The truth about Cape slavery: The foundations of colonial South Africa by Patric Tariq Mellet (Tafelberg, 2024)
Title: The truth about Cape slavery: The foundations of colonial South Africa
Author: Patric Tariq Mellet
Publisher: Tafelberg
ISBN: 9780624095293
Epub ISBN: 9780624095309
In The truth about Cape slavery, Patric Tariq Mellet argues that modern South Africa – its economy and politics – is shaped and established on the foundation of chattel slavery just like the United States of America. Cape slavery, rather than minor, was a crucial feature of maritime capitalism. This then moved to become the cornerstone of the Cape’s agricultural economy.
Slavery is at the core of the glaring inequality which persists in South Africa to this day. Yet slavery is but a subscript in our national consciousness. As a “storyteller who asks new questions”, Patric Tariq Mellet sets out to rectify this.
While academic research has since the 1990s upended the myths that the enslaved were marginal to Cape economic development, and that they lived under “mild” conditions, the story needs to be told more broadly, and the impact of the two centuries of slavery in South Africa examined more closely.
In The truth about Cape slavery, Melle shows that modern South Africa – its economy and politics – is hsaped by slavery in the same way that is has shaped the United States of America, and that it deserves the same scrutiny. Cape slavery was a crucial feature of maritime capitalism and became the cornerstone of the Cape’s agricultural economy. This book challenges the Netherlands to improve on the weak apology offered in 2023 by its kind and the lack of reparations offered by its government.
Mellet questions falsehoods and distortions, such as that there was no enslavement of Indigenous South Africans, that slavery in this part of the colonial world ended in 1834, and that it was just a Cape phenomenon. With a focus on the experience of the enslaved, he looks at auctions, house and field labour, manumission and Free Blacks – and at endurance, punishment and resistance. In poignant portraits, we meet Tromp van Madagascar, Galant van der Kaap, Januarie van Tutocorijn and others who were enslaved.
An incisive, timely look into the realities of Cape slavery and why its legacy endures in South Africa.