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CHAPTER 2

Slavery, Indenture and Migrant Labour: Maritime Immigration from Mozambique to the Cape, c.1780–1880

Patrick Harries

Mozambique has been a major site for the export of labour to South Africa for close to 250 years. The development of a vast system of migrant labour to the diamond and gold mines has dominated this story.¹ What is less well known is the history of Mozambique as an exporter of labour to the south-western tip of Africa where the importation of slaves and other forced immigrants transitioned, with little interruption, to the importation of migrant workers. This chapter focuses on the exportation of labour from Mozambique over a century, starting around 1770, and draws attention to the hesitant transition in labour relations at the Cape as they shifted from slavery to indenture and, finally, to contracted labour migration. It outlines the extreme violence needed to establish a labour force and notes that, as in other parts of the world, the end of slavery created the need for imported, foreign labour held under strict indenture.² The final part of the chapter examines how the coercive nature of this inheritance came to underlay the system of migrant labour.

The chapter starts by examining the growth of the trade in slaves from Mozambique to the Cape at the end of the eighteenth century. It argues that at this early stage the Portuguese colony began to depend for its revenues on the export of human capital. The sale of the colony’s major means of production fatally undermined its ability to attract immigrants and investment, as had Brazil or the Cape Colony, and institutionalised a dependence on the export of labour. Chattel slaves dominated the early years of this trade, but with the implementation of abolition at the Cape in 1808, two new waves of forced immigrants moved from Mozambique to the British colony where they acquired limited rights as freed or ‘apprenticed’ slaves. Like the slaves, they initially came from northern Mozambique, the areas north of Cape Delgado and Madagascar. But as Mozambique opened to trade with Brazil, forced immigrants arrived at the Cape in greater numbers from Quelimane, as well as from Inhambane and Delagoa Bay. During the 1850s, the commerce in slaves across the Atlantic declined sharply and the East African slave trade turned northwards. The role of the Cape as a site for the freeing of slaves ended in the mid-1860s only to be replaced, ten years later, by its new function as an importer of migrant labourer. The final part of this chapter examines the thin line between the expatriation of slaves, a system long present in southern Mozambique, and the new, state-controlled form of labour exportation represented by migrant labour. Although the colonial administration at the Cape brought new freedoms to the labour market in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the colony continued to depend on the labour of forced immigrants from Mozambique. Underlying the transition from slavery and indentured labour to a system of migrant labour was the historical dependence of the Portuguese administration on the revenues drawn from the export of labour. Indigenous systems of slavery in Mozambique also supported this transition by providing both slave traders and government recruiters with workers who had little or no say over how and to whom they were engaged. As elsewhere in the world, these factors infused migrant labour with a weighty heritage that retarded and restricted the emergence of a free labour system.³

The slave trade

The number of African slaves arriving at the Cape grew markedly during the last quarter of the eighteenth century when the Dutch East India Company (VOC) turned away from its traditional sources of slave labour in South Asia and Indonesia and, instead, looked for supplies to the south-west Indian Ocean. Settlements and islands along the East African coast, from Kilwa to Mozambique, became important exporters of slaves in the 1770s as the French developed tropical plantations on the Mascarenes. But they also discovered that slaves could be taken around the Cape and sold at great profit in the Caribbean at their colony of St Domingue (modern-day Haiti). In 1789 French traders took some 9 000 slaves from the island capital of Mozambique to St Domingue in about 30 slave ships, many of which stopped at the Cape.⁴ This new stream of slaves passing around the Cape offered colonists a fresh source of labour as captains found that, by disposing of weak and sickly slaves, they could rid their cargoes of those elements least likely to survive the long and gruelling Middle Passage to the Americas.⁵ But this source of forced immigration to the Cape came to an end following the slave uprising in St Domingue in 1791 and the outbreak of war with Britain two years later.

