Indian Ocean slavery and its demise in the Cape Colony

Abstract

The Cape Colony may seem an odd candidate for inclusion in a book on slave systems of Asia and the Indian Ocean. Where comparisons are made between the Cape and other slave systems, they are usually in terms of the Atlantic world where the similarities of settler agrarian communities using imported slave labour seem most evident. But the Cape was not based on the Atlantic trading systems. For the large majority of its period as a slaveimporting colony (1658-1807) it was an integral part of the Vereenigde OostIndische Compagnie (‘Dutch East India Company’, hereafter VOC) trading network in the Indian Ocean, drawing slaves from a wide range of Asian and southwestern Indian Ocean regions. When the Cape came under the control of the British in 1795, the main increase in imported slaves came from Mozambique and other regions of southeastern Africa. Emancipation in the 1830s was on the model of British colonies in the Atlantic and Mauritius rather than those of British India or other Asian slave societies. Yet the legacy of the Indian Ocean roots of Cape slavery continued into the era of ‘freedom’ and is still highly visible in the linguistic, religious and cultural characteristics of the Cape today.