethnic preferences had come to distinguish the slave labour market by the end of the eighteenth century. Thus, according to an English observer at the beginning of the 1800s, “the Dutch inhabitants” favoured “the Mosambiques” for all “heavy burthens”, while the “much superior Malays” were preferred “for works where a ready imagination and genius” was required.
Probably the most scintillating and simply enjoyable sections of Die Kaapse slawe deal with aspects of the living legacy of this period. If you want to digest more than whatever one of those My Cape Malay kitchen cookbooks can give you, Eunice Visser really turns “melktert” and “bobotie” into informative food history. Much the same can be said of her vibrant treatment of the mutation of Nederlands into a “gekreoliseerde” or “krom” language, a patois fertilised by an amalgam of the varying linguistic currents flowing through the slave Cape, including “Javanees, Malgassies, Maleis en Portugees”. In the end, the emergence of Afrikaans in the nineteenth century represented the creolised fruit sucked on by “die boere, slawe en Khoi-Khoin” in addition to other smaller mouths. If you’ve ever been intrigued by names like “koejawel” or “spanspek”, everything’s revealed in chapter six.
Die Kaapse slawe ends with a shrewd and clear-eyed cultural retrospective on the deposits – some obvious like Islam, some subtle like furniture design – left by the slave Cape in the vault of South African history. While never sugar-coating the “pynlike en onmenslike” practice of enslavement, Eunice Visser’s massively researched epic is a humane and haunting testimony to the unique contribution of the Cape slave experience to South Africa’s national life – the old pulse of a “multikulturele sosiale milieu”. Although that’s flickered at times, it’s never stopped beating.
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Kommentaar
Curious that no reference is made in the book itself to Karel Schoeman's HUGE contribution to the topic (including Armosyn van die Kaap – not referenced by Nasson either). The book seems to ride firmly on the coattails of Schoeman's work.