The eastern border therefore never became as densely populated as Somerset had hoped. The settlers who did remain as farmers made a significant contribution to agriculture, by planting maize, rye and barley. They also began wool farming which later became a very lucrative trade. Some of the settlers, who were traders by profession, also made a significant contribution to business and the economy.
New towns such as Grahamstown and Port Elizabeth therefore grew rapidly. Source: chrislayson. Slavery affected the economy of the Cape, as well as the lives of almost everyone living there. Its influence also lasted long after the abolition of slavery in In South Africa under Dutch settlement, there was a shortage of labour, especially on the wheat and wine farms.
But the VOC did not want to spend its money on the expensive wages that European labourers demanded. Nor could the VOC use the Khoi people as slaves. The Khoi traded with the Dutch, providing cattle for fresh meat. The Khoi also resisted any attempts to make them change their pastoralist way of life.
The Dutch were already involved in the Atlantic slave trade and had experience in buying and controlling slaves. They thus imported slaves as the cheapest labour option. Slaves were imported from a variety of places, including the east coast of Africa Mozambique and Madagascar , but the majority came from East Africa and Asia, especially the Indonesian Islands, which were controlled by the Dutch at the time.
This explains, for instance, why there are a relatively large number of people of Malaysian descent in the Cape the so-called Cape Malays. Initially, all slaves were owned by the VOC, but later farmers themselves could own slaves too. Slaves were used in every sector of the economy.
Some of the functions of the slaves included working in the warehouses, workshops and stores of the VOC, as well as in the hospital, in administration, and on farms or as domestic servants in private homes. Some slaves were craftsmen, bringing skills from their home countries to the Cape, while others were fishermen, hawkers and even auxiliary police. The economy of the Cape depended heavily on slave labour. The lives of the slaves were harsh, as they worked very long hours under poor conditions.
They were often not given enough healthy food and lived in overcrowded and dirty conditions. They also had little chance of education. Women slaves were at risk of being raped by their masters and other slaves. A traveller, Otto Mentzel, observed that: "It is not an easy matter to keep the slaves under proper order and control. The condition of slavery has soured their tempers.
While there were many laws inhibiting the lives and movements of slaves, there were also rules to protect them, for example, female slaves could not be beaten. The Abolition of Slavery Act ended slavery in the Cape officially in The more than 35 slaves that had been imported into South Africa from India, Ceylon, Malaysia and elsewhere were officially freed, although they were still bonded to their old masters for four years through a feudal system of "apprenticeship".
For many years wages rose only slightly above the former cost of slave subsistence. The abolition of slavery and the emancipation of slaves caused a lot of resentment and opposition from the Cape colonials towards the anti-slavery lobby, as embodied in the. London Missionary Society that had put pressure on the British government to take this decision. Even before emancipation, the publicised cases of missionary intervention on behalf of mistreated black workers on farms, sometimes even winning convictions against farmers, made them enemies of the largely Afrikaner farming community in the Cape.
Reverends John. Philip, Johannes van der Kemp and John Read were the most hated missionaries because of their fight for the rights of oppressed black Cape residents. In fact, one of the reasons for the Great Trek, which would lead to the migration of many white, Dutch-speaking farmers away from the Cape after , was the abolition of slavery by the British government. The farmers complained that they could not replace the labour of their slaves without losing a great deal of money.
Importantly, the abolition of slavery did not change the colonial—feudal "slave—master" relations between black and white. Black people were "enslaved" by the oppressive laws of industrialisation, pass regulations, and labour ordinances such as the Masters and Servants Act of , which made it a criminal offence for a worker to break a labour contract. Slaves from India or Ceylon Sri Lanka were either transported directly across the Indian Ocean from the region or were trans-shipped from their homelands to Batavia and then transported back across the Indian Ocean to the Cape.
Slaves from the Indies came from the multitude of island polities across the archipelago and more rarely from the Malay peninsula. The ethnic origins and identities of these slaves from the eastern Indian Ocean were complex and it is difficult to ascertain where many of them were born despite slave naming practices that indicated supposed place of origin. Although one can confidently identify a forced Malagasy diaspora to the Cape, in general one cannot do the same for, say, a Bugis diaspora.