After the British had seized the Cape, they prohibited French ships from anchoring in Table Bay and started to hunt down French and allied vessels. Captured as ‘prizes of war’, these vessels often contained slaves being shipped to, or between, the French islands. As the British closed their grip on Mauritius and Réunion, French slavers sold their ships to a small group of merchants operating from Mozambique Island. Being Portuguese citizens, these merchants could travel safely around the Cape, sell slaves at the British port or use it as a refreshment station on the way to Rio de la Plata and Brazil.⁶ Mozambique experienced a period of economic growth as the slave trade expanded and traders invested their profits in the prazo estates along the Zambezi River, in the small town on Mozambique Island and, soon, in the construction of a handful of ocean-going slave ships.

During the Batavian occupation of the Cape (1803–1806) and the first months of Britain’s reoccupation of the region, Mozambican traders landed more than 7 200 slaves at Cape Town.⁷ This trade ended with the Act of Abolition implemented at the Cape on 1 March 1808, but it did little to stop the burgeoning trade in slaves from Mozambique to Brazil. Although the new Act prohibited naval officers from selling captured slaves, it offered them considerable fixed sums for each slave captured as a prize of war and British warships continued to bring in captured human cargoes. These forced immigrants alleviated the shortage of labour at the Cape and joined others, freed from visiting slave ships, when their vessels were wrecked or condemned for contravening aspects of colonial law.⁸ At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British entered into a series of international treaties aimed at the eventual abolition of the slave trade. But these treaties largely concentrated on suppressing the slave trade north of the equator and made no attempt to restrict Portugal’s massive transfer of labour from Mozambique and Angola to Brazil.

Labour at the Cape

The British authorities placed slaves freed at the Cape under 14-year apprenticeships. This was an adaptation of the system of apprenticeship at home that released parishes from having to provide for indigent youths and, instead, placed them in the hands of a master for training in a useful craft. The Act of Abolition stipulated that slaves freed in British ports should be apprenticed in this manner to the navy, army or colonial government; those superfluous to the needs of these institutions could then be apprenticed to private masters. In return for this free labour, masters were required to introduce apprentices to Christian teaching and to the skills needed to prevent them from becoming charges of the state at the end of their indentures. The slaves fell under the protection of the Controller of Customs who had to ascertain whether they were married, ensure that parents were not separated from their children and, in general, safeguard their interests.⁹ The apprenticeship system had the advantage of introducing a degree of flexibility into the labour market just as the Caledon or ‘Hottentot’ Code of 1809 subjected the indigenous Khoi to a pass system, severely controlling their movements. It also gave the colonial administration the power to distribute labour to recently arrived British immigrants in ways that gave them a foothold in the local economy. Moreover, apprenticeship generated the first extensive register of labour in the history of the colony. This provided the government with a blueprint of how to deal with and better control the workforce and deeply inserted the concerns of state into the field of labour relations.¹⁰

At the Cape this system suffered from an inherent fault when slave-owners took on the responsibility for feeding, lodging and protecting freed slaves and for providing them with a modicum of training. Although many masters failed to provide their apprentices with formal skills, many prize slaves did become cooks, cleaners, grooms, household servants, porters or washerwomen. Masters frequently hired out prize apprentices for periods of time ranging from a day to a few months. This was an established and popular way for colonists to reap a quick financial return on the capital invested in one or two slaves and it became a major means of rendering more flexible a labour market bound by the pass controls of the Caledon Code.

Figure 2.1

The naval base served as the headquarters of the anti-slavery squadron. Drawing by Sir Jahleel Brenton, head of the dockyard and defender of the interests of Prize Negroes.

Sir Jahleel Brenton

Simonstown 1815

Simon’s Town Museum, courtesy Richard Brenton Sinker

The rights of apprenticed slaves became an important topic during the early years of the second British occupation. Sir Jahleel Brenton, the much-decorated head of the Simon’s Town dockyard from 1815 to 1821, loudly championed the rights of Prize Negroes. He noted that masters had little reason to show any consideration for Prize Negroes, as their responsibility for these apprentices came to an end with the termination of their contracts.¹¹ However Brenton also recognised that prize apprentices had inalienable rights under legislation as they could not be sold, inherited or transferred to another colony, were to receive a training in a marketable skill and were to be held in service for a maximum of 14 years. Yet, while he pressed for the early liberation of those apprentices who could support themselves through the sale of acquired skills, Brenton recognised the larger problem: freedom would merely reduce them to ‘the position of Hottentots’.

