More than 170 years after emancipation, the legacy of slavery takes on a new significance in South Africa.

Hovering somewhere between lighting his cigarette and relating an inherited nightmare that he is trying to turn into a dream of redemption, Peter Voges is certain about only one thing: collective amnesia.
Hovering is something he is used to. Born to a father who passed the South African apartheid government’s pencil test (which classified race on the degree to which the pencil stuck in one’s hair) and a mother who didn’t, the award-winning director of the Western Cape Theatre was brought up to believe he was impure.
“My mother told me so at a very young age,” says the retired drama lecturer who was instrumental in organizing a symbolic funeral service for Cape slaves buried anonymously in De Waterkant and Green Point between 1658 and 1838, just a week before a new batch of bones were discovered in Chiappini Street.
A prelude to a series of plays he hopes to stage soon, the Freedom Day ceremony was “emotional to say the least”, says Voges, who, like many citizens classified ‘coloured” or “other than white (but not black)” by the pre-1994 dispensation, knew little more of his ancestry than that his father was of European origin and that his mother’s ancestors were “van de Kaap” (from the Cape).
But her surname “January” said enough – the slaves who began arriving by the boatload six years after the Dutch commander Jan van Riebeeck in 1652, were named by their owners, and often their month of purchase was the extent of imagination employed in the bestowal of the name.
For many, such an ostensible legacy of slave roots is the source of inferiority, but for Voges it was the beginning of a journey beyond the memory blank manifested by his own family.
“From 1658 to 1838 when the 34 000 slaves were emancipated, slaves were just non-human pieces of property who had no right to a burial.”
“Many slave descendants are still in denial,” believes Voges. “But when a white woman at the Grahamstown Festival asked me, ‘wie’s djy’(who are you?) a few years ago, mimicking our local Afrikaans dialect, she unwittingly sparked a chain of events that had been festering since childhood.”
He set about researching his family tree and discovered that his ancestral father was a German who arrived in the late 1700s and married a freed slave.
For Voges’s mother’s family, the introduction of apartheid was almost a formality – freed slaves were not given full citizenship rights unless they were mulatto or half-caste, and their status 40 years after emancipation was announced in 1834 (though they were still contracted for a four-year apprenticeship before being released) was still on the bottom rungs of the social and financial ladders.
Those who didn’t seek refuge in outlying mission stations generally eked out an existence by small-scale trades, most doing their utmost not to return to the easier, but less independent option of contracted labour.
‘What people forget is that discrimination goes back much further than 1948 when apartheid became official,” says Voges. “Ten years of democracy focuses on liberation from apartheid for ‘indigenous’ inhabitants, but it forgets the evils that went before, and the people that were caught in the middle of the experiment.”
Sparse records from the point of view of slaves are the biggest problem in reconstructing remnants of their past, but researchers like Jackie Loos are trying to make them more accessible.
Despite the promise of self-sustenance apparently afforded by emancipation (which many historians argue was an economic decision in the face of industrialization rather than a human one), “there had been no attempt to create a self-sustaining peasantry by distributing vacant crown land,” explains Loos in her recently released Echoes of Slavery, which relates the “slave experience” through previously untapped archival records.
“Even the most industrious ex-slaves were unable to accumulate sufficient land or capital to generate wealth, and they were denied access to international commerce.”
“Education was the key to advancement, but there were never enough places in the overcrowded mission schools, and standards of instruction were poor.”
For many, survival depended on sheer force of spirit.
Like Lydia Williams, the whip-scarred slave woman who inspired the script for Voges’s latest play that forms the core of a collective he dubs The Homecoming and who is the namesake of the affectionate term once used to describe Emancipation Day: Lydia Day.
To highlight the plight of slaves worldwide, the revamped Slave Lodge recently hosted a travelling Unesco exhibition entitled Lest We Forget.
Says Dr Gabema Abrahams-Braybrook, archaeologist at the lodge, Cape Town’s second oldest building, which researchers have nominated as a World Heritage Site. “We need to break the chains of silence and this research is a part of that.”
An therein, perhaps, lies a rub. Contradictions abound as to just how much can be unlocked when so few records are available.
South Africa was not mentioned in the exhibition because it addresses the Atlantic trade and exodus of African slaves to the west rather than the importation of slaves to Afruca from the east, but its mandate to rewrite history from a more representative point of view does bode well for the post-apartheid country, which knows a little of the forces that shaped over half the population at the Cape in its first 200 years.
Another sign that the blanket of racial prejudice is gradually lifting is the formation of the Transcription of Estate and Slave Papers at the Cape of Good Hope (TESPC Project) financed by the Dutch government.
Professor Rob Shell and his team of researchers have produced tow films, a book and a CD on the slave-owning era during which around 63 000 slaves were imported into South Africa between 1658 and 1807.
By 1707, more than half of the population at the Cape were slaves. By 1806 the Cape Town slave population, mainly from the east coast of Africa, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, India, the Malay Peninsula and Indonesian islands, comprised 9367 of a total of about 16 500. Unlike the Americas, the collection of slaves at the Cape was a mixed bag of nationalities, emphasized by the fact that they began to interbreed with the indigenous Khoi, who were officially employed, but treated like slaves, by European farmers in the 18th century.
Their diverse cultural origins and the fact that they were isolated from each other on farms meant that social cohesion, outside the city, was diminished – as was the ability to stage meaningful collective rebellion.
In addition, in the early years of settlement by the Dutch, European women were few and far between, and marriage “across the colour bar” was encouraged. Often a slave woman was emancipated by her suitor.
