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The Emancipation of the Enslaved in the Cape Colony: Historiography and Introduction

The First of December 1838 is one of the most significant dates in South African colonial history, marking as it does the final emancipation of the enslaved within the Cape Colony. Together with their fellows in Mauritius and the Caribbean, all the enslaved in the Cape Colony were manumitted in the course of 1834–35, even though they had to spend a period of four years as apprentices under, effectively, the same conditions as before. Emancipation had two major results. First, and most importantly, the legal basis of labour relations within the colony was fundamentally changed. This process should be seen in relation to the consequences of the promulgation of Ordinance 50 of 1828. This decreed that there was to be no legal discrimination on the basis of race. While it also applied to ‘Free Blacks’ and was exported to the Caribbean slave colonies on that basis, the prime beneficiaries of this measure, as was intended, were the Khoesan people of the colony. They had long been suffering under colonial conquest, which was particularly violent in the Cape Colony, and the subsequent legal code, which was intended to prevent the recurrence of the atrocities but had the practical effect of binding the Khoesan to their employers and reducing their bargaining power in the labour market to zero. Serious questions remain as to the real effects of the two emancipations as regards the living experience of the former enslaved. It should be pointed out here that the study of the effects of Ordinance 50 and of the emancipation of the Khoesan remains probably the greatest lacuna in the historiography of the Cape Colony. At the very least, it can be said that the control of the countryside by the pre-emancipation elite did not disappear, but how this was achieved and how successful it was still require major research. Secondly, the abolition of slavery led to the creation of several institutions of capitalism, notably the banks. The British parliament allocated £20 million as compensation for those