Robin Cohen's characterization of a 'victim diaspora' would, interestingly enough, include the Huguenots alongside the slaves that arrived at the Cape. This is not necessarily the case for Asians who were forcibly migrated as criminals and political prisoners. James Armstrong has traced the transportation to the Cape of Chinese men, overwhelmingly residents of Batavia who were convicted of crimes or exiled as illegal residents.
In a sense, one could extend notions of the Chinese trading diaspora to a trans-Indian Ocean dimension that includes the Cape. The transmission of Islam came directly through these slaves and political prisoners who formed the basis of the Muslim community at the Cape.
One of the disadvantages of teasing out the networks of migration to the Cape across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans is the tendency to treat the strands of migration as separate phenomenon.
It goes without saying that the colonial society at the Cape, despite the Company's racial categorization of the population of its settlements, was forged through the intertwining of these people from different parts of the world as well as those who were there in the first place. In the evolution of South African society, the Dutch colonial period has been seen by South Africans both within distinct migrations of Europeans and as the mixing of people living at the Cape who formed the basis of those communities who were later classified as "white" and "coloured" under apartheid.
I would argue that the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa has brought renewed interest among South Africans in their search for cultural origins and that this process contributes to the theorization of what "diaspora" means in a colonial context.
The strands of cross-oceanic migrations that I have outlined above can be more accurately described in combination as migrations and sojourns rather than diasporas. A crucial part of theorizing "diaspora" is that a diaspora includes the continued claim of a specific homeland by those living elsewhere. What has emerged in South Africa in about the last decade is the development of diasporic consciousness among individuals and communities, particularly at the Cape. Coloured communities at the Cape have begun to embrace their slave origins and in some instances search for specific sites from which their forebears originated.
There has been a renewed interest in claiming "Malay" ethnic heritage in the Cape which projects a notion of a "Malay diaspora" backwards into the past, particularly but not exclusively among Cape Town Muslims.
Travel agents in Cape Town do quite a brisk trade in "homeland tours" to Southeast Asia where South Africans visit Malaysia and Indonesia to explore what they believe is, and embrace, as their own cultural heritage. Individuals have traced their family genealogies to specific islands in the Indonesian archipelago and sought their "roots" in these communities. Others have embraced India as the site of their diasporic past, although not in religious terms.
Interestingly, Madagascar isn't a significant site in this evolution of diasporas in the Cape despite its significance for the origins of slaves. I think this process in South Africa mirrors patterns of the proliferation of people claiming to be part of "diasporas" in the era of globalization. Renewed interest in "ethnic origins" conceptualized through notions of diaspora are part of the claiming of what being part of the "new South Africa" is all about. Disengaged from apartheid and racial discrimination, claims of ethnicity in South Africa have no legal basis in people's relation to the state and therefore can be embraced historically as part of the cultural history of the country.
This is most clearly visible in the Cape where the majority of communities and individuals claiming origins in slavery and forced migration live, where the representation of these diasporas also form part of the marketing of the Cape in local and international tourism.
Middlesex, Boxer's chapter on the Cape is entitled "the tavern of two seas" pp. Cape Town, and also published in Afrikaans as Herberg van die see. Dordrecht, Cape Town, Honolulu, Kathirithamby-Wells and John Villiers eds. Singapore, Volume 2: Expansion and Crisis. New Haven and London, See especially chapter two 'The City and Its Commerce'. Kathirithamby-Wells, 'Introduction' p. London and New York, The main source for Company shipping is J.
Bruijn, F. Gaastra and I. Schoffer, Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17 th and 18 th Centuries. Arasaratnam's overview of Indian Ocean historiography doesn't mention urban history as one of the major themes in the field. Translated by Sian Reynolds. Second Edition. Cambridge, Knoxville, The World System A. New York and Oxford, Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: economy and civilization of the Indian Ocean from the rise of Islam to Richard Hall's popular history does make an attempt to traverse the length and breadth of the ocean.
In those days, it was much more difficult to travel and it took a lot longer than today. This meant that the government did not have as much control over the places that were far away from Cape Town, so the farmers had to look after themselves and were basically free to do what they wanted.
But when the British took over, they wanted more control over the eastern border. When the British government of the Cape spread their control to the east, they also fought with the local Xhosa inhabitants. There were nine wars between the government and the Xhosa, called the frontier or border wars. The Dutch farmers also fought with the Xhosa over land. In the end, in about , thousands of these farmers moved away from the Cape Colony to the north.
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