The renewed armed intervention of the Royal Navy started in 1839, a year after the final emancipation of slaves at the Cape. Over the next few years the British brought about 6 000 ‘captured Negroes’ to the colony where they entered into apprenticeships of only one to three years. For a few years in the early 1840s, this made Cape Town the primary location in Africa for the liberation of captured slaves. With Freetown momentarily transformed into a site of emigration taking workers to the plantations of the West Indies, freed slaves were directed to the Cape.23 But the new, decisive policy aimed at suppressing the East African slave trade also contributed to a liberalisation of the labour market in the colony as, with apprenticeships limited to little more than one year, ‘captured Negroes’ were permitted to respond more freely to market demands.24
A Master and Servant Act, passed in March 1841, promised to control this labour force by prosecuting workers for negligent work, desertion, disobedience or insolence. But despite this attempt to create a disciplined labour force capable of responding to the demands of the market, questions remained about the human costs involved in bringing these forced immigrants to the Cape. The sea journey of five weeks from Mozambique exhausted slaves already weakened by a long tramp to the coast and long periods confined in barracoons or ships’ holds. As large numbers of slaves died in ships making their way to the Cape as prizes of the Royal Navy, pressure mounted on the Admiralty to bring captured slavers before courts in Mauritius or the Seychelles.25
This policy grew more strongly as the slave trade shifted northwards, following the final suppression of the trade to Brazil, and in response to a growing demand for slaves in the Comores, at Madagascar and Zanzibar. Slaves were also shipped to Réunion, mainly from central and northern Mozambique in the 1850s and 1860s as engagé or émigré labourers. In southern Mozambique, the slave trade declined sharply in the 1840s as the Gaza Nguni consolidated their empire and relied on domestic slaves to swell their numbers. Nevertheless, Inhambane was still visited by huge slave ships, such as the Rapid Emperatriz that, in 1851, left the port for Cuba with 1 000 slaves. Rapid, three-masted clippers, of which we have little precise detail, continued to take slaves illegally from Lourenço Marques and Inhambane until late in the decade.26 As elsewhere in the colony, the Portuguese held slaves in the south where several thousand laboured at Inhambane and, to a lesser extent, at Lourenço Marques.27 Portugal eventually emancipated these slaves in 1869, but subjected them to a period of unpaid apprenticeship (as libertos) that would only finally come to an end in 1878 with the passage of a new form of compulsory labour in the shape of an anti-vagrancy law.
The shipment to the Cape of forced immigrants from Mozambique finally ended in 1864.28 But by this time the British had alternative landing sites for the landing of freed slaves. In 1873 the Royal Navy brought the first of about 600 Mozambican slaves to Durban where they laboured under five-year apprenticeships.29 As the mineral revolution gathered strength and a tentacular new demand for labour spread throughout southern Africa, officials at the Cape made new requests for labour from Mozambique. With labourers leaving the farms to work at Kimberley or on the roads, railways and port facilities, the Cape looked north, yet again, to supply its labour market with a steady flow of workers from Mozambique.
Figure 2.4
Brand marks on slaves freed at the Cape Early 1840s
Reprinted by the Western Cape Archives and Records Service
Migrant labour
Communities on the coastal plain of southern Mozambique had a long history of moving in response to changing seasons and frequent, intemperate extremes in weather. Networks of information existed on the coast where men had worked with whalers and traders for several generations and had a taste for imported goods. News of work opportunities on the sugar plantations of Natal in the early 1860s drew men to make their way south across Zululand. But this route south, dangerous for individuals, was only made secure when the Natal government negotiated with the Zulu king in 1873 for recruiters to take workers through his kingdom. Some of these men deserted their employers in Natal and headed south through Pondoland in search of better conditions of work at the Cape.30 In July 1876 administrators at the Cape attempted to control this movement of labour by establishing a maritime immigration scheme with the Portuguese. Modelled on a plan recently inaugurated by the Natal government, this scheme required the Cape’s agent at Lourenço Marques to make a 15s payment for the passport of every emigrant prepared to accept a two-year work contract. About 700 workers made their way from Lourenço Marques to Cape Town on mail steamers at this time, several independently of the government scheme.
The attempt to renew the shipping of labour from Mozambique to the Cape proved short-lived, largely because it required a greasing of the palms of the Portuguese officials and an increase in the passport fee to 26s6d (half of which reputedly went to the governor of Lourenço Marques).31 With recruiting fees and the charge of a berth in steerage on a mail steamship, it cost an average of £7 to bring one man from Delagoa Bay to Cape Town. At the Cape, employers and the government shared the payment of this amount and guaranteed emigrants a return voyage home. This investment was lost when workers imported under the scheme deserted. Another cause of the scheme’s hasty demise was the moral repugnance with which many viewed the importation of labour from ports in which elements of slavery were still to be found.
A new generation of British abolitionists, dedicated to eradicating slavery throughout the world, wrote to the Colonial Office about their opposition to the maritime labour emigration scheme. Officials in Whitehall also found this way of acquiring labour in an area with a long slave history to be morally dubious.32 These objections continued after the start of the scheme when the colonial secretary in Natal saw the shipping of labour from Lourenço Marques to Durban as ‘a very questionable mode of supplying the labour market’. Part of the cost of embarking workers at Lourenço Marques, he had heard, came from having to ‘guard, superintend ... and prevent [them from] running away’.33 It was whispered that free men had been press-ganged in the interior and registered as libertos at Lourenço Marques and that libertos had been shipped to the Cape, via Lourenço Marques, from ports such as Quelimane.34 This perhaps explains the handful of ‘Makuas’ from northern Mozambique included in the early register of workers drawn up at the Cape. But the most stinging critique of all came from the French who, only a little over a decade earlier, had borne a wave of criticism from British abolitionists for their own émigré scheme. In 1877 the leading French abolitionist, Victor Schoelcher, called the shipping of labour from Lourenço Marques to Natal and the Cape, and the freeing of slaves at Durban, ‘a disguised restoration of the murderous slave trade’.35
The number of men shipped to the Cape declined sharply in 1878 as the status of liberto came to an end and employers in the British colony turned to labour drawn from the Transkei. But as the economy expanded, the demand for labour rose once again and, after the resuscitation of the scheme in November 1879, some 2 400 workers boarded ship for the Cape over the next 30 months. Men from the Delagoa Bay area were the first to respond to the call for labour, but from July 1880 recruiters sought out men from further north who were prepared to enter three-year contracts at considerably lower wages.
The old slave harbour of Inhambane replaced Lourenço Marques at this time as recruiters brought to the port men from the Gaza kingdom and Chopiland. As libertos