While his friend John Phillip fought to undo the serf-like condition of the Khoi under the Caledon Code, Brenton lobbied hard to ameliorate the situation of apprentice slaves at the Cape and achieved some notable successes in this regard at Simon’s Town.¹² In the meantime, as the first, short apprenticeships came to an end in 1816, several prize slaves opposed the renewal of their indentures. This happened just as slaves were enabled to take charges of mistreatment before a Protector of Slaves and a year after Khoi labourers had for the first time laid charges against their masters before the new circuit court. It was perhaps this new concern with legal rights that led several Prize Negroes to seek release from their status as apprentices or to claim that they had been illegally enslaved.¹³

Although this and other early attempts to bring the rights of prize apprentices to the notice of the courts proved unsuccessful, the complaints helped stir a wind of dissent that rose again in 1822–1823. This occurred as the first 14-year apprenticeships expired and government legislation suddenly entitled both slaves and prize apprentices to claim better treatment from their masters. This legislation regulated the conditions under which Prize Negroes laboured, established clear rights to food, clothing and small payments and limited punishments for misdemeanours. It obliged masters to provide their apprentices with a rudimentary education and training and threatened them with heavy fines for selling their apprentices into slavery.¹⁴ Opponents of Lord Charles Somerset turned their criticism of government around these broad questions of freedom and particularly succeeded in bringing before the colonial court the corrupt ways in which government officials dealt with prize slaves.¹⁵ In the meantime, Brenton’s reports to parliament helped bring to the Cape a commission of inquiry in March 1823, which gathered evidence from masters and apprentices and that showed freed slaves had seldom benefited from any form of tutelage. The difficulties associated with freeing forced immigrants in a colony still practising slavery were compounded by the venality of an administration only too willing to benefit from a trade in these individuals and their labour.¹⁶

In London, parliament responded to the demands of the abolitionists by passing the Slave Trade Consolidation Act of 1824 that, finally, prohibited slavers from stopping at the Cape and, in a separate clause, reduced the period of apprenticeship for prize slaves to the seven years found in Exodus 21:2.¹⁷ Ordinance 49 of 1828 prepared the way for a liberalisation of the labour market when it empowered immigrants to cross the frontier in search of work, with the provision that they carry passes. Ordinance 50 of the same year then freed both Khoi and prize slaves from the restrictions of the Caledon Code.

Figure 2.2

Southern Mozambique was an active site for the slave trade in the first half of the nineteenth century. The body marks on this Brazilian slave indicate that he came from southern Mozambique. The people called Knopneuse (Knobnoses) by the Boers, and ‘Inhambanes’ by the slave traders, could be found in the Mascarene islands, in Brazil, as well as at the Cape and Freetown.

Johan Moritz Rugendas

Voyages pittoresque dans le Bresil 1835

Paris, Engelmann

While the humanitarian lobby won these limited advances at home and in the empire, it made no attempt to curb the growing slave trade from East Africa. Northern and central Mozambique initially dominated this commerce with the Mascarenes and Americas. During this time, southern Mozambique was on the edge of the slave trade as forced emigrants from Inhambane and Lourenço Marques had to pass through the customs office at Mozambique Island. This increased the periods of time they spent in ships’ holds and increased their propensity to die during the long Middle Passage to the Americas. But as the profitability of the slave trade grew in the early nineteenth century, these ports on the edge of empire started to export slaves independently of the tax authorities at the island capital. As elsewhere in Mozambique, slave traders fastened onto indigenous social practices in their attempt to acquire the merchandise of their trade. Indigenous people practised various forms of slavery in the region south of the Save River, from debt bondage to pawnship and domestic slavery. This produced a population that, uprooted and without rights, constituted the raw material of the slave trade.

