Soon after Jan van Riebeeck set up a Dutch settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, to supply provisions to Dutch ships plying to and from India and the East Indies, people from India were taken to the Cape and sold into slavery to do domestic work for the settlers, as well the dirty and hard work on the farms. A woman from Bengal named Mary was bought for van Riebeeck in Batavia in 1653. Two years later, in 1655, van Riebeeck purchased, from the Commander of a Dutch ship returning from Asia to Holland, a family from Bengal – Domingo and Angela and their three children. On May 21, 1656, the marriage was solemnised at the Cape between Jan Wouters, a white, and Catherine of Bengal who was liberated from slavery. Later in the year Anton Muller was given permission to marry Domingo Elvingh, a woman from Bengal.
From then until late eighteenth century when the import of slaves from Asia was prohibited, many hundreds, if not thousands, of persons from India – mainly Bengal, Coromandel Coast and Kerala – were taken to the Cape and sold into slavery. Officers of ships and officials of the Dutch India Company returning to Holland usually took slaves or servants with them and sold them at high profit in the Cape. (Slaves could not be taken to Holland where slavery was prohibited). Many others were carried by Danish and British ships. While most of the Indians were taken from Dutch trading posts in India, a considerable number were also taken from Batavia as thousands of Indians had been taken by the Dutch as slaves to Batavia. South African, American, British and other scholars have conducted painstaking research into the archives in the Cape – records of the deeds office, courts, churches etc. – and have brought out several studies on slavery in the Cape. They contain extensive, though far from complete, information on transactions in human beings, the conditions of slavery and resistance of the slaves.
The archives indicate that Mary, the first known Indian slave, was found in bed with a constable, Willem Cornelis, in 1660. He was fined and dismissed from his post but she was apparently not punished. Van Riebeeck and his family probably took her with them when they moved to Batavia in 1662. Jan Wouters was transferred to Batavia soon after his marriage to Catherine. There is no information on Anton Muller. Van Riebeeck sold Angela, who had taken care of his children, to Abraham Gabbema, his deputy and law officer. Gabbema granted freedom to Angela and her three children before he departed for Batavia in 1666, except that she was required to work for six months in the home of Thomas Christoffel Muller.
She integrated easily into the white community even while continuing relations with her friends who were still in slavery. She asked for and obtained a plot of land in the Table Valley in February 1667. Next year she obtained a slave from Malabar on hire. In 1669 she married Arnoldus Willemsz Basson, with whom she had three children. Her daughter from the first marriage also married a Dutchman. When her husband died in 1689, Angela took charge of the estate which had a considerable value when she died in 1720. Some of these early slaves – especially women from Bengal who were acquired by senior officials of the Dutch India Company for domestic work – were relatively fortunate. The great majority of those enslaved in the Cape, however, lived under miserable conditions.
The researches in the past three decades – by Anna Boeseken, Margaret Cairns, Achmat Davids, Richard Elphick, H. F. Heese, J. Hoge, Robert Ross, Robert Shell, Nigel Worden and others – destroy several myths that had been prevalent – for instance, that slavery had little economic importance in the Cape, that the treatment of slaves, especially Asian slaves, was benign, that Asian slaves were mostly from Indonesia etc. The number of slaves exceeded the number of white settlers by early 18th century and they did the hard work of developing the land. Most of the Asian slaves worked on the farms and were treated as cruelly as the Africans. There were almost as many, if not more, slaves from India as from Indonesia.
