A Long Way Home. Deborah James

of this ban and readily inscribed false names in passports for departing workers. These documents cost 11s8d, a sum he shared with recruiters bringing the men from the interior. The British consul at Mozambique, Henry O’Neil, soon reported on the felonious nature of this traffic as recruiters acquired men by ‘all sorts of pretences’ and, once at the port, had them chained together and embarked on waiting ships.³⁶ If men living within the Portuguese dependency at Inhambane had little say over the conditions under which they were recruited, those beyond its sway of influence were similarly bereft of influence over their recruitment. The large numbers of Chopi recruited under the scheme were, more than likely, the product of the relentless raids mounted by the Gaza on their stockades south-west of Inhambane. These Nguni-speakers ruled over an empire in southern Mozambique, possessed large numbers of slaves and had no concept of ‘free labour’. It seems highly likely that the Gaza king, Gungunyane, was the major beneficiary of the wages brought back home by men returning from the Cape Colony.³⁷

       Conclusion

      Slaves liberated at the Cape showed little desire to return home to areas of Mozambique devastated by the violence and turmoil of the slave trade. But with the ending of both slavery and the slave trade along the Mozambican coast and at Zanzibar, some Makua-speakers at Durban returned home.³⁸ Many of the men who moved to the Cape as contracted labourers took advantage of the secured return passage offered by their employment. Those who completed their legal contracts embarked on the mail ship while others, often after breaking contract, tramped home overland.³⁹ Many took up work on the railways and ports of the Eastern Cape. These men returned home with new beliefs, skills of all sorts and even the first text in Gwamba (Tsonga), the language transcribed by Swiss missionaries.⁴⁰ Several returned home with wives who took Christianity and the English language into parts of the Delagoa Bay hinterland.⁴¹ Some of these migrants became famous pioneers of Christianity, most notably the Methodist Robert Mashaba in the Delagoa Bay area and the Anglican Bernard Mizeki in Zimbabwe.⁴² Equally importantly, the Catholic Saturnino do Valle migrated from Inhambane to establish a Catholic mission on the Bluff at Durban. This attracted members of the Makua or ‘Zanzibari’ freed slave community who later played a role in taking their new faith to the Zulu.⁴³

      In 1883 the labour scheme bringing Mozambicans to the Cape by sea came to an end. New sources of migrant labour had become available to employers with the incorporation of the Transkeian territories into the Cape Colony and, as many Mozambicans deserted their contracts, the scheme had become too costly. The movement of labour that had started a century earlier had taken on a migrant form with the ending in Mozambique of slavery and the slave trade. But the forced, compulsory nature of this trade in human beings remained. Portuguese officials and recruiters depended on the revenues drawn from the export of labour both to line their pockets and run the administration. Together with chiefs, who also drew a financial advantage from the migration of labour, these individuals pressured men to emigrate and, through the agency of the Portuguese consul in Cape Town, they were also encouraged to return home. The maritime labour scheme continued the tradition of a high level of state intervention in the labour market through the registration, organisation and control of labour brought to the Cape by sea. Like earlier generations of slaves and prize apprentices at the Cape, the migrants had no say over the employers to whom they would be contracted and it is very probable that they had no say over the length of time they would work or their level of remuneration.

      The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 and the development of an organised system of migrant labour put paid to hopes at the Cape of resuscitating the maritime labour scheme. But vestiges of the old patterns remained in the new arrangement in the Transvaal: the dependence of the Mozambican economy on the export of labour; the high level of compulsion used to force men to migrate; the strong degree of state intervention on the side of capital in this growing ‘system’, especially after the British took charge of the Transvaal, and a centralised decision-making process that excluded workers. As migrant labour emerged as a system, it carried with it elements of a maritime trade in human beings with a long history in south-east Africa, a commerce accompanied by a practice of work marked by slavery and indenture. This experience of a deeply unfree system of labour would influence industrialists and politicians alike and would help shape the contours of labour relations in South Africa for the next century.

