Nigel Worden

Contested heritage at the Cape Town Waterfront.

Abstract Cape Towns Victoria and Alfred Waterfront is a prime example of the international trend of revitalising economically defunct harbour areas for tourism and retail usage. This paper examines the various contested images of heritage evoked at the site during the period of South Africas political transformation in the early 1990s:‐ a nostalgic perception of a harmonious past (by middle‐class Capetonians) versus a place of privilege and exclusion (by predominantly black working‐class inhabitants); academic concerns to commemorate the social history of the area versus commercial sensitivity to current marketing image; and the multiplicity of images in a postmodern space of spectacle and pastiche.

THE CHANGING POLITICS OF SLAVE HERITAGE IN THE WESTERN CAPE, SOUTH AFRICA

Changes that have taken place in the ways in which the slave past has been remembered and commemorated in the Western Cape region of South Africa provide insight into the politics of identity in this locality. During most of the twentieth century, public awareness of slave heritage was well buried, but the ending of apartheid provided a new impetus to acknowledge and memorialize the slave past. This engagement in public history has been a vexed process, reflecting contested concepts of knowledge and the use of heritage as both a resource and a weapon in contemporary South African identity struggles.

New Approaches to VOC History in South Africa

This special feature of eight articles represents a new wave of writing about the history of the Cape under Dutch East India Company (VOC) rule. This period lasted for almost 150 years (1652-1795), but it has hitherto remained something of a Cinderella in recent South African historiography, paling in comparison with the rich writing on early settler societies in North and Latin America and Australia.

Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town, 1695–1807

The most immediate and visible connection of early colonial Cape Town to the Indian Ocean world lay in its sizeable slave population. This article will examine new data from household inventories to enumerate in more precise ways than has previously been possible the Indian Ocean origins of slaves imported into the town in the 18th and early 19th centuries. In particular, it identifies the importance of south Asian sources in the earlier parts of the 18th century and the shift to the African coast in the later 18th and 19th centuries. Both of these regions are neglected in current academic and popular perceptions of the origins of slaves in the city. Comparisons will be made throughout with slavery in other colonial Indian Ocean port cities of the period.

‘Below the Line the Devil Reigns’: Death and Dissent aboard a VOC Vessel

ABSTRACT In 1732, the VOC vessel Loenderveen limped into Saldanha Bay after months at sea on a disastrous voyage from the Netherlands. Mortality levels had been abnormally high, and bitter dissent had broken out between different factions of the officers with both sides appealing to the diverse mixture of soldiers and sailors on board. A full mutiny was only averted by arrival at the Cape, and the ringleaders were arraigned before the Council of Justice. The resulting evidence provides an insight into the operation of power and hierarchy aboard a VOC vessel. The paper will consider issues such as the mobilization of ethnic loyalties, the tensions between sailors and soldiers, masculinity, honour and blasphemy, and the ways in which cultural symbols and rituals were appropriated into the conflict. All of this is set against the background of the dead and dying, and the fears of new VOC recruits in a pre-Enlightenment era of unknown worlds beyond ‘the line’.

Strangers ashore: Sailor identity and social conflict in mid-18th Century Cape Town

Worden’s chapter examines the experience of sailors on shore in eighteenth-century Cape Town. Sailors in the Dutch East India Company (VOC) had a strong sense of collective identity, reinforced by the coastal regions of Europe from which they were recruited and their living and working conditions on board ship. On land they were a minority and as temporary visitors they were distinct from the soldiers, slaves and settlers of Cape Town with whom they frequently came into conflict. Worden analyses the nature of these conflicts and the distinct social and cultural identities of sailors that they can reveal.

After Race and Class: Recent Trends in the Historiography of Early Colonial Cape Society

ABSTRACT This article reviews the recent upsurge of writing on the history of the early colonial Cape Colony from the VOC period to the early nineteenth century. It responds to important questions raised by Nicole Ulrichs review article of Contingent Lives in this issue. In particular it considers what is gained and what can be lost in the recent shift from class-based analyses characteristic of late twentieth-century revisionist South African historiography to research more influenced by the ‘cultural turn’, transnational and microhistorical approaches.

Missing Heads, Public History in South Africa

On the night when Nelson Mandela made his acceptance speech as victor of South Africas first democratic election, he paid tribute to ‘some of South Africas great leaders including John Dube, Josiah Gumede, Moorooghia Naidoo, Dr Abdurahman, Chief Luthuli, Lilian Ngoyi, Bram Fisher, Helen Joseph, Yusuf Dadoo, Moses Kotane, Chris Hani and Oliver Tambo. They should have been here to celebrate with us, for this is their achievement too’.

Brazilian Slavery: A Survey From the Cape of Recent Literature in English

This article surveys some of the rich historical writing on slavery in Brazil which has appeared in English over the past twenty years. This work has made important modifications to the notion that Brazilian slavery was part of a benign seigneurial society, markedly different from that of other New World colonies. By selecting five themes ‐ the transition from indigenous Indian to imported African slavery; slavery and rural production; slaves on the mines and in the towns; treatment of slaves; and the causes of emancipation ‐ the article draws attention to features of comparative interest to slavery elsewhere and particularly to that at the Cape.

The Environment and Slave Resistance in the Cape Colony

This chapter explores the ways in which the physical environment of the Cape Colony provided opportunities for individual or small-scale group desertion by slaves during the heyday of Dutch colonial rule in the eighteenth century. In so doing, it identifies a slave geography, that is, a landscape perceived and used by slaves in ways different from those of their owners. However, the slave uprising in 1808 and the forms of slave resistance in the subsequent decades marked the attempted conquest of those parts of the Cape’s environment hitherto dominated by the slave owners rather than an escape from it. The environment itself did not change, but the ways in which slaves used and perceived it did.