Patrick Harries

Mozambique Island, Cape Town and the Organisation of the Slave Trade in the South-West Indian Ocean, c.1797–1807

In the 1780s, French merchants developed a systemic trade in slaves to and around the Cape of Good Hope. But a decade later the trade passed into the hands of a cosmopolitan group of merchants at Mozambique. These men developed various strategies as a way of raising the funds needed to acquire, outfit and insure slave ships. They particularly built up trade links with agents and partners in several ports of the western Indian Ocean and the south Atlantic. This article concentrates on the organisation and operation of the slave trade at Mozambique Island in the decade around 1800. It is particularly concerned to examine the role in this trade on the part of merchants at the Cape, who serviced slave ships and bought their human merchandise, and who mounted their own expeditions in search of slaves. It ends by suggesting ways in which new directions in the trade, following its piecemeal abolition, and the growing dominance of Brazil, contributed to long-term developments in the region.

Middle passages of the Southwest Indian Ocean: a century of forced immigration from Africa to the Cape of Good Hope

Forced immigration from the Southwest Indian Ocean marked life at the Cape of Good Hope for over a century. Winds, currents, and shipping linked the two regions, as did a common international currency, and complementary seasons and crops. The Capes role as a refreshment station for French, Portuguese, American, and Spanish slave ships proved particularly important in the development of a commerce linking East Africa, Madagascar, and the Mascarenes with the Americas. This slave trade resulted in the landing at the Cape of perhaps as many as 40,000 forced immigrants from tropical Africa and Madagascar. Brought to the Cape as slaves, or freed slaves subjected to strict periods of apprenticeship, these individuals were marked by the experience of a brutal transhipment that bears comparison with the trans-Atlantic Middle Passage. The history of the Middle Passage occupies a central place in the study of slavery in the Americas and plays a vital role in the way many people today situate themselves socially and politically. Yet, for various reasons, this emotive subject is absent from historical discussions of life at the Cape. This article brings it into the history of slavery in the region. By focusing on the long history of this forced immigration, the article also serves to underline the importance of the Cape to the political and economic life of the Southwest Indian Ocean.

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

In the 1770s the Cape became an important destination for slaves from East Africa. This trade ended in 1808 with the implementation of the Act of Abolition but was quickly replaced by the importation of freed slaves seized from ships going to South America, who were subjected to 14-year apprenticeships. International treaties aimed at suppressing the slave trade brought an end to this forced immigration in 1818 but did little to curb the trans-Atlantic trade that soon turned Mozambique into a major supplier of slaves. With the rapid growth in the demand for slaves in Brazil and the Mascarenes Islands, southern Mozambique came to rival the northern ports in this trade. As the trade mushroomed, the Portuguese administration and its personnel quickly came to depend on the profits of this commerce. The emancipation of slaves at the Cape was followed by the entry of a new wave of freed slaves as the Royal Navy started to stop and search Portuguese ships in the southern hemisphere. By the 1860s pressure on the Portuguese shifted from halting the slave trade to demanding an end to slavery as an institution. In the following decade the Portuguese found a new market for the sale of Mozambiques labour in the British colonies of South Africa. The terms of service of these contracted, migrant labourers retained many aspects of the earlier systems that had brought forced immigrants and slaves to the Cape. This experience would exercise an important influence on the development of labour relations in South Africa for the next hundred years.

Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860-1910

From 1860 to 1910, Mozambican workers travelled to the sugar plantations, diamond fields and gold mines of South Africa. Through their encounter with other blacks, a new and dynamic culture emerged. This book provides a history of the making of that culture. By using a wide range of materials drawn from Portuguese, French, English and Afrikaans sources, this book provides a narrative of the day-to-day life of the migrants as they travelled to work and lived out their daily existence far from home. The author focuses on several traditional themes: the causes and consequences of migrant labour; the social history of the migrants; and their changing relations with employers and the state. There is also a discussion of the manner in which workers constructed new ways of seeing themselves and others through innovative rituals, traditions and beliefs. Culture, identity and interpretation are central themes in this book; the practices of leisure are discussed as thoroughly as work, portraying workers as not mere units of suffering, but human beings attempting to deal with exploitative situations in culturally creative ways.