9 Wage Labour and Slavery on the Cape Frontier

9 Wage Labour and Slavery on the Cape Frontier The Impact of the Abolition of Slave Imports on Labour Relations in the Graaff-Reinet District* Johan Fourie and Erik Green Hofmeester, Karin & Pim de Zwart (eds.), Colonialism, Institutional Change, and Shifts in Global Labour Relations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI: 10.5117/9789462984363/CH09 Abstract The 1807 ban on the importation of slaves is said to have had severe consequences for farmers in South Africa’s Southwestern Cape, an area of wheat and wine farming that used large numbers of slave labourers. The ban resulted in a rapid rise in slave prices, which significantly increased input costs. In contrast, the effect of the ban was apparently much more moderate in the eastern parts of the colony, where stock farmers used predominantly Khoesan labour. We use six tax censuses from the easternmost district in the Colony, Graaff-Reinet, to show that the ban on importing slaves did indeed have important consequences for farmers, even on the colony’s distant frontier. The ban affected not only the composition of labour but also its productivity. Keywords: slavery, abolition, Graaff-Reinet, labour, tax censuses * This chapter is based on a paper prepared for the Workshop on Economic Institutional Change and Global Labour Relations, IISH Amsterdam, 26-27 September 2014. We want to thank the participants of this workshop, and in particular Pim de Zwart and Karin Hofmeester, for their valuable comments on an earlier version. We would also like to thank members of the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past (LEAP) seminar series for their valuable feedback. We further thank Elsje Kemp, Chris de Wit, and Linda Orlando for research assistance, and Erika le Roux for archival support. 266 JOHAN FOURIE AND Erik GREEN Introduction When the Cape Colony became part of the British Empire in the early nineteenth century, its main agricultural products were wheat and wine from the fertile region close to Cape Town, and cattle and sheep from the drier interior. This geographical specialization divided eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Cape production into two distinct types, with wheat and wine farmers mostly using slave labour, and cattle farmers mostly employing the indigenous people, the Khoesan, either as free wage labour or under semi-bonded contracts.1 Consequently, it seems reasonable to assume that the 1807 British ban on slave importation was a major shock to the wheat and wine farmers, whereas farmers in the interior would have been much less affected, everything else being equal. However, this generalized view ignores the nuances of labour relations on Cape Colony farms. In an earlier work, we have shown that the Khoesan played an important role in the wine and wheat farms of the Southwestern Cape,2 and in this chapter we show that slaves played a similarly important role as farm labourers in the interior. This chapter details the first systematic quantitative analysis of labour relations in the nineteenth-century Cape that includes the contribution of Khoesan labour. Our analysis uses newly transcribed tax censuses of frontier farmers over the first twenty-five years of the nineteenth century, the original records of which are housed in the Cape Town Archives Repository. In particular, we show how farmers were affected by the legal changes that were set in motion by the 1807 ban on slave importation. We use the frontier district of Graaff-Reinet as an in-depth case study, but we also relate this to general developments in the Cape Colony. We argue that although the changes certainly affected the settler farmers, the effect was not as straightforward as is commonly assumed. To show this, we exploit the fact that the Hottentots, as the Khoesan were then called, appear as a separate labour category in the tax censuses of settler farmers in the Graaff-Reinet district, on the eastern border of the colony. This district provides us with an interesting case because its settler farming history differs considerably from that of the Southwestern Cape, where slavery was more widespread and slaves were the only labour supply enumerated in the tax record. The fact that Graaff-Reinet farmers relied predominantly on Khoesan labourers – and that these labourers are included in tax records for the period – enables us to compare the productivity 1 Worden, Slavery; Penn, “Pastoralist and Pastoralism”; Scully, Liberating the Family?; Ross, “The Origins”. 