Figure 2.1
The naval base served as the headquarters of the anti-slavery squadron. Drawing by Sir Jahleel Brenton, head of the dockyard and defender of the interests of Prize Negroes.
Sir Jahleel Brenton
Simonstown 1815
Simon’s Town Museum, courtesy Richard Brenton Sinker
The rights of apprenticed slaves became an important topic during the early years of the second British occupation. Sir Jahleel Brenton, the much-decorated head of the Simon’s Town dockyard from 1815 to 1821, loudly championed the rights of Prize Negroes. He noted that masters had little reason to show any consideration for Prize Negroes, as their responsibility for these apprentices came to an end with the termination of their contracts.11 However Brenton also recognised that prize apprentices had inalienable rights under legislation as they could not be sold, inherited or transferred to another colony, were to receive a training in a marketable skill and were to be held in service for a maximum of 14 years. Yet, while he pressed for the early liberation of those apprentices who could support themselves through the sale of acquired skills, Brenton recognised the larger problem: freedom would merely reduce them to ‘the position of Hottentots’.
While his friend John Phillip fought to undo the serf-like condition of the Khoi under the Caledon Code, Brenton lobbied hard to ameliorate the situation of apprentice slaves at the Cape and achieved some notable successes in this regard at Simon’s Town.12 In the meantime, as the first, short apprenticeships came to an end in 1816, several prize slaves opposed the renewal of their indentures. This happened just as slaves were enabled to take charges of mistreatment before a Protector of Slaves and a year after Khoi labourers had for the first time laid charges against their masters before the new circuit court. It was perhaps this new concern with legal rights that led several Prize Negroes to seek release from their status as apprentices or to claim that they had been illegally enslaved.13
Although this and other early attempts to bring the rights of prize apprentices to the notice of the courts proved unsuccessful, the complaints helped stir a wind of dissent that rose again in 1822–1823. This occurred as the first 14-year apprenticeships expired and government legislation suddenly entitled both slaves and prize apprentices to claim better treatment from their masters. This legislation regulated the conditions under which Prize Negroes laboured, established clear rights to food, clothing and small payments and limited punishments for misdemeanours. It obliged masters to provide their apprentices with a rudimentary education and training and threatened them with heavy fines for selling their apprentices into slavery.14 Opponents of Lord Charles Somerset turned their criticism of government around these broad questions of freedom and particularly succeeded in bringing before the colonial court the corrupt ways in which government officials dealt with prize slaves.15 In the meantime, Brenton’s reports to parliament helped bring to the Cape a commission of inquiry in March 1823, which gathered evidence from masters and apprentices and that showed freed slaves had seldom benefited from any form of tutelage. The difficulties associated with freeing forced immigrants in a colony still practising slavery were compounded by the venality of an administration only too willing to benefit from a trade in these individuals and their labour.16
In London, parliament responded to the demands of the abolitionists by passing the Slave Trade Consolidation Act of 1824 that, finally, prohibited slavers from stopping at the Cape and, in a separate clause, reduced the period of apprenticeship for prize slaves to the seven years found in Exodus 21:2.17 Ordinance 49 of 1828 prepared the way for a liberalisation of the labour market when it empowered immigrants to cross the frontier in search of work, with the provision that they carry passes. Ordinance 50 of the same year then freed both Khoi and prize slaves from the restrictions of the Caledon Code.
Figure 2.2
Southern Mozambique was an active site for the slave trade in the first half of the nineteenth century. The body marks on this Brazilian slave indicate that he came from southern Mozambique. The people called Knopneuse (Knobnoses) by the Boers, and ‘Inhambanes’ by the slave traders, could be found in the Mascarene islands, in Brazil, as well as at the Cape and Freetown.
Johan Moritz Rugendas
Voyages pittoresque dans le Bresil 1835
Paris, Engelmann
While the humanitarian lobby won these limited advances at home and in the empire, it made no attempt to curb the growing slave trade from East Africa. Northern and central Mozambique initially dominated this commerce with the Mascarenes and Americas. During this time, southern Mozambique was on the edge of the slave trade as forced emigrants from Inhambane and Lourenço Marques had to pass through the customs office at Mozambique Island. This increased the periods of time they spent in ships’ holds and increased their propensity to die during the long Middle Passage to the Americas. But as the profitability of the slave trade grew in the early nineteenth century, these ports on the edge of empire started to export slaves independently of the tax authorities at the island capital. As elsewhere in Mozambique, slave traders fastened onto indigenous social practices in their attempt to acquire the merchandise of their trade. Indigenous people practised various forms of slavery in the region south of the Save River, from debt bondage to pawnship and domestic slavery. This produced a population that, uprooted and without rights, constituted the raw material of the slave trade.
Between 1804 and 1807, three slave vessels left Inhambane for the Cape where they sold their human cargoes. The implementation of abolition turned this trade in Inhambane slaves away from the Cape and directed it to Brazil. The slave trade in the region grew precipitously in the 1820s as Nguni warlords migrated northwards and devastated the coastal regions of southern Mozambique. These political upheavals produced perhaps as many as a thousand slaves for the sugar plantations of Mauritius and Réunion every year during the second half of the 1820s.18 Smaller numbers went to Brazil but, as that country prepared to end the slave trade, merchants sought to export as many slaves as possible. In 1829–1830, 12 large slave ships, each laden with an average of 555 slaves, left Lourenço Marques for Brazil. In the north, in 1830 alone, six slavers left Inhambane for Brazil with a total of 3 456 slaves.19
Figure 2.3
The woman on the right, described as ‘Koomassie a woman from the country of Lake Nyassa’, was in a party of slaves encountered by David Livingstone near where the Shire River enters Lake Nyassa. After walking to the coast, she was embarked on a dhow of 125 tons just north of Cape Delagado, along with close to 70 other slaves. Captured by HMS Lynx in October 1859, the dhow was destroyed and the crew taken to Zanzibar for adjudication. The warship then sailed for the Cape where the slaves were freed on 19 January 1860 and distributed as apprentices.
Thomas Baines
Walledi woman of Bakarri East Coast Africa; Koomassie, a woman from the country of Lake Nyassa 1859
Courtesy of Museum Africa, Johannesburg
Anti-slavery
During the 1820s British treaties with Portugal effectively protected the export of slaves from Mozambique and Angola on which Brazil depended