Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjss20 Download by: [University of Cape Town Libraries] Date: 14 July 2016, At: 23:36 Journal of Southern African Studies ISSN: 0305-7070 (Print) 1465-3893 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjss20 Children for Ewes: Child Indenture in the Post- Emancipation Great Karoo: c. 1856–1909 Lance van Sittert To cite this article: Lance van Sittert (2016) Children for Ewes: Child Indenture in the Post- Emancipation Great Karoo: c. 1856–1909, Journal of Southern African Studies, 42:4, 743-762, DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2016.1199394 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2016.1199394 Published online: 30 Jun 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 8 View related articles View Crossmark data
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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjss20
Download by: [University of Cape Town Libraries] Date: 14 July 2016, At: 23:36
Children for Ewes: Child Indenture in the Post-Emancipation Great Karoo: c. 1856–1909
Lance van Sittert
To cite this article: Lance van Sittert (2016) Children for Ewes: Child Indenture in the Post-Emancipation Great Karoo: c. 1856–1909, Journal of Southern African Studies, 42:4, 743-762,DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2016.1199394
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2016.1199394
Children for Ewes: Child Indenture in the Post-Emancipation Great Karoo: c. 1856–1909
Lance van Sittert
(Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town)
While the employment of child labour in the Cape Colony under slavery is well known, the same cannot be said for the post-emancipation period, despite the hinge masters and servants ordinance of 1841 governing the new free labour market legitimating employment of two categories of child labour: those indentured by their parents, and ‘destitute children’ indentured by the state. Both groups left paper trails. That of destitute children is easier to follow because they had to advertised in the press, but a few scattered sets of contracts of ‘indenture of apprenticeship by parents’ (IAP) survive in the archives of the colonial magistrates. The article offers a close reading of the destitute children advertisements and IAP contract archive for one such magistracy: that of Colesberg in the Great Karoo in the second half of the 19th century. It traces patterns in the aggregate demography, form and features of the more than 250 IAP contracts signed in the magistracy over this period to demonstrate the gendered nature of child indenture, its relation to and dampening effect on adult wage rates, and its contributions to reproducing proletarian households in the commercialising pastoral economy of the Great Karoo. In so doing, it troubles two prevailing assumptions about the post-emancipation Cape labour market: that settler employers dictated the terms of exchange through coercion, and that the proletarian household was a haven from such exploitation. It detects evidence for both the patrimonial exchange and parental exploitation of proletarian children. Finally, the article offers a corrective to the scholarship on the invention of colonial childhood in the final quarter of the 19th century, based exclusively on the white middle-class experience of the south-western Cape, by suggesting that post-emancipation black childhood was without formal education or indolent adolescence, but rather an apprenticeship in labour.
Child Labour in the 19th-Century Cape Colony
The importance of child labour to white settlement in southern Africa is well known. Its most important contribution, according to Delius and Trapido, writing about child inboekselings in the South African Republic in the second half of the 19th century, was ‘in meeting the Boer household’s requirementsfor domestic labour and through their acquisition of the variety of skills essential to the Boer economy’.
If taken sufficiently young, these children became distanced culturally as well as physically from their societies of origin. Partially socialized within the Boer household or under the care of adult inboekselings and clients, they both absorbed and contributed to the under-class culture which existed within Boer-dominated society. As these children grew up they learned the various skills required of them. Ideally, they would become bound to Boer society by ties of culture, family and skill. Probably most important of all was that they could be entrusted with firearms and placed in
supervisory positions over herders and hunting and trading expeditions. Some of the secondary sources suggest an ideal evolution from indentured child to contented client.1
The same was true of the Cape Colony. In the18th century, settlers enjoyed legal title to the offspring of their slaves, supplemented with children captured in raids against the indigenous population on and beyond the frontier. The British banning of slave trading (1807) and ownership (1838) greatly increased the importance of compliant child labour to the 19th-century Cape colonial economy in general, and the rural settler households in particular, as evidenced by the various legal mechanisms created to secure indigenous (1812), destitute (1819), immigrant (1833) and ex-slave (1834) children for settlers in the first third of the 19th century.2 These mechanisms were incorporated into the masters and servants legislation that governed the post-emancipation labour market in the Cape Colony.3
While there is a considerable body of historical scholarship on child labour during abolition, little has been written about the post-emancipation Cape.4 Instead attention shifts after abolition to the Highveld, where child trafficking and enslavement remained a feature of both settler and indigenous society until the final quarter of the 19th century.5 The post-emancipation Cape scholarship focuses exclusively on white, and particularly white middle-class, childhood, and that only in the small corner of the south-western Cape.6 The lapse of attention is strange, given the mass corvées of children harvested by the Cape Colony from the cattle-killing (1857–58), and the so-called eighth frontier war (1878) in the eastern Cape, and the many other ‘small wars’ fought along its northern frontier over the latter two-thirds of the 19th century.7
1 P. Delius and S. Trapido, ‘Inboekselings and Oorlams: The Creation and Transformation of a Servile Class’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 8, 2 (1982), pp. 226–7. See also B. Grier, ‘Child Labour and Africanist Scholarship: A Critical Review’, African Studies Review, 47, 2 (2004), pp. 1–25.