Between 1804 and 1807, three slave vessels left Inhambane for the Cape where they sold their human cargoes. The implementation of abolition turned this trade in Inhambane slaves away from the Cape and directed it to Brazil. The slave trade in the region grew precipitously in the 1820s as Nguni warlords migrated northwards and devastated the coastal regions of southern Mozambique. These political upheavals produced perhaps as many as a thousand slaves for the sugar plantations of Mauritius and Réunion every year during the second half of the 1820s.¹⁸ Smaller numbers went to Brazil but, as that country prepared to end the slave trade, merchants sought to export as many slaves as possible. In 1829–1830, 12 large slave ships, each laden with an average of 555 slaves, left Lourenço Marques for Brazil. In the north, in 1830 alone, six slavers left Inhambane for Brazil with a total of 3 456 slaves.¹⁹

Figure 2.3

The woman on the right, described as ‘Koomassie a woman from the country of Lake Nyassa’, was in a party of slaves encountered by David Livingstone near where the Shire River enters Lake Nyassa. After walking to the coast, she was embarked on a dhow of 125 tons just north of Cape Delagado, along with close to 70 other slaves. Captured by HMS Lynx in October 1859, the dhow was destroyed and the crew taken to Zanzibar for adjudication. The warship then sailed for the Cape where the slaves were freed on 19 January 1860 and distributed as apprentices.

Thomas Baines

Walledi woman of Bakarri East Coast Africa; Koomassie, a woman from the country of Lake Nyassa 1859

Courtesy of Museum Africa, Johannesburg

Anti-slavery

During the 1820s British treaties with Portugal effectively protected the export of slaves from Mozambique and Angola on which Brazil depended for its economic growth.²⁰ It was only in the late 1830s that the British attempted to curb the slave trade from Mozambique by forcing Portugal’s hand. However the colonial administration in Mozambique refused to implement the abolition of the slave trade, decreed in Lisbon in 1836, and gave limited support to the Royal Navy’s attempt to suppress the trade through force of arms. Mozambique’s role in the commerce in human beings had grown phenomenally over the previous two decades and, now in the hands of expatriate Brazilians, had sapped the colony of its productive forces and rendered it highly unstable politically.²¹ Brazilian entrepreneurs paid a tax on every slave exported and supplied the colony with the bulk of its specie. Government officials depended on these traders to boost their meagre wages and soldiers looked to them for a regular income.²²

The renewed armed intervention of the Royal Navy started in 1839, a year after the final emancipation of slaves at the Cape. Over the next few years the British brought about 6 000 ‘captured Negroes’ to the colony where they entered into apprenticeships of only one to three years. For a few years in the early 1840s, this made Cape Town the primary location in Africa for the liberation of captured slaves. With Freetown momentarily transformed into a site of emigration taking workers to the plantations of the West Indies, freed slaves were directed to the Cape.²³ But the new, decisive policy aimed at suppressing the East African slave trade also contributed to a liberalisation of the labour market in the colony as, with apprenticeships limited to little more than one year, ‘captured Negroes’ were permitted to respond more freely to market demands.²⁴

A Master and Servant Act, passed in March 1841, promised to control this labour force by prosecuting workers for negligent work, desertion, disobedience or insolence. But despite this attempt to create a disciplined labour force capable of responding to the demands of the market, questions remained about the human costs involved in bringing these forced immigrants to the Cape. The sea journey of five weeks from Mozambique exhausted slaves already weakened by a long tramp to the coast and long periods confined in barracoons or ships’ holds. As large numbers of slaves died in ships making their way to the Cape as prizes of the Royal Navy, pressure mounted on the Admiralty to bring captured slavers before courts in Mauritius or the Seychelles.²⁵