       Notes

      1.C Higgs, Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery and Colonial Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), Chapter 6; K Grant, A Civilized Savagery: Britain & the New Slavery in Africa, 1884–1926 (New York: Routledge, 2005); F de Vletter, ‘Labour Migration to South Africa: The Lifeblood for Southern Mozambique’, in On Borders: Perspectives on International Migration in Southern Africa, ed. DA McDonald (New York: St Martin’s Press and SAMP, 2000), 46–70; P Harries, Work, Culture and Identity: Migrant Labor in Mozambique and South Africa, c.1860–1910 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1994); R First, Black Gold: The Mozambican Miner, Proletarian and Peasant (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983); J Duffy, A Question of Slavery: Labour Policies in Portuguese Africa and the British Protest, 1850–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).

      2.J Quirk, ‘Ending Slavery in All Its Forms: Legal Abolition and Effective Emancipation in Historical Perspective’, International Journal of Human Rights 12 (2008), 529–554.

      3.Cf. R Allen, ‘The Mascarene Slave Trade and Labour Migration in the Indian Ocean in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in The Structure of Slavery in the Indian Ocean, ed. G Campbell (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 33–50; T Weiskel, ‘Labour in the Emergent Periphery: From Slavery to Migrant Labour Among the Baule People, c.1880–1925’, in The World System of Capitalism: Past and Present, ed. W Goldfrank (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979), 207-233.

      4.J Capela, O Tráfico de Escravos Nos Portos de Moçambique (Lisbon: Edições Afrontamento, 2002), 311; K Schoeman, Portrait of a Slave Society: The Cape of Good Hope, 1717–1795 (Pretoria: Protea Boekhuis, 2012), 156–170, 294–305.

      5.G Debien, ‘Le Voyage d’un Navire Négrier Bordelais au Mozambique (1787–88)’, in La France d’Ancien Regime: Textes et Documents, 1484–1789, ed. F Cadilhon (Bordeaux: Presses Univ de Bordeaux, 2003), 232–233; Capela, O Tráfico, 311, 315; J Mettas, Répertoire des Expéditions Négrières Françaises au XVIIIe Siècle, 1: Nantes (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-mer, 1978), 390; S Daget and M Daget (eds), Répertoire des Expéditions Négrières Françaises au XVIIIe Siècle, 2: Ports Autres que Nantes (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-mer, 1978), 669.

      6.L Antunes, ‘O Comércio com o Brasil e a Comunidade Mercantil em Moçambique (séc. XVIII)’, Dimensoes: Revista da Historia de Ufes 19 (2007), 207–220; J-P Tardieu, La Traite des Noirs entre l’Océan Indien et Montevideo (Uruguay): Fin du XVIIIe Siècle et Debut du XIXe (Paris: St Denis, 2010), 10, 20, 55, 67, 87; A Borucki, ‘The Slave Trade to the Río de la Plata, 1772–1812: Trans-Imperial Networks and Atlantic Warfare’, Colonial Latin American Review 20.1 (2011), 95.

      7.M Reidy, ‘The Admission of Slaves and “Prize Slaves” into the Cape Colony, 1797–1818’, MA thesis, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, 1997, 5–6; R Ross, ‘Last Years of the Slave Trade to the Cape Colony’, Slavery and Abolition 9.3 (1988), 215.

      8.P Harries, ‘Negotiating Abolition: Cape Town and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade’, Slavery and Abolition 34.4 (2013), 579–597.

      9.Cape Archives (CA), Government House (GH) 1/3: Castlereagh to Caledon, 11 April 1808 in GM Theal (ed.), Records of the Cape Colony (RCC) XV (London: Govt of the Cape Colony, 1897), 228–229.

      10.The National Archive, London (TNA), Colonial Office (CO) 48/64, Returns of Apprenticed Negroes 1824.

      11.H Raikes, Memoir of the Life and Services of Vice-Admiral Sir Jahleel Brenton (London: Hatchard and Son, 1846), 437.

      12.TNA, Admiralty 7/5, Brenton papers, undated note starting ‘Professional man ...’.

      13.TNA, CO 48/34, F Shortt and J Callander