A Global History of Runaways by Rediker Marcus;Chakraborty Titas;Rossum Matthias van;

Author:Rediker, Marcus;Chakraborty, Titas;Rossum, Matthias van;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520304352
Publisher: University of California Press

“BUT THOMAS DIDN’T DIE”

Desertion had a common history across race, ethnicity, and labor type at the Cape under VOC rule. Running away was widespread, in both its individual and collective incarnation. Many runaways deserted in groups with the aim of leaving the Cape. Others remained within the colony, creating new social formations or joining fugitive communities on the borderland. The latter consisted of commando bands and new dissident raider communities. These bands contested colonial rule, especially its practices of dispossession and land enclosure.

The British empire occupied the Cape (1795–1803 and again from 1806–13) to protect its political and commercial interests in the Indian Ocean region during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. In 1814, the Dutch officially ceded the Cape to the British. This moment marked the start of a new, more intensive phase of imperialism and global capitalism. The new colonial officials in the Cape were keen to ameliorate some of the more violent excesses related to labor control and discipline, to curb movement of laborers, and to bind them more firmly to their masters and mistresses. Yet unfree forms of labor persisted. Slavery would not be officially abolished until 1838.

Within this context, laborers at the Cape developed new repertoires of resistance and a new language of rights. Desertion continued as a common form of protest and indeed soon took on a profound “national” form. Just north of the Cape colony, Bastaards, runaways slaves, sailors and soldiers, and indigenous Khoesan formed their own nation and adopted the name “Griqua” to claim a common ancestor and heritage.85 The Kok family had long incorporated runaways and played a key role in the creation of the Griqua. On the eastern reaches of the colony we see a more proletarian response. Mainly Khoesan laborers and some slaves deserted their masters in large numbers and joined large raider bands massing on the borderland. These laborers believed that their class and colonial oppression were intimately linked. The best remedy to indenture and violent abuse was, in the words of one of the rebel captains, Klaas Stuurman, to reclaim “the country of which our fathers were despoiled by the Dutch,” and to fight for their independence from their Boer masters.86 By the end of July 1799 raider bands were in control of the whole southeastern portion of the Graaf-Reinet district. Although this rebellion dissipated in 1803, the “Servants” Rebellion was a major anticolonial revolt that emerged from a long history of desertion. For a brief moment it succeeded not only in halting the latest colonial encroachments, it also managed to push back the colonial border.

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