2 Fourie and Green, “The Missing People”. W AGE LABOUR AND SLAVERY ON THE CAPE FrONTIER 267 of slave and Khoesan labourers, something that we cannot do for the more well-researched districts of Cape Town, Stellenbosch, and Swellendam.3 Farm labour in the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Cape The Cape was settled in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company, the VOC (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie), as a refreshment station for passing ships. The first commander of the station, Jan van Riebeeck, soon reported back to the directors of the VOC that he needed more Europeans to settle as farmers in order to ensure a sufficient supply of food for the passing ships. The inflow of settlers, however, remained modest until the late seventeenth century, when European settlement began to expand and a small but scat- tered free settler society was established, supplying the town primarily with wheat, wine, and cattle.4 The increased commercialization of settler farming helped to reproduce a prosperous agrarian elite,5 although it did not lead to a monocultural plantation system supplying the metropolitan market, as was the case with West Indian sugar and Brazilian coffee.6 The settler farmers faced two major economic constraints: lack of capital and shortage of labour. Land tenure was initially offered free of charge, which considerably reduced the drain on capital. The VOC further granted farmers start-up capital loans, often in the form of seed or equipment that helped them set up their operations. The large credit market that developed in the colony also helped farmers to get started.7 However, the shortage of labour proved particularly troublesome. At first, the VOC suggested that European immigrants, who could be employed as indentured labourers, would ensure the supply, but the number of these immigrants arriving in Table Bay was never sufficient to satisfy the farmers’ requirements. Another solution was to employ knechts (company servants), but they were also few in number, and because of their scarcity 3 In this chapter we use the term “Khoesan” while acknowledging that this was not a ho- mogeneous group. The settlers at the Cape encountered diverse groups of peoples whom they identified as “Bushmen” (San), the hunter-gatherers, and “Hottentots” (Khoe, also Khoi or Khoikhoi), a nomadic, pastoral people. Anthropological research shows that the two groups are not discrete ethnic categories. The Dutch differentiated them not by physical appearance, but socioeconomically: the cattle owners were classified as Khoe and the non-cattle owners as San. A comprehensive discussion can be found in Elphick, Kraal and Castle. 4 Fourie and Von Fintel, “The Dynamics of Inequality”. 5 Williams, “Who, Where, and When”; Fourie, “The Remarkable Wealth”. 6 Worden, Slavery, p. 19. 7 This credit market is the focus of ongoing research; Swanepoel and Fourie, “‘Impending Ruin’”. 268 JOHAN FOURIE AND Erik GREEN they could command higher prices than many farmers could afford. Van Riebeeck suggested employing Chinese immigrants, as were used in Batavia, but this plan was abandoned because the cost of their passage was too high. The colony thus turned to using slaves from Africa and the East Indies. Slaves from West Africa could be bought with the help of the Dutch West India Company, and the VOC had contacts with Asian slave traders bringing slaves from the East. The company initially offered slaves on credit to the farmers in order to stimulate production, and in the 1680s the number of slaves at the Cape began to rise steadily.8 By 1800, about 90 per cent of the Cape settler farmers owned slaves. Historians are in agreement that slaves were a major input for farmers in the colony’s southwestern region. Armstrong and Worden suggest a strong positive correlation between slave ownership and yields of wine and wheat,9 and this view is confirmed by earlier observers. In the 1730s, for example, Mentzel, a visitor to the Cape, said that “the expansion of the colony demands an ever increasing number of slaves” and that “every farmer requires many more slaves than members of his own household to grow his crops and develop his land”.10 In the interior, where the harsher environment and lack of infrastructure made large-scale wine and wheat farming difficult, settlers established pastoral farms. Why they moved into the interior remains a matter for debate. The economic historian Neumark attributes this largely to the attraction of financial opportunities for raising stock and trading with the indigenous people, whereas historians such as Guelke argue that the pressure of the expanding population in the Southwestern Cape forced young settlers to make this move.11 Guelke’s view is supported by Shell, who dismisses the popular belief that European immigration to the Cape ended in 1717, and makes the case that the boundaries of the colony expanded as Europeans continued to move to the Cape throughout the eighteenth century.12 The first settler farmers adopted the indigenous people’s system of taking sheep and cattle out to pasture during the day and returning them to the kraal in the evening for fear of thieves, a system that made pastoral farming in the Cape quite labour-intensive.13 The farmers in the interior used slaves less than the farmers of the Southwestern Cape. As has been pointed out 8 Worden, Slavery, pp.

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