Her children were born out of bondage or later freed, but in 1685, following the observation by visitors to Cape Town that the Company Slave Lodge had become a debauched brothel for sailors and soldiers and that most slaves were “as fair as Europeans”, “marriages between whites and freed slaves were forbidden, although an exception was made for half-caste slaves”, says micro-historian Nigel Worden.
However, these restrictions had little practical impact: permanent sexual liaisons continued in Cape Town, and while they were less evident in rural areas, “farmers had the opportunity of casual and illicit sexual contact…and some masters encouraged the co-habitation of their slaves with other whites since the offspring would be the owner’s slaves”, explains Worden, who co-chairs the TESPC project with Dr Antonio Malan.
As early as the turn of the 18th century, racial prejudice was evident.
Although freed slaves (known as Free Blacks or vrijzwarten, who were only entitled to manumission if they were baptized as Christians and spoke Dutch) were theoretically entitled to the same privileges as European burghers, they faced increasing discrimination as the century wore on.
They were discouraged from attending the same churches as whites, were excluded from the burgher militia, and in 1765, restrictions were placed on their dress (to prevent competition with Europeans) and behaviour. Slaves had to walk, shoeless, in the middle of the road.
The seeds of a selective memory disease had clearly been sown: white was right and the not-quite-white sat tight, in the hope that their mixed origins would not be swept out from under the carpet.
Though Emancipation Day was celebrated for two generations, “in return (for emancipation), ex-slaves and their descendants were expected to be grateful and patriotic to Britain.”
This only entrenched unbalanced master-and-servant relations along the lines of the old Slave Code, says historian Vivian Bickford-Smith in Meanings of Freedom.
Subjective meanings of freedom were often concealed in ghoemaliedjies (“drum songs” that evolved over the years), which were parodies of Dutch folk songs or British anthems, sometimes with veiled threats to slave owners.
As early as the 1840s, squatter settlements inhabited by the newly free were destroyed and sold off to white farmers.
The introduction of apartheid, which many are wont to apply only to indigenous “blacks”, shifted the goalposts again, and the slave descendants who had managed to carve themselves self-sustaining niches were thrust into another muddy ravine.
It is a pathology – or defence mechanism – that endures today and another reason Voges hates being clumped as a Cape “coloured”, often perceived as a comical tourist attraction, and indicative only of a cosmetic rootless identity.
“Tweede Nuwe Jaar, Kaapse Klopse, the world-famous annual factory beauty pageant, the fruit and flower sellers with their bastardized patois…all are superficial manifestations of a deeper truth concealed by commercial make-up,” he says.
Tweede Nuwe Jaar – or Second New Year – replaces Slave Emancipation Day as an official holiday in the 1870s, and is still marked by the official Coon Carnival, but it is no longer a holiday and its significance had been largely forgotten. This year’s furore over its celebration adds poignance to the tale.
The number of minstrel troupes taking part in the bright street carnival doubled in 2004 – another indication that the blanket is lifting – but it was nearly shelved for lack of government funds.
Though some use the term “Coon” with a characteristic self-deprecatory humour honed over centuries, Alan Mountain in An Unsung Heritage alludes to the increasing sensitivity the term elicits: in future the event will be called the Cape Minstrels Carnival, to avoid racist overtones.
Despite these moves, the debate over the final resting place of 3000-odd slave skeletons found at an upmarket development site in Prestwich Street in 2003 still hangs in the balance. The serendipitous discovery of yet more bones in Chiappini Street at the end of April affirms the contention that much of the Mother City CBD is built on the bones of those who built it.
For Reverend Michael Weeder, chairperson of the Hands-Off Committee, who initially researched Lydia’s story, the erection of an appropriate memorial for those who were laid to rest in shallow sandy ground sans epitaph or tombstone is an essential bridge to the past.
The South African Heritage Resources Agency (Sahra) has ordered that the bones be stored in boxes at Somerset Hospital and remain closed. For Tim Hart, one of the University of Cape Town archaeologists involved in the excavation, this move has rendered the entire exhumation futile, as forensic examination would yield not only ages, diets and causes of death, but also possibly ethnic origin.
Jan Baartman’s perception, quoted by William Dicey in Borderline, explores the danger of losing this link between past and future. “The brown people are a people destroyed. They have lost the idea of doing anything for themselves. They have no history, no culture, no values, nothing.”
The implication of this statement is that cultural and personal identities were lost the day slaves were first imported, and what they have is a creolised mengelmoes that no longer serves a function. So what is this ‘slave culture’ that Voges hopes to keep alive?
He is hovering again because it defies definition, but for him it is a symbolic reminder that South Africa is a creolised society, that love is colour blind and that his heritage is something he needs to be proud of.
The complex origins of the slave rituals that are still practiced – the sopvleis, a Victorianesque square dance, the satirical puns of risqué songs deliberately worded to mislead, minstrel dress influenced by black American counterparts – though still not practiced in their entirety, are his world and their preservation provides a stepping stone between centuries.
Like millions, he didn’t get the once-perceived luck of the draw when it came to genetic copulation, but he is the product of a culture that is central to his identity. By implication, to have been a slave means that emancipation was necessary. Whether it came in mass manumission 170 years ago is open to conjecture. Slavery means oppression, and it is these – the chains of silence – that Voges feels it is his duty to break.

(Published in Sunday Life, The Independent, 15 May 2005. Copyright owned by the author.)