Slavery in the Cape Colony, South Africa

Slavery was a key feature of the Cape Colony in South Africa from the establishment of the colony by the Dutch East India Company (DEIC) in the 1650s, throughout the period of DEIC and Dutch Batavian rule in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and under British rule until the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the 1830s. Until the abolition of the slave trade in 1808, slaves were imported from a wide range of areas in the Indian Ocean world, including India, Sri Lanka, maritime southeast Asia, Madagascar, and Mozambique. Children born to slave women in the Cape Colony were also slaves and this was the sole source after the abolition of the slave trade. Slaves played a major role in the economy and society of the Cape Colony and during the DEIC period there were as many, or more, slaves than settlers. Most lived in Cape Town or on the arable farms of the southwestern Cape, although slaves were also located in the pastoral northern and eastern districts of the colony. Only a few were manumitted before general emancipation in the 1830s. Slaves worked on settler farms alongside some of the Indigenous Khoesan inhabitants of the Cape. The slaves, Khoesan, and their descendants subsequently became the main laboring class of the colonial Cape region of South Africa and the legacy of their impoverishment remains to this day. Raiding for slaves also took place on the frontiers of the Dutch colony and examples of forced and captive labor existed in the interior regions of South Africa when these were occupied by settlers from the Cape in the 19th century.