This policy grew more strongly as the slave trade shifted northwards, following the final suppression of the trade to Brazil, and in response to a growing demand for slaves in the Comores, at Madagascar and Zanzibar. Slaves were also shipped to Réunion, mainly from central and northern Mozambique in the 1850s and 1860s as engagé or émigré labourers. In southern Mozambique, the slave trade declined sharply in the 1840s as the Gaza Nguni consolidated their empire and relied on domestic slaves to swell their numbers. Nevertheless, Inhambane was still visited by huge slave ships, such as the Rapid Emperatriz that, in 1851, left the port for Cuba with 1 000 slaves. Rapid, three-masted clippers, of which we have little precise detail, continued to take slaves illegally from Lourenço Marques and Inhambane until late in the decade.²⁶ As elsewhere in the colony, the Portuguese held slaves in the south where several thousand laboured at Inhambane and, to a lesser extent, at Lourenço Marques.²⁷ Portugal eventually emancipated these slaves in 1869, but subjected them to a period of unpaid apprenticeship (as libertos) that would only finally come to an end in 1878 with the passage of a new form of compulsory labour in the shape of an anti-vagrancy law.

The shipment to the Cape of forced immigrants from Mozambique finally ended in 1864.²⁸ But by this time the British had alternative landing sites for the landing of freed slaves. In 1873 the Royal Navy brought the first of about 600 Mozambican slaves to Durban where they laboured under five-year apprenticeships.²⁹ As the mineral revolution gathered strength and a tentacular new demand for labour spread throughout southern Africa, officials at the Cape made new requests for labour from Mozambique. With labourers leaving the farms to work at Kimberley or on the roads, railways and port facilities, the Cape looked north, yet again, to supply its labour market with a steady flow of workers from Mozambique.

Figure 2.4

Brand marks on slaves freed at the Cape Early 1840s

Reprinted by the Western Cape Archives and Records Service

Migrant labour

Communities on the coastal plain of southern Mozambique had a long history of moving in response to changing seasons and frequent, intemperate extremes in weather. Networks of information existed on the coast where men had worked with whalers and traders for several generations and had a taste for imported goods. News of work opportunities on the sugar plantations of Natal in the early 1860s drew men to make their way south across Zululand. But this route south, dangerous for individuals, was only made secure when the Natal government negotiated with the Zulu king in 1873 for recruiters to take workers through his kingdom. Some of these men deserted their employers in Natal and headed south through Pondoland in search of better conditions of work at the Cape.³⁰ In July 1876 administrators at the Cape attempted to control this movement of labour by establishing a maritime immigration scheme with the Portuguese. Modelled on a plan recently inaugurated by the Natal government, this scheme required the Cape’s agent at Lourenço Marques to make a 15s payment for the passport of every emigrant prepared to accept a two-year work contract. About 700 workers made their way from Lourenço Marques to Cape Town on mail steamers at this time, several independently of the government scheme.

The attempt to renew the shipping of labour from Mozambique to the Cape proved short-lived, largely because it required a greasing of the palms of the Portuguese officials and an increase in the passport fee to 26s6d (half of which reputedly went to the governor of Lourenço Marques).³¹ With recruiting fees and the charge of a berth in steerage on a mail steamship, it cost an average of £7 to bring one man from Delagoa Bay to Cape Town. At the Cape, employers and the government shared the payment of this amount and guaranteed emigrants a return voyage home. This investment was lost when workers imported under the scheme deserted. Another cause of the scheme’s hasty demise was the moral repugnance with which many viewed the importation of labour from ports in which elements of slavery were still to be found.

