Like a good beverage, a good book holds promise from the first sip. This extract is used with the permission of NB Publishers.
About the author

Patric Tariq Mellet (photo: NB Publishers)
Patric Tariq Mellet was born and raised in the Salt River, Woodstock and District Six districts of Cape Town. He is a former liberation movement cadre, who returned from exile in 1990. His MSc dissertation from Buckinghamshire New University is titled: Heritage tourism - Cape slavery and indigenous people. In 2009 his work on the intangible heritage of the Cape received a Western Cape Provincial Honours award. In 2019 the Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture appointed him to the Governance Council of the South African Heritage Resources Agency.
About the book
First Sip – Extract:
Slavery sparks Europe’s development
Without slavery there would have been no bridge between a backward Europe emerging from the Dark Ages, with its competing feudal orders, and the globalisation of social and economic control under a new elite order rooted in corporatism. South Africans tend to think of the
Netherlands as having been an old, advanced and mighty European power when it ventured to the Cape, but that was just not the case. The Dutch Republic, or Dutch States General, had been founded only in 1579, after longstanding suzerainty over the Low Countries by the Spanish Empire. Europe’s development from a backward dark age had everything to do with its conquest of land, resources and technologies from Africa, West Asia, India, Southeast Asia, China and Japan.
The Netherlands, or Dutch States, was created only 70 years before Jan van Riebeeck came to the Cape in 1652. Its rise, from occupation by other powers, from division, ruin and war, to become a superpower, was the result of the ascendance of global corporatism via imperial conquest and colonisation. The Dutch were at the cutting edge of the new way of doing business in which human dignity and humanity were low on the agenda of elites, particularly if the people concerned had darker skin tones.
The Dutch and British East India and West India companies were the world’s first multinational corporations, which spearheaded the aims and objectives of the emergent globalised capitalist system. At the time, capitalism was in its infancy, a process of primitive accumulation of capital required to use feudal slave labour before it could evolve to free market wage labour. In these young years of capitalism, from the 16thto the early 19th centuries, there was no surplus value to pay even a semblance of a wage and therefore there was nothing to kick-start capitalism – without enslaving people and brutally compelling them to work.
Only with the accumulation of capital through colonialism and slavery, followed by new methods of production in the industrial and agrarian sectors, were the concepts of contrived free wage labour and a free market able to grow. Understanding that imperialism and colonialism are the cornerstones of the trade and use of enslaved labour is not incidental to slavery studies but core to understanding what slavery was all about.
The Cape as part of the global project
The insular and inward-looking slavery research in South Africa has long failed to understand the role of the VOC project at the Cape as part of a bigger, global economic project. South African academia is preoccupied with the pennies of the Cape project rather than the pounds of the bigger picture. Academics look at the micro economy of the Cape as an end in itself, whereas the Cape project was just one part of a complex global imperial logistics operation and economy in a company that had many divisions, from dedicated military and security infrastructure, transportation, technology development and revenue-producing micro economies in its settlements, factories and plantations to research and development, as parts of its large portfolio. The Cape project was a service station for shipping. Sea craft and the fortunes of craft and crew were the VOC’s largest capital investment concern. It had to move on rapidly from flimsy, vulnerable ships experiencing great attrition rates to more reliable ships. Shipping was
its most vulnerable investment, requiring ever new technologies to be developed to ensure speed, capacity, safety and the prolonged and secure shelf life of the products it transported. Halfway harbouring and taking on fresh provisions at the Cape was a vital part of this.
Military and security heavily reliant on the ocean transport of soldiering manpower and arms and munitions was another huge capital investment.
It is this greater cost, profit and loss motive, which was heavily reliant on a widely spread population of enslaved, that provides the bigger economic picture – the imperial and colonial frame that gives context to the Cape project and its reliance on slavery. The bigger picture into which the Cape Colony fitted as part of the global Dutch footprint was not just huge expansive colonies, settlements, plantations, mines, markets trading in the enslaved and factories, but also aggressive competition with other European powers, particularly with the English. The impact of the geopolitics of these competing European nations cannot be overlooked, especially the Anglo-Dutch Wars (six of them) in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, with the 1795 Battle of
Muizenberg and the 1806 Battle of Blaauwberg taking place at the Cape.
Both Shafiq Morton36 and Ebrahim Salie37 provide evidence of local impacts of the Anglo-Dutch Wars, involving the arrival of prominent exiled Muslim leaders. Even the Confederate-versus-Union civil war conflict, which had much to do with slavery, played out at the Cape when the CSS Alabama confederacy raider visited Table Bay. Its legacy in Cape culture is the song ‘Daar ko die Alibama’, which is still sung today. There were no doubt enslaved people on board the Alabama as crew who would have engaged with local enslaved and Free Blacks, leaving an indelible impression on them. The larger picture of the transoceanic trade in slavery also brought news of revolts by the enslaved in the Caribbean, which contributed through inspiration to the largest-ever rebellion of enslaved at the Cape in 1808 – the Jij Rebellion led by Louis van Mauritius.
My work serves only as a primer to your own journeys of discovery and critique. In reference to an article he wrote, ‘Cape Slaves in the Paper Empire of the VOC’, and looking at the limitations of the paper archive and Cape slavery, Nigel Worden noted (p. 38):
[The] voluminous archive of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) controlled, constructed, and delimited the presence of slaves in the paper world of the VOC empire. The extensive paper archive of the VOC recorded slaves in ways which matched the concerns of the administration, such as enumeration in census returns and as objects for inheritance or sale in estate inventories.
Nonetheless, historians have been able to uncover considerably more information about their experience and agency. Much detail is provided in criminal and (to a lesser extent) civil judicial records, which explains the emphasis on individual and collective resistance in the slave historiography of the 1980s. More recently Cape historians have adapted techniques of reading across the grain in order to explore the mentalité and cultural worlds of Cape slaves. However, the VOC archive was not only a record of the ruling classes. Slaves also used writing for their own purposes, either in alternative networks of literacy in Asian languages or by turning Dutch papers into documents for their own advantage, some of which has found its way into the official documents.
The combination of these records with oral traditions and community memories have enabled Cape historians to transcend the apparent silence of the official archive. Worden’s observations in this paper are important to digest for anyone who is researching Cape slavery and the Indian Ocean slave trade.
However, what should also be taken into consideration is that, Worden’s observations apart, there is an Afro-European (or white) lens applied with some myopia, and this requires a black lens involving the emotional intelligence of the lived experience of descendants, which is now coming to the fore. We cannot escape the fact that in South Africa there are different forms of groupthink at play and different worldviews rooted in the experience of oppressor and oppressed that will perceive what arises from these new methodologies of research in different ways. There is what could be called a white truth and a black truth, which have butted heads at every turn but now can be found to be beginning to work cooperatively. The search for truth or restorative memory requires us to answer many tough questions, facing emotional hurdles in the process, and to unearth many answers that will be difficult for some to accept. Confronting the truth and parting company with the lies is not an easy path to tread
Lees ook:
First sip: One pot cooking for South Africans by Louisa Holst