Indian Ocean Slaves in , 1695–1807

Nigel Worden

The most immediate and visible connection of early colonial Cape Town to the Indian Ocean world lay in its sizeable slave population. This article will examine new data from household inventories to enumer- ate in more precise ways than has previously been possible the Indian Ocean origins of slaves imported into the town in the 18th and early 19th centuries. In particular, it identifies the importance of south sources in the earlier parts of the 18th century and the shift to the African coast in the later 18th and 19th centuries. Both of these regions are neglected in current academic and popular perceptions of the origins of slaves in the city. Comparisons will be made throughout with slavery in other colonial Indian Ocean port cities of the period.

It is only since about 2007 that ’s place in the historical networks of the Indian Ocean world has begun to be recognised by South African and Indian Ocean scholars influenced by transnational approaches.1 The process

Source: Worden, Nigel, “Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town, 1695-1807,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 42(3) (2016): 389–408. © The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies.

1 For South Africa’s Indian Ocean connections, see, most notably, I. Hofmeyr, ‘South Africa’s Indian Ocean’, History Compass, 11, 7 (2013), pp. 508–12, and P. Gupta, I. Hofmeyr and M. Pearson (eds), Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (Pretoria, UNISA Press, 2010). Cape Town’s early colonial links to the Indian Ocean are highlighted especially in K. Ward, ‘“Tavern of the Seas”?: The as an Oceanic Crossroads during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in J. Bentley, R. Bridenthal and K. Wigen (eds), Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu, Hawaii University Press, 2007), pp. 137–52; K. Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009); N. Worden, ‘VOC Cape Town as an Indian Ocean Port’, in H. P. Ray and E. A. Alpers (eds), Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 142–62. Recent examples of the growing awareness of Cape Town by Indian Ocean specialists include P. Larson, Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009); C. Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012). Meg Samuelson also made important initiatives with a series of workshops—‘Indian Ocean Africa’ and ‘Thinking Africa from the Cape’—held at University, South Africa, in 2011.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi ��.��63/9789004346611_044 Indian Ocean Slaves In Cape Town, 1695–1807 1369 is far from complete, but has been especially influential among historians of early colonial Cape Town. For in the 17th and 18th centuries Cape Town’s ad- ministrative, trading, demographic and cultural connections were at least as strongly linked to the Indian Ocean as to the Atlantic and European worlds, or indeed to its continental African hinterland.2 Nowhere is this more evident than in the origins of Cape Town’s slave popula- tion. This has of course long been recognised not only in academic scholarship but also in the memory of slave descendants and in wider popular awareness, through the identification of Cape Islam and ‘Cape ’, with a heritage from south-east .3 Yet this is only part of the story, since Cape Town’s slave population came from a much wider geographical range than south-east Asia. Existing accounts of slavery in the town during the period of Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company—VOC) rule in the 17th and 18th centuries have not matched the detail and focus of Andrew Bank’s magisterial analysis of urban slavery in the period of British rule between 1806 and 1834.4 There is a good reason for this. Bank was able to draw on detailed slave registers that were kept in the decades of amelioration leading up to slave emancipation, initiated by the British authorities to check on the illegal impor- tation of slaves into the colony after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. No such registers exist for the preceding centuries. The only relatively complete set of data for slaves in the VOC period are the opgaaf tax rolls, but these do not distinguish urban residents in Cape Town from farmers in the surrounding grain lands of the Cape district, nor do they list slaves by name and toponym

2 For the most recent scholarship on these themes, see N. Worden (ed.), Cape Town between East and West: Social Identities in a Dutch Colonial Town ( and Hilversum, Jacana and Verloren, 2012). 3 The literature on this is now extensive. Notable examples are R. Ross, Cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa (London, Routledge 1983); N. Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985); R. Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838 (Hanover and Johannesburg, Wesleyan University Press and Wits University Press, 1994). For the more recent growth of public and popular awareness of this heritage, see N. Worden, ‘The Changing Politics of Slave Heritage in the , South Africa’, Journal of African History, 50, 1 (2009), pp. 23–40. 4 A. Bank, The Decline of Urban Slavery at the Cape, 1806–1843, Communications, No. 22 (Cape Town, Centre for African Studies, UCT, 1991). For work on urban slavery in the VOC period, which includes slave total numbers extracted from the few available sources, see R. Ross, ‘The Occupations of Slaves in Eighteenth Century Cape Town’, in C. Saunders and H. Phillips (eds), Studies in the (Cape Town, Centre for African Studies, UCT, 1984), pp. 1–14; and parts of N. Worden, E. van Heyningen and V. Bickford-Smith, Cape Town: The Making of a City (Cape Town, David Philip, 1998).