Review: Vivien Horler

The Truth about Cape Slavery – The foundations of colonial South Africa, by Patric Tariq Mellet (Tafelberg)

In 1808 an enslaved man, Louis van Mauritius, led an armed uprising of 346 fellow enslaved and Khoe farm labourers from the Malmesbury, Swartland and Durbanville districts.

It took them three days to get to Cape Town, where they planned to take over the Castle, then the seat of government. This did not turn out well.

The governor of the Cape at the time, Lord Caledon, sent a regiment of Dragoons to meet the attackers as they crossed the Salt River estuary.

In what Patric Tariq Mellet calls the largest treason trial in SA history, 52 leaders were put in the dock, while 292 others were tried separately. A total of 16 were put to death and others were sent to Robben Island for life.

This was known as the Jij Rebellion, because white slave owners considered it insolent if their “property” addressed them as jij and sij.

Mellet quotes a speech by one of the leaders, Abraham van der Kaap, made on the eve of the rebellion and reported in the subsequent trial: “Tomorrow when we have won the good fight and raised the bloody flag over the Castle, you will be able to address your masters as Jij and Sij.”

Apart from this interesting fact, Mellet quotes another in relation to this trial: during the Treason Trial of 1956 to 1961, when Nelson Mandela and 155 others were accused in the country’s second largest treason trial, 10 of those accused were descendants of members of the Jij Rebellion.

Mellet, also the author of The Lie of 1652, has written a long and somewhat academic introduction, part of which I skipped. But I became fascinated when I got to the meat of the book, because it turns out there is a great deal about slavery at the Cape of which I had no clue.

Mellet says the general world narrative of the slave trade refers to that which took place between Africa, the Americas and Europe across the Atlantic, while the Indian Ocean slave trade – perpetrated by the Portuguese, Dutch, French and British – is largely ignored. But, he says, “it was Europe’s eastern forays that provided the capital that kick-started the growth of the Atlantic slave trade”.

The number of countries from which captives were brought as enslaved – he eschews the term slaves throughout – to the Cape include Benin, Angola, Madagascar, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mauritius, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and even Japan.

The East African and Great Lakes countries saw the enslaved exported to Mozambique Island and then on to the Cape, where they were known as Masbiekers.

One group of Masbiekers was known as the Masbiekers of Clifton, after 300 survivors of a shipwreck just off Masbieker (Clifton) Beach in 1794 were sold on the beach. Mellet says many Masbiekers were later part of the Jij Rebellion.

Ghoema music was originally brought to the Cape by the Masbiekers. “Across southern Africa, the common faith is the Ngoma faith. The way of the Ngoma translates as the ‘the Way of the Drum’

“The direct translation of Ngoma is ‘drum’ and in Cape Town the word was creolised to become ‘Ghoema’.”

Mellet says 62% of all first-generation enslaved brought to the Cape were Africans. DNA readings show that 20% to 36% of today’s coloured people, whom Mellet refers to as Camissa Africans, were from sub-Saharan Africa.

He adds: “These roots are often denied by descendants who prefer to emphasise the Asian or Khoe roots that they also share.”

The general narrative of slavery at the Cape, much of which comes from descendants of slave owners (ie whites), is that they were treated relatively benignly, which anyone who read historian Jackie Loos’s weekly column in the Cape Argus will know is not true. But the horrors she reported are nothing as to some contained in this book.

Slavery was finally abolished in British territories in 1834, but slaves had to work for their former owners as “apprentices” for another four years before obtaining their freedom. Some were helped to make new lives by their former owners, others were turned off properties, where they may have worked for generations, with nothing.

In many cases outraged farmers left the Cape before 1838 on the Great Trek, taking their slaves with them. Their workers thus lost the opportunity of freedom.

By 1838 there were about 37 400 enslaved at the Cape, based on the figures of owners who applied for compensation. The compensation of course went to the owners, and not to the enslaved who had been forced to give generations of service for no remuneration.

Mellet points out “apartheid did not simply fall out of the sky in 1948. At that time apartheid as a political institution was the result of building on 300 years of colonialism, which was founded on slavery and the indentured labour and migrant labour systems that succeeded the slavery order.

“The relationshiop of racism to slavery is absolute. Racism developed out of the dehumanising and controlling system of treating human beings as chattel, to be bought sold, used, abused, disposed of and even killed…”

Pernicious aspects of apartheid go back a very long time: Jan van Riebeeck ordered that daily rations of alcohol and tobacco be given to the enslaved, including children, to pacify them. This practice, Mellet says, left a legacy of alcoholism and foetal alcohol syndrome “that is rife in descendant communities today”.

He believes the worst legacies of slavery, affecting today’s descendants, include mass homelessness, widespread substance abuse, lack of education and training, widespread formation of criminal gangs and an inadequate social service and health care system.

And he believes that restitution, reparation and restorative justice are the responsibility of the descendants of slave owners in SA; the Netherlands and its corporate sector rooted in the old Dutch East India Company; the British government and its corporate sector rooted in the English East India Company; and the SA government “as the successor of the various governance authorities from 1652 until the present”.

The chances of an ANC government stepping up to the plate on this one seem remote. Mellet says this government views our slavery history as “a  Western Cape and ‘coloured’ thing”.

Maybe, at the very least, we should familiarise ourselves with this terrible history.

“This is why restorative memory projects such as this book are important, because the restorative narrative is vital to crafting restorative justice. One cannot apologise for the slavery system and then say that you do not know exactly what you are apologising for.”

Mellet has done a vast amount of research in writing this book – the bibliography alone runs to nearly eight pages.

I found The Truth About Cape Slavery to be deeply sobering, informative and enormously interesting, shining a light on a part of our history I suspect many of us know little about.