Pastel on paper 188.5 × 66.3 cm
Wits Art Museum Collection
Figure 1.16
Photographer unrecorded Zulu male migrant worker c.1956
Photographic studio in Marabastad, Pretoria Private Collection
CHAPTER 2
Slavery, Indenture and Migrant Labour: Maritime Immigration from Mozambique to the Cape, c.1780–1880
Patrick Harries
Mozambique has been a major site for the export of labour to South Africa for close to 250 years. The development of a vast system of migrant labour to the diamond and gold mines has dominated this story.1 What is less well known is the history of Mozambique as an exporter of labour to the south-western tip of Africa where the importation of slaves and other forced immigrants transitioned, with little interruption, to the importation of migrant workers. This chapter focuses on the exportation of labour from Mozambique over a century, starting around 1770, and draws attention to the hesitant transition in labour relations at the Cape as they shifted from slavery to indenture and, finally, to contracted labour migration. It outlines the extreme violence needed to establish a labour force and notes that, as in other parts of the world, the end of slavery created the need for imported, foreign labour held under strict indenture.2 The final part of the chapter examines how the coercive nature of this inheritance came to underlay the system of migrant labour.
The chapter starts by examining the growth of the trade in slaves from Mozambique to the Cape at the end of the eighteenth century. It argues that at this early stage the Portuguese colony began to depend for its revenues on the export of human capital. The sale of the colony’s major means of production fatally undermined its ability to attract immigrants and investment, as had Brazil or the Cape Colony, and institutionalised a dependence on the export of labour. Chattel slaves dominated the early years of this trade, but with the implementation of abolition at the Cape in 1808, two new waves of forced immigrants moved from Mozambique to the British colony where they acquired limited rights as freed or ‘apprenticed’ slaves. Like the slaves, they initially came from northern Mozambique, the areas north of Cape Delgado and Madagascar. But as Mozambique opened to trade with Brazil, forced immigrants arrived at the Cape in greater numbers from Quelimane, as well as from Inhambane and Delagoa Bay. During the 1850s, the commerce in slaves across the Atlantic declined sharply and the East African slave trade turned northwards. The role of the Cape as a site for the freeing of slaves ended in the mid-1860s only to be replaced, ten years later, by its new function as an importer of migrant labourer. The final part of this chapter examines the thin line between the expatriation of slaves, a system long present in southern Mozambique, and the new, state-controlled form of labour exportation represented by migrant labour. Although the colonial administration at the Cape brought new freedoms to the labour market in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the colony continued to depend on the labour of forced immigrants from Mozambique. Underlying the transition from slavery and indentured labour to a system of migrant labour was the historical dependence of the Portuguese administration on the revenues drawn from the export of labour. Indigenous systems of slavery in Mozambique also supported this transition by providing both slave traders and government recruiters with workers who had little or no say over how and to whom they were engaged. As elsewhere in the world, these factors infused migrant labour with a weighty heritage that retarded and restricted the emergence of a free labour system.3
The slave trade
The number of African slaves arriving at the Cape grew markedly during the last quarter of the eighteenth century when the Dutch East India Company (VOC) turned away from its traditional sources of slave labour in South Asia and Indonesia and, instead, looked for supplies to the south-west Indian Ocean. Settlements and islands along the East African coast, from Kilwa to Mozambique, became important exporters of slaves in the 1770s as the French developed tropical plantations on the Mascarenes. But they also discovered that slaves could be taken around the Cape and sold at great profit in the Caribbean at their colony of St Domingue (modern-day Haiti). In 1789 French traders took some 9 000 slaves from the island capital of Mozambique to St Domingue in about 30 slave ships, many of which stopped at the Cape.4 This new stream of slaves passing around the Cape offered colonists a fresh source of labour as captains found that, by disposing of weak and sickly slaves, they could rid their cargoes of those elements least likely to survive the long and gruelling Middle Passage to the Americas.5 But this source of forced immigration to the Cape came to an end following the slave uprising in St Domingue in 1791 and the outbreak of war with Britain two years later.
After the British had seized the Cape, they prohibited French ships from anchoring in Table Bay and started to hunt down French and allied vessels. Captured as ‘prizes of war’, these vessels often contained slaves being shipped to, or between, the French islands. As the British closed their grip on Mauritius and Réunion, French slavers sold their ships to a small group of merchants operating from Mozambique Island. Being Portuguese citizens, these merchants could travel safely around the Cape, sell slaves at the British port or use it as a refreshment station on the way to Rio de la Plata and Brazil.6 Mozambique experienced a period of economic growth as the slave trade expanded and traders invested their profits in the prazo estates along the Zambezi River, in the small town on Mozambique Island and, soon, in the construction of a handful of ocean-going slave ships.
During the Batavian occupation of the Cape (1803–1806) and the first months of Britain’s reoccupation of the region, Mozambican traders landed more than 7 200 slaves at Cape Town.7 This trade ended with the Act of Abolition implemented at the Cape on 1 March 1808, but it did little to stop the burgeoning trade in slaves from Mozambique to Brazil. Although the new Act prohibited naval officers from selling captured slaves, it offered them considerable fixed sums for each slave captured as a prize of war and British warships continued to bring in captured human cargoes. These forced immigrants alleviated the shortage of labour at the Cape and joined others, freed from visiting slave ships, when their vessels were wrecked or condemned for contravening aspects of colonial law.8 At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British entered into a series of international treaties aimed at the eventual abolition of the slave trade. But these treaties largely concentrated on suppressing the slave trade north of the equator and made no attempt to restrict Portugal’s massive transfer of labour from Mozambique and Angola to Brazil.
Labour at the Cape
The British authorities placed slaves freed at the Cape under 14-year apprenticeships. This was an adaptation of the system of apprenticeship at home that released parishes from having to provide for indigent youths and, instead, placed them in the hands of a master for training in a useful craft. The Act of Abolition stipulated that slaves freed in British ports should be apprenticed in this manner to the navy, army or colonial government; those superfluous to the needs of these institutions could then be apprenticed to private masters. In return for this free labour, masters were required to introduce apprentices to Christian teaching and to the skills needed to prevent them from becoming charges of the state at the end of their indentures. The slaves fell under the protection of the Controller of Customs who had to ascertain whether they were married, ensure that parents were not separated from their children and, in general, safeguard their interests.9 The apprenticeship system had the advantage of introducing a degree of flexibility into the labour market just as the Caledon or ‘Hottentot’ Code of 1809 subjected the indigenous Khoi to a pass system, severely controlling their movements. It also gave the colonial administration the power to distribute labour to recently arrived British immigrants in ways that gave them a foothold in the local economy. Moreover, apprenticeship generated the first extensive register of labour in the history of the colony. This provided the government with a blueprint of how to deal with and better control the workforce and deeply inserted the concerns of state into the field of labour relations.10
At