14 - Liberated Africans at the Cape: Some Reconsiderations

Summary

Who is the Prize Negro? He is a person who was violently seized by pirates and robbers in his native country, torn from his home, his family, and relations, and stowed away in irons, or in a cask in the hold of a slave ship, brought to the Cape, and bound to serve fourteen years without wages, in a strange country, among people of a strange language, professing an unknown relation, exhibiting customs and matters which to him are utterly unintelligible. At the end of this strange process he is told he is free. Free to do what? He has no pride of nation or tribe—no parents or relatives to influence his feelings, on whom his good or bad conduct can have any effect—he has no family, or in all probability his wife and children are the bond slaves and private property of another. No pains have been taken to throw the golden net of religious or moral restrictions over his appetites.

—John Fairbairn, in South African Commercial Advertiser, 2 March 1831

In the 1970s, there was no significant writing on those who were usually called “prize negroes” in the early nineteenth-century Cape Colony and occasionally known as “liberated Africans.” I stumbled across the topic while teaching African history at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and learning of liberated Africans in Sierra Leone, and because of my interest in the late 1970s in the history of black Africans in the western Cape, arising from a wish to challenge the apartheid policies of the time that sought to exclude such Africans from the western Cape. After exploring the Cape Archives for material on liberated Africans, I began publishing a series of articles on the topic in 1983. But it was only one of my historical interests in what was, for anyone then living in South Africa, a particularly traumatic decade. In the early 1900s, as South Africa went through its transition to democracy, I abandoned any further research on liberated Africans, moving instead to aspects of the transition from apartheid to democracy in southern Africa. But I kept a “watching brief “ on liberated Africans at the Cape, and I am glad to have the opportunity here to review what has been written on liberated Africans at the Cape since my original articles.