2 See S. Newton-King, ‘The Labour Market of the Cape Colony, 1807–28’, in S. Marks and A. Atmore (eds), Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa (London, Longman, 1980), pp. 171–207, for an overview. S. Newton-King, Masters and Servants on the Cape Eastern Frontier, 1760–1803 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 116–49; J. MacDonald, ‘“Like a Wild Beast He Can be Got for the Catching”: Child Forced Labour and the “Taming” of the San along the Cape’s North-Eastern Frontier, c.1806–1830’, in M. Adhikari (ed.), Genocide on Settler Frontiers: When Hunter Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers Clash (Cape Town, UCT Press, 2014), pp. 60–87; E. Bradlow, ‘The Children’s Friend Society at the Cape of Good Hope’, Victorian Studies, 27, 2 (1984), pp. 155–77, and J. Tosh, ‘Children on Free Immigrant Ships: From England to the Cape of Good Hope, 1819–20’, History Australia, 9, 2 (2012), for immigrant children; N. Worden, ‘Between Slavery and Freedom: The Apprenticeship Period, 1834 to 1838’, in N. Worden and C. Crais (eds), Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in the Nineteenth Century Cape Colony (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 1994), pp. 115–44; P. Scully, Liberating the Family?: Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823–1853 (Portsmouth NH, Oxford and Cape Town, Heinemann, James Currey and David Philip, 1997), and R.L. Watson, Slave Emancipation and Racial Attitudes in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 89–98, for slave children.
3 See V.C. Malherbe, ‘Indentured and Unfree Labour in South Africa: Towards an Understanding’, South African Historical Journal, 24, 1 (1991), pp. 3–30, for a useful overview of this legislation.
4 See Footnote 2. 5 See E.A. Eldredge and F. Morton, Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labour on the Dutch Frontier (Boulder,
Westview Press, 1994). 6 See L. Chisholm, ‘The Pedagogy of Porter: The Origins of the Reformatory in the Cape Colony’, Journal of
African History, 27, 3 (1986), pp. 481–95; E. Bradlow, ‘Children and Childhood at the Cape in the Nineteenth Century’, Kleio, 20 (1988), pp. 8–27; S.E. Duff, ‘Saving the Child to Save the Nation: Poverty, Whiteness and Childhood in the Cape Colony, 1870–1895’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 37, 2 (2011), pp. 229–45; S.E. Duff, ‘Onschuldig vermaak: The Dutch Reformed Church and Children’s Leisure Time in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony’, South African Historical Journal, 63, 4 (2011), pp. 493–513, and S.E. Duff, ‘Unto Children’s Children: Clerical Families and Childrearing Advice in the Cape Colony’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 14, 1 (2013), for the literature on children in the post-emancipation Cape.
7 See J. Peires, ‘Sir George Grey versus the Kaffir Relief Committee’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 10, 2 (1984), pp. 145–69, for child indentures following the cattle killing; Cape of Good Hope, Number of Kafirs Introduced into the Western Districts during and after the Late Galaka and Gaika Wars (A43–79), for the eighth frontier war, and T. Strauss, War Along the Orange: The Korana and the Northern Border Warsof 1868–69 and 1878–79 (Cape Town, Centre for African Studies, 1979), and K. Shillington, Luka Jantjie: Resistance Hero of the South African Frontier (London, Aldridge Press, 2011), pp. 263–86, for other ‘small wars’.
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The literature on child labour in the abolition era Cape also places overwhelming emphasis on coercion as the main mechanism of securing child labour, and is more or less explicitly coloured by today’s ‘northern’ norms of children and childhood.8 The former may in part reflect its dependence on the judicial archive. The cumulative effect is to demonise settlers and idealise the indigenous family, reducing the latter to the passive victims of the former. Charles van Onselen long ago showed that settler paternalism in the colonial countryside rested on more than the sjambok, and Peter Delius has recently suggested that children were no less vulnerable to exploitation within indigenous societies than without.9
What follows seeks both to fill the lacuna on child labour in the post-emancipation Cape Colony and to nuance the existing analysis through a critical reading of the surviving paper traces of the Masters and Servants Acts from one Great Karoo magistracy. Because children constituted a special category of labour under these acts, the record, although far from complete, is a rare and rich source on the ‘everyday’ legal exchange of child labour in the region over the six decades after the abolition of slavery, which enables a high-resolution reconstruction of its changing political economy. This reveals an unevenly commercialising pastoral economy, in which children were exchanged for livestock between adult white settlers and black labourers in a rural barter economy constituted at the local level of the farm or town.
