The truth about Cape slavery and historical misrepresentations

My 2020 book, The Lie of 1652, explores lesser-known aspects of South African history that challenge a number of untruths and misrepresentations, such as the so-called “empty land” theory, aka terra nullius, distortions and lies regarding the 1652 foundation of the Dutch colony and the first European engagement with Indigenous people at the southern tip of Africa, and many other historical events concerning the colonisation of the land.

This book expands on chapter four of The Lie of 1652, and as a sequel explores another important aspect of South African history — the two centuries or so of slavery in South Africa and the lie that the enslaved were marginal economic development role-players, who lived under conditions of mild, or liberal, slavery. It challenges the notion of a benevolent slavery system at the Cape, said to have been not as bad as the slavery story in the Americas.

The critique proceeds from these clearly articulated untruths, which are based on a patronising colonial and European supremacist mindset that goes back from modern-day academic assertions about benevolent slavery to early colonial statements that defined Cape slavery as a mild form of the chattel-slavery system. Slavery at the Cape was argued to be beneficial to the enslaved rather than cruel, exploitative and dehumanising.

This book also examines the untruth that the slavery system at the Cape was largely inconsequential to the greater economic development of South Africa, or, at best, a minor influence on Cape infrastructural development, which instead has been accredited largely to European skills and labour. 

My critique further challenges the measured, rather patronising acknowledgement that the cultures of the enslaved had “some influence” on colonial culture in terms of cuisine, language, music and dance. This perspective is framed by the erroneous notion that all the enslaved were “Cape Malays”. 

I question many other 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 not practised elsewhere in the country.

This false paradigm of slavery has skewed the history of South Africa as a whole and has underplayed the slavery system and its influence on politics, culture, economic development and even apartheid culture (which was founded on slavery). 

The overall approach of the lie paradigm is to downplay colonialism (the cornerstone of slavery) and the imperial shadow of the Dutch and English that reached across the Indian Ocean, including the Cape Colony.

There is a further distortion of South African history in minimising the fact that the Cape and Cape slavery were part of a much bigger Dutch East India footprint in the Indian Ocean, which was overlaid by the British imprint that was itself rooted in slavery. 

The Cape, as part of an imperial whole that incorporated parts of East Africa, parts of West Asia, India, Southeast Asia, Japan and China, dotted with similar colonies, is often divorced from this narrative. Instead, historians of slavery at the Cape have been largely inward-looking, as though the Cape Colony was a stand-alone entity and political economy. 

This latter issue is now beginning to be addressed to some degree by excellent new works in recent years, such as Cape Town Between East and West, edited by Nigel Worden, and Networks of Empire, by Kerry Ward.

The earliest expressions of the notion of a liberal, mild or benevolent slavery model at the Cape trace back to commentators steeped in what was called the late European “Age of Enlightenment” or “Age of Reason” and its early 19th-century aftermath. Because of the contradictions that slavery posed for the dominant philosophies of this era, the adherents to these philosophies attempted to cloak the harshness of slavery with humanistic padding.

Laurens Pit, of the VOC council in Coromandel, noted in 1661, “It is indisputable that the purchase of these poor people is a work of compassion since they would otherwise perish, as happens to those who are turned down …”

In the 18th century, when French ornithologist François le Vaillant was visiting the Cape, he said: “There is no country in the world where slaves are treated with so much humanity as at the Cape.”

Diarist Samuel Hudson, in the 18th century, summarising the notion of benevolent slavery at the Cape, said: “When we can rescue a poor wretch from cruel servitude with a determination to render him those comforts to make slavery bearable, it becomes an act of charity and which humanity need not blush at.”

Hudson goes on, emphatically: “The slaves of the Cape, I know it from experience that they are better fed, clothed, and have a more comfortable bed to rest their weary limbs on than half the peasantry of our trusted land of freedom.”

Another diarist, Robert Semple, stated: “In general the slaves at the Cape are not ill-treated. If now and then instance can be found to the contrary, that affects not the general character. A man may use his slave ill; but the slaves at the Cape are well-treated.”

At the time of the British military conquest of the Cape in 1806, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Wilson remarked: “Here and here alone perhaps in the world, are the slaves treated with mildness that would merit the admiration of a Howard.”

Historian Victor de Kock makes this comment on attitudes justifying slavery: “Other supporters, again, drew attention to the so-called humane side of the slave traffic, alleging that it was based on a desire to save the lives of those taken captive in the tribal wars.”

De Kock further quotes from the British writer Boswell to elaborate on the thinking about the morality of slavery, arguing: “To abolish a status which in all ages God has so sanctioned … would be cruelty to the African savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre and introduces to a much better life.” 

This spurious notion of liberal or benevolent slavery had more to do with slave-owners’ moral justification than fact. 

As I show later, there certainly were variations in slave-owners’ practices but it is false to portray slavery at the Cape as characterised by benevolence.

Across the decades to the present day, in an entrenched example of the modern observation of “whataboutism”, these assertions have been parroted unquestioningly by many white South Africans, despite much evidence that contradicts the assertion that the Cape had a liberal, mild, benevolent and life-enhancing slavery system in comparison to the broader colonial world. 

No enslaved people or aggrieved descendants have asserted this or that it rescued people from a worse life as free people in their country of origin living with the families and communities from which they were wrenched.

The Truth About Cape Slavery is published by Tafelberg.