Bound to be Free? Manumission in Cape Town, 1825–34

Abstract

ABSTRACT As in other slave societies, manumission existed in the Cape Colony from the introduction of slavery by the Dutch East India Company in the 1650s until British abolition in the 1830s. This article focuses on manumissions in Cape Town between 1825 and de jure Emancipation in 1834, during which time changing manumission regulations loosened slaveowners’ grip over the process. One thousand two hundred and sixty-six enslaved people were manumitted in Cape Town and recorded in the ‘Return of Manumissions’. Among them were more enslaved women and girls than men and boys, a pattern consistent with earlier periods at the Cape and other slave societies. The most common reason for manumission was purchase constituting 38% of the manumissions. This shifts the focus away from slaveowners granting manumission towards enslaved people achieving it. Using specific cases, this article explores wages, inheritance and loans as possible means of acquiring funds to purchase manumission, and suggests that conditions attached to manumission, while uncommon, were sometimes repayment arrangements. In this analysis, the importance of work both in slavery and life after slavery comes to the fore, and it opens questions about the financial lives of the enslaved for future research.