The Great Karoo was a pastoral frontier zone, lying north of the old arable slave economy of the Dutch East India Company and south of the new pastoral slave economies of the Highveld, the former relying on immigrant imports and the latter on indigenous captures. Although derived from the historical practices of slavery in the south and nourished by imports of captives from the north, it was largely settled after abolition under the new British regime of ‘free labour’. As such, it is more representative of the post-emancipation Cape countryside than the old slave heartlands of the south-western Cape, on which the existing scholarship on 19th-century child labour is based. Bisected by the 380-millimetre isohyet and with an open frontier to the north, the settler presence in the Great Karoo was more recent, sparser and less self-confident than the arable south, creating an extensive pastoral economy in which labour enjoyed some scope for independent production and thus leverage over its own price in the market. Children were an important resource for maintaining independent household production and hence the bargaining position of adult workers in the rural labour market, their work power being exchanged with settler pastoralists for subsistence, cash and/or livestock to subsidise, supplement and sustain adult household subsistence production.
Making the Post-Emancipation Cape Labour Market
The history of labour in the 19th-century Cape Colony is the history of successive colonial state interventions intended to make a market in settlers’ favour.10 The magna carta of the post-emancipation Cape labour market was the 1841 Masters and Servants Ordinance, buttressed by a dense secondary growth of amending and supporting legislation over the course of the subsequent six decades, which sought to keep the cost of labour as low as possible for settler employers.11 Child labour was simultaneously both a key mechanism for cheapening the cost of adult labour and an important form of cheap labour in the post-emancipation colonial countryside, and hence closely regulated by the Masters and Servants Acts.
8 O. Nieuwenhuys, ‘Embedding the Global Womb: Global Child Labour and the New Policy Agenda’, Children’s Geographies, 5, 1–2 (2007), pp. 149–63.
9 See C. van Onselen, ‘The Social and Economic Underpinning of Paternalism and Violence on the Maize Farms of the South-Western Transvaal, 1900–1950’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 5, 2 (1992), pp. 127–60; P. Delius, ‘Recapturing Captives and Conversations with Cannibals: In Pursuit of a Neglected Stratum in South African History’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 36, 1 (2010), pp. 7–23.
10 See Newton-King, ‘The Labour Market of the Cape Colony’.11 See Malherbe, ‘Indentured and Unfree Labour’.
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The Cape’s abolition-era child labour legislation was folded into the 1841 omnibus founding ordinance of the new ‘free labour’ regime.12 This permitted parents both to sell the labour of children younger than 16, along with their own, for the duration of their service, and to sell the labour of their children between 10 and 16 independent of their own, until the children turned 21.13 In the latter case, the contract had to be written down and signed or ‘marked’ by the parent(s), who were forbidden from apprenticing children younger than 10 and those older as ‘agricultural labourers’ after they turned 16.14 The exceptions were those children orphaned through the death or desertion of their parents. The local magistrate acted in loco parentis for such ‘destitute children’, apprenticing them to relatives or ‘strangers’ – girls until they turned 16 and boys 18, with written contracts specifying the provision of lodging, clothing, food, medicine, education, religious instruction and wages.15
Settlers utilised the ‘destitute children’ provisions to circumvent the new legal constraints on their access to colonial child labour by sourcing it beyond the borders of the colony.16 Thus, for example, Pieter Grobbelaar requested to have three bushmen children indentured to him at Colesberg in July 1841 on the grounds that
About three years since I was beyond the boundary with my cattle and remained at the Modder River for a whole winter. Whilst there some Korannas brought to me the three children here present, a girl now about ten or twelve years called Silvie – Delia now about six years. Roslyn about five years these children were perfectly naked and about dead with hunger – the Korannas (whose names I do not know) told me that the parents were dead and that these children had been given them in exchange for articles of trifling value – I gave the Korannas some goods and some old clothing for these children – I did this because the children were in such a state of misery with the Korannas that I thought it was for their benefit that I should get possession of them.17
The clerk of the peace, John Campbell, reported that Grobbelaar’s was but one of ‘several recent applications to … indenture children brought from beyond the boundary and represented to have been found there in a state of destitution’, and warned that this ‘illegal traffic’, if unchecked, would lead to the establishment of ‘a sort of slave trade’ in the Great Karoo.18 The attorney general agreed that
to countenance such a transaction must tend directly to establish a slave trade in our very borders. Whether you purchase children to impose Slavery or to confirm freedom upon them will be a matter of complete indifference to the natives beyond the boundary who are likely to be tempted to procure by fair means or by foul the marketable article.19
Campbell accordingly confiscated the children from Grobbelaar, despite his protests, and apprenticed them to worthies in the village, with the full support of the colonial state.
