Slave holdings at the Cape gradually became more agriculturally based and more rural. There were three types of farms: market gardens, freehold plantations/farms and frontier ranches. The freehold farms were intensively cultivated, freehold, arable farms (5 to 200 morgen), with wine, wheat, rye, and barley as the predominant crops.
The data were harvested from Estate Inventories held at the Cape Town archives (Completed Volumes: 1760-1793, MOOC 8/10 to MOOC 8/20, MOOC 8/19,20; MOOC 18/30 to 18/31, 18/34; MOOC 8/49 to MOOC 8/51; and from Incomplete Volumes [prior to 1760]: 18/32 and 18/33 and all volumes prior to MOOC 8/10; as well as associated files. To search or browse the Freehold Farms click here.
Slave holdings at the Cape gradually became more agriculturally based and more rural. There were three types of farms: market gardens, plantations and frontier ranches. Each type of farm was characterized by its distance from the market, and since the market gardens surrounded and even penetrated the port, the agricultural sector cannot simply be equated with “rural.”
The Market Garden Holding
All the market gardens (which ranged from 0.1 to 5.0 morgen, or 11.25 acres), were near the port or inland villages, where the crops in greatest demand were green beans, peas, lemons, limes, and other varieties of fresh produce to feed the scurvy-ridden crews of the ships passing the Cape twice each year. Since these farms’ crops were never reported on the census, the identification of market gardens has gone virtually unnoticed by Cape historians.
Many of the prize market gardens were on the slopes of Table Mountain (on the outskirts of Cape Town), and a few well known market gardens, like Schotschekloof (the present day “Malay quarter”) and Tamboerskloof, were in Cape Town itself. The Lodge slaves were originally meant to tend the Company’s own urban market garden, but during the regime of Willem Adrian van der Stel (1699 to 1706) this walled area in the center of the city became an experimental farm and, finally, a botanical garden, which it remains today.
There were only eight market gardens during the first 75 years of this period, ranging in size from one-half acre to 12 acres; thereafter they proliferated. Although market gardens were small and few, farm for farm and acre for acre (representing only 2 percent of the original 440 freehold farms) market gardens employed many more slaves than other agricultural enterprises at the Cape. Slaves stationed on these market gardens had to do double duty as planters and sellers, and such farms generated a fortune. W. W. Bird described one in 1821:
LeeuwenhofCthe Lion’s denCis what in England would be called a good estate, yielding to its owner ample means of living like a gentleman. The rents arise from the daily sale of every description of fruit and vegetables to the population of Cape Town; this is done to a great extent by slave boys, who go with two large baskets twice a day, backwards and forwards, filled with whatever is seasonable, from the garden, and with eggs and milk from the farms. From some gardens five or six slaves are constantly so engaged, and at particular seasons, each will bring home twenty or thirty rixdollars a day.
More isolated rural farmers could supplement their labor force with occasional Khoi labor. Not so with the urban market gardeners who required steady year-round labor. Even “rural” Stellenbosch by 1820 was considered a center of market garden activity. Only in the areas immediately surrounding the towns did slave holding become virtually universal. The proliferation of market gardens was partly responsible for this particular distribution of slaves Market gardeners had both steady and seasonal consumer support, thanks to the thousands of scorbutic sailors and soldiers who passed through the port each summer, some on the way to the East, others returning from there. Market garden owners were jointly responsible for the purchase of 5 percent of the total domestic market of slaves, mostly men in their prime. The number of market farms increased dramatically during the latter half of eighteenth century in response to a boost of maritime traffic after 1770 (see Figure 2-2). While the male slaves around the port labored outside to produce and deliver vitamin C for the sick seafarers, the female slaves in the ubiquitous Cape Town boardinghouses ministered to the needs of the revitalized sailors and officers. Again, the result was to concentrate slaves in and around the port.
The Freehold Plantations:
The second type of farm was the intensively cultivated, freehold, arable farm (5 to200 morgen), with wine, wheat, rye, and barley the predominant crops. This farm type has been extensively analyzedby the Cape historians Nigel Worden, Mary Rayner, Pamela Scully, Robert Ross,and Peter van Duin.[1] Wine production, which only slowly developedan export base, enjoyed a spectacular boom in the 1820s that, according to MaryRayner, brought about a hyperexploitation of the slave workers in the ruralvineyards, and from Andrew Bank we can infer a relocation of many urban slavesto the wine-growing regions.[2] According to complaints from wine producersin this period, they were in a mood close to desperation, as no additionallabor could be found for these labor-consuming farms. Ordinance 50 (1828), which liberated the Khoifrom serfdom, also posed an additional labor crisis for the rural Cape farmer,who had barely recovered from the abolition of the oceanic slave trade.
Source: Children of Bondage by Robert C.H. Shell (1994 – 2001)
Example of Freehold Farms Database entry.
