Too Close for Comfort: Master and Slave Relations in the Colonial CapePosted in Africa, History, Media Archive, Slavery, South Africa on 2013-09-01 03:40Z by Steven |
Too Close for Comfort: Master and Slave Relations in the Colonial Cape
The World Is Robert: An assortment of posts related to an unquenchable thirst for knowledge
2013-04-03
The effects of propinquity on the nature and development of slavery in colonial Cape society were profound. Unlike the large plantations that evolved in parts of the Americas, where enslaved Africans could develop slave cultures without the incessant supervision of whites, close contact between white masters and slaves in the Cape led to constant supervision that created intimately oppressive conditions. Therefore, slavery developed into an institution of extreme regulation and monitoring of slaves for social control with the appearances of benign paternalism, which was weaker in Cape Town than in the countryside. These aforementioned intimately oppressive conditions entailed a form of slavery mixing physical and psychological forms of domination, domestic affection and the threat of violence, and paternalism and overseers to ensure slave subordination while also creating conditions for more cultural and racial mixing…
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