A new generation of British abolitionists, dedicated to eradicating slavery throughout the world, wrote to the Colonial Office about their opposition to the maritime labour emigration scheme. Officials in Whitehall also found this way of acquiring labour in an area with a long slave history to be morally dubious.³² These objections continued after the start of the scheme when the colonial secretary in Natal saw the shipping of labour from Lourenço Marques to Durban as ‘a very questionable mode of supplying the labour market’. Part of the cost of embarking workers at Lourenço Marques, he had heard, came from having to ‘guard, superintend ... and prevent [them from] running away’.³³ It was whispered that free men had been press-ganged in the interior and registered as libertos at Lourenço Marques and that libertos had been shipped to the Cape, via Lourenço Marques, from ports such as Quelimane.³⁴ This perhaps explains the handful of ‘Makuas’ from northern Mozambique included in the early register of workers drawn up at the Cape. But the most stinging critique of all came from the French who, only a little over a decade earlier, had borne a wave of criticism from British abolitionists for their own émigré scheme. In 1877 the leading French abolitionist, Victor Schoelcher, called the shipping of labour from Lourenço Marques to Natal and the Cape, and the freeing of slaves at Durban, ‘a disguised restoration of the murderous slave trade’.³⁵

The number of men shipped to the Cape declined sharply in 1878 as the status of liberto came to an end and employers in the British colony turned to labour drawn from the Transkei. But as the economy expanded, the demand for labour rose once again and, after the resuscitation of the scheme in November 1879, some 2 400 workers boarded ship for the Cape over the next 30 months. Men from the Delagoa Bay area were the first to respond to the call for labour, but from July 1880 recruiters sought out men from further north who were prepared to enter three-year contracts at considerably lower wages.

The old slave harbour of Inhambane replaced Lourenço Marques at this time as recruiters brought to the port men from the Gaza kingdom and Chopiland. As libertos made up a large part of the population of Inhambane, the Portuguese prohibited the export of labour from the port. But the town’s governor took no notice 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 to J Truter, 11 December 1816.

14.JE Mason, Social Death and Resurrection: Slavery and Emancipation in South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), Chapters 2 and 3.

15.HC Botha, John Fairburn in South Africa (Cape Town: Historical Publication Society, 1984), 20–23; JR Wahl (ed.), Thomas Pringle in South Africa 1820–1826 (Cape Town: Longman Southern Africa, 1970), Chapter 5.

16.Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry to Earl Bathurst upon the complaints of Mr Lancelot Cooke, 22 July 1825 in RCC XXII, ed. Theal, 40, 211–213; New Monthly Magazine, July 1827, 211–212; Z Laidlaw, ‘Investigating Empire: Humanitarians, Reform and the Commission of Eastern Inquiry’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40.5 (2012), 759.

17.Exodus 21:2 (King James): ‘If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing.’

18.P Machado, ‘A Forgotten Corner of the Indian Ocean: Gujerati Merchants, Portuguese India and the Mozambique Slave Trade, 1730–1830’, Slavery and Abolition 24.2 (2003), 25; P Harries, ‘Slavery, Social Incorporation, and Surplus Extraction: The Nature of Free and Unfree Labor in South-East Africa’, Journal of African History 22 (1981), 314–316.

19.Slave Trade Data Base, www.slavevoyages.org.

20.Harries, ‘Negotiating Abolition’, 581–582.

21.R Pélissier, Naissance du Mozambique: Résistance et Révoltes Anticoloniales (1854–1918) (Orgeval: Éditions Pélissier, 1984), vol 1, 35, 85–86.

22.J Capela, ‘Mozambique and Brazil: Cultural and Political Interferences through the Slave Trade’, in Africa and America: Interconnections During the Slave Trade, ed. J Curto and R Soulodre-La France (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2005), 243–258.

23.P Harries, ‘The Hobgoblins of the Middle Passage: The Cape and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade’, in The End of Slavery in Africa and the Americas: A Comparative Approach, ed. U Schmieder, K Füllberg-Stolberg and M Zeuske (Berlin: LIT, 2011), 27–50; M Schuler, ‘Alas, Alas, Kongo’: A Social History of Indentured African Immigration into Jamaica, 1841–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); ME Thomas, Jamaica and Voluntary Laborers from Africa 1840–1865 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1974).

24.Proclamation of 13 December 1839 in Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 3 January 1840; CC Saunders, ‘Liberated Africans in Cape Colony in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 18.2 (1985), 235.

