SA-HISTORY-L Archives

From: "Kammie" <>
Subject: [SoAfricaHistory] December 1, 1834/1838 - South African Slave Emancipation Day
Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2002 22:12:10 +0200

Hi SA-HISTORY list participants


December 1, 1834/1838 - South African Slave Emancipation Day on Sunday, 1 December 2002
Thus the release of 39 000 slaves on 1 December 1838 across the Western & Eastern Cape will be commemorated on 1 December 2002, tomorrow by some members of the local "Cape Coloured" community [of mixed/mulatto descend] and by slave historians across the Western Cape.

Impact of slavery at the Cape on the development of South African Society and Southern African History :
1] The Cape Slave Code of 1754 formed the foundation of the initial Master and Servants Acts during the post emancipation era (only repealed in 1974) and, thereafter for generations 'labour relations' legislation until the industrial relations framework was modernised by the Nelson Mandela government;
2] The emancipation of slaves at the Cape was considered one of the causal factors for mass movement of farmers known as the Voortrekkers i.e. the descendants of the former slaveholding society of the Cape of Good Hope into the interior to the later Transvaal and Orange Free State Boer Republics;
3] The compensation monies received by wealthy recipients of the former slaveholding classes were used for the economic growth by investing in the wool trade in the Eastern Cape and the formation of colonial banks which are the forerunnners of present day national commercial finance houses;
4] The past slavery system determined the social relations and cross racial interaction between black and white South Africans;
5] The slave system as an economic system affected the economic development of the whole Southern Africa in respect of cheap labour for the gold and diamond mines in later decades;
6] Importation of Batavian slaves made a major contribution towards local South African cuisine, known as Cape Malay Cookery;
7] Slavery and Missionary Christianity shaped the religious attitudes of the mainstream churches towards supporting state- sponsored social segregation or resisting the ideology and practices of Apartheid social re-engineering in the 20th century;
8] The magnificent Cape Dutch style homesteads on the Boland wine farms were designed and built by the skilled labour of slave artisans from the East;

PS. :
The Cape Slaveholding Society in the Cape Colony about 170 years ago laid the foundation for the Apartheid racial segregation policies more than 160 years later. South Africa was nearly 4 times longer a Slave-Holding society than the almost 50 years of Nationalist rule and maintenance of racial Apartheid as a statutory 'social segregation' system.

The celebration of Slavery Emancipation Day, on Sunday, 1st of December 2002, is recalling more than 300 years of the denial of universal human rights to the disenfranchised masses which was only restored by the Nelson Mandela led post-1994 government to the descendants of slaves known as the 'Cape Coloureds' in the Western Cape Province of Republic of South Africa
=====================================================================================
You are most welcome to view my South African Slavery-pages hosted by B@tavia at the "Centre fir Sustainable Development/
Centre for Third World Studies" based at the University of Ghent, in Belgium.
My website address : " slavery @ the Cape [of Good Hope] = http://batavia.rug.ac.be/slavery/
My email address :
=====================================================================================

This thread:

• [SoAfricaHistory] December 1, 1834/1838 - South African Slave Emancipation Day by "Kammie" <>