“I have been called, to this I have also been born, here is my sufferings and my joys." Leopold von Ranke on historical research, 1830.
I have loved learning new things as long as I can remember. As soon as I could read I begun to devour books with gusto. Fiction and non-fiction alike engrossed my attention drawing me into worlds beyond my imagination. I hand drew maps of the world and made notes from books of facts ranging from dinosaur types to buccaneers and corsairs. It was particularly these stories of the sea that captured my imagination. I read of Thor Heyerdahl battling the elements on board his raft Kon Tiki so that I could almost see the swells of the ocean and taste the spray. The thrilling discovery and excavation of the treasure laden San José, sunk off the coast of Colombia was brought to light by the glossy photographs in a faded copy of Readers Digest. The fictional near death escapades and adventures of a man calling himself Oloff the pirate in his quest to avenge his father’s murder drew me into the fascinating social world of the Dutch Cape Colony and wider Indian Ocean. Little did I know that it was the lived realities of this milieu that I would one day spend countless hours immersing myself in.
By 2019, I had completed my undergraduate degree at Stellenbosch University and was left with a choice: pursue a postgraduate diploma in education like many of my peers or choose the less certain path of a history graduate student. By this point, much like father of modern historiography Leopold von Ranke, I had been captivated by the sirens song of the archive and chose the latter. My love of maritime history led me under the expert guidance of supervisors Kate Ekama and Chet Fransch, to examine the lives of those captured at sea by anti-slavery vessels and brought to colonial South Africa where they were forcibly apprenticed for periods of between seven and fourteen years. Known in the scholarship as liberated or recaptured Africans or in Cape colonial nomenclature as “prize negroes”, after serving their apprenticeships at the Cape they became known as “free blacks”. Recaptured African experiences of freedom I found were complex and shaped by a variety of factors, including the nature of and their understanding of their new contracts, relationship with their contract holders, police harassment and available land and accommodation. Not all free blacks were apprentices however, in fact the majority were formerly enslaved people. So what happened to these freed slaves and their descendants? Were they able to in the words of Booker T. Washington move “up from slavery” over time or was their social mobility hampered by their former slave status and social environment? It was these questions that animated and intrigued me and that I seek to explore in my ongoing doctoral studies at Radboud University under the supervision of Dries Lyna and Kate Ekama. Focusing on inheritance practices in last wills and testaments, I seek to assess the family and fictive kin that formerly enslaved left possessions to and how these decisions impacted the lives of their descendants over several generations. These sources along with ancillary documents such as inventories, estate files and auction records highlight a rich tapestry of social relationships and interactions between formerly enslaved people and slaves, recaptives, autochthonous people and settlers. These interactions between ordinary people which has often been overlooked through a “single category history” approach (a focuses on distinct social groups) is also at the forefront of the exciting new research project entitled “Economies of Trust? A New Digital Infrastructure on the Urban Poor in the Cape Colony” funded by the prestigious Gerda Henkel Stiftung.
My own research intersects nicely with each of the projects in Economies of Trust. Inheritance invariably bred conflict with many of these disputes being acrimoniously aired out in the courtroom involving witnesses and an often enthralled public. Inventories and liquidation and distribution accounts accompanying last wills reveal the business entanglements of free blacks with other social groups, both as debtors and creditors. Due to Cape law which prohibited marriage without baptism, many enslaved and later free black women were single or lived in legally unrecognised relationships as a “byzit” (partner). Others recorded in their wills that several of their children were in onegt verwekt (illegitimately conceived), but had been baptised. These births can often be traced in ecclesiastical records. Given the complementarity of my study with these various research strands, the methodological and conceptual innovativeness of the project and the substantial expertise of the project managers and postdoctoral researchers on a wide range of fields, I was delighted to be asked to collaborate. I hope to not only learn much from the research, but also contribute if only in a small way, to better understanding the complex social dynamics, interactions and day to day lived experiences of the ordinary people of the colonial Cape Colony.