25.WL Mathieson, Great Britain and the Slave Trade, 1839–1865 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929), 47–48; H Temperley, British Antislavery 1833–1870 (London: Longman, 1972), Chapters 3 and 4; P Hill, Fifty Days on Board a Slave Vessel in the Mozambique Channel, April and May 1843 (London: John Murray, 1844).

26.TNA, Foreign Office (FO) 312/17, Cape Town mixed commission judges to Earl Russel, 15 May, 18 and 20 September 1862; L McLeod, Travels in Eastern Africa (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1860), vol 1, 117, 188–189, 194–200, 252, 331–332.

27. Boletim Oficial de Moçambique 23 (7 June 1862) and 44 (5 December 1862).

28.House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 1865 (3503), correspondence with British Commissioners at the Cape of Good Hope, 1864, 70.

29.Natal Government Notice 177, 1873; NA (Natal Archives), Government House (GH) 59.9, Barkly to HM Consul, Zanzibar 9 July 1873 and consul to Barkly, 25 August 1873 in Kimberley to Pine, 26 January 1874. NA, Indian Immigration (II), 1/2. 3590/76, annotation of colonial secretary, 30 December 1876. On this ‘Zanzibari’ community at Durban, see P Kaarsholm, ‘“Diaspora or Transnational Citizens?” Indian Ocean Networks and Changing Multiculturalisms in South Africa’, Social Dynamics 38.2 (2012), 454–466.

30.NA, Secretary for Native Affairs (SNA) 1/1/27, Protector of Immigrants, ‘Memo’, 18 January 1876; Supt Police to SNA, 2 March 1876. See also NA.II 482/75; II 496/75.

31.NA II 1/3 R509/77, Bennet to Protector of Immigrants, 28 November 1877; George Stevens to the Cape of Good Hope Labour Commission 1893 (G.3993), 62.

32.NA GH 55, Joseph Sturge to Hubert, 23 April 1872 in Kimberley to Natal Governor, 4 May 1872; memorandum in Murdoch to Hubert, 4 May 1872.

33.NA GH 845, Colonial Secretary to Protector of Immigrants, 11 September 1878.

34.Portuguese Colonial Archives, Lisbon (AHU), Correspondence of the Mozambican Governor, pasta 32, Curadoria Geral dos Individuous sujeitos a tutella publica to Governor, 17 August, 1877; Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lisbon, English Legation in Portugal, RB Morier to Marquis de Avila, 13 March and 24 April 1877.

35.V Schloecher, Restauration de la Traite des Noirs à Natal (Paris: Brière, 1877), 3.

36.P Harries, ‘Mozbiekers: The History of an African Immigrant Community in the Western Cape: 1877–1881’, in Collected Seminar Papers, Cape Town History Workshop, University of Cape Town, 1979.

37.Harries, ‘Slavery, Social Incorporation’, 324–325.

38.NA II 1/5 502/79, Assistant Protector of Immigrants to Colonial Secretary, 28 May 1879, annotation of attorney general, 29 May 1879.

39.George Stevens and ML Neethling to the Cape of Good Hope Labour Commission 1893 (G.3993), 61–62.

40.P Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2007), 165–166.

41.Swiss Mission Archives, Lausanne 497/E, P Berthoud to Leresche, 11 October 1888; 513/A, Grandjean to Leresche, 21 August 1893.

42.On Mashaba, see Harries, Butterflies, 90, 171–172, 187–188, 263–264. On Mizeki, see D Ferrant, Mashonaland Martyr: Bernard Mizeki and the Pioneer Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 50–53, 63; GWH Knight-Bruce, Memories of Mashonaland (London: Edward Arnold, 1895), 90–91, 170–171; T Ranger, ‘Taking Hold of the Land: Holy Places and Pilgrimages in Twentieth-Century Zimbabwe’, Past and Present 117 (1987), 167, 177, 187–193.

43.H St George, ‘A Lay Apostle of the Nineteenth Century: Saturnino do Valle; Pioneer of Zulu Catholicism’, Études Oblates 25 (1966), 135–152.