The example made of Grobbelaar did little to change settler labour practices in the region. Thus three years later Campbell reported another instance of child trafficking, this time four Zulu children brought into the colony in June 1841 by two ‘Emigrant Farmers’, Christoffel Esterhuisen and Dirk Vermeulen returning from commando in Natal. The oldest, a boy of 16, called himself ‘April’ and knew only that ‘he came from Panda’.20 The other three were ‘much
12 Compare Proclamation, 23 April 1809 and Proclamation, 9 July 1819 with Ordinance for amending and consolidating the Laws regulating the relative rights and duties of Masters, Servants and Apprentices, No. 1, 1841.
13 Ordinance No. 1, 1841, Chapter II, Clause XII and Chapter III, Clauses I-III.14 Ordinance No. 1, 1841, Chapter III.15 Ordinance No. 1, 1841, Chapter II, Clause XIII and Chapter III, Clause XII.16 See N. Penn, The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the Eighteenth
Century (Cape Town, Double Storey, 2005), for the endemic raiding for child labour that accompanied the 18th- century settler conquest of the Great Karoo.
17 Cape Archives Depot (hereafter KAB), LG 537, 1014 Pieter Grobbelaar’s Affidavit before Fleetwood Rawstone, Resident Magistrate, Colesberg, 5 July 1841.
18 KAB, LG 537, 1014, John Campbell, Clerk of the Peace, Colesberg to the Civil Commissioner, Colesberg, 1 September 1841. Campbell reported that Grobbelaar had already transferred one of the children to a relative.
19 KAB, LG 537, 1014, Attorney General W. Porter to John Campbell, Clerk of the Peace, Colesberg, 22 July 1841.20 KAB, CO 4020, 70, Report of John Campbell, Clerk of the Peace, Colesburg, 9 February 1844.
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too young to give any account whatever as they spoke but very indifferent dutch and were in a wretched state of ignorance, and not one of the Native Foreigners in the village could understand them’.21 The field cornet estimated the boy called ‘January’ to be 12 or 13 years old and the girls ‘Anett’ and ‘Sabiena’ 11 and 9, respectively.22
Esterhuisen and Vermeulen reported the children to their field cornet, but the latter ‘forgot’ to report them to the magistrate for more than two years. Campbell thought the otherwise ‘zealous’ field cornet guilty of ‘conniving at this transaction until fear prompted him to divulge the case’.23
I am afraid that universal feeling among the Boers in this part to obtain Servants either by fair or foul means is too deeply ingrafted in all classes for us to expect any voluntary assistance even from the field cornets to check that prevailing system of bringing Native children from over the boundary into the Colony with the view of securing their services for a series of years. I am led to believe that there are many similar cases as the present in this District, but from the mutual understanding which seems to exist among the farmers in never alluding to their Servants, and the Field Cornets studiously avoiding any enquiry as to how they became possessed of such children, only increases the difficulty of detection … all Inhabitants know the illegality of bringing the Native children from over the Boundary, but the chances of escaping detection and thus securing the services of the same for an unlimited period is too strong a temptation for them to withstand.24
The solution to child trafficking, the attorney general noted in 1841, was for officials ‘never [to] bind a child to the person who brings it from beyond the boundary under any circumstances.… the only true security against foul play is to relieve all persons of all temptations to practice it’.
Colonial officials, however, did nothing to remove the temptation of slaving from settlers for another decade, until the mass destitution of whole populations in the eastern Cape following the cattle-killing threatened the emergence of the practice on a large scale.25 Legislation was thus hastily passed in 1857 prohibiting settlers from procuring ‘children of tender age’ beyond the colony’s borders ‘to be made servants of’.26 The new act required anyone other than a parent ‘bringing into the colony any … child … [to] deliver over such child to any resident magistrate of the colony within the space of fourteen days’, and decreed that ‘no such child shall be apprenticed to or left with the person by whom such child shall have been brought into the colony’.27 The impact of outlawing imported children on the colony’s labour supply was softened by both the continued conspiracy of silence between farmers and field cornets and the 1856 amendment of the Masters and Servants Act, which allowed colonial parents to apprentice children younger than 10 provided the magistrate deemed it ‘for the benefit of the child’.28 Together the new 1856–57 labour legislation re-focused settler attention on colonial child labour for the first time since their failed efforts in the 1830s to secure the right to apprentice slave children beyond abolition, and in so doing made the political economy of child labour in the Great Karoo legible to official surveillance.29
Destitute Children of the Post-Emancipation Great Karoo
As a check on the development of an internal traffic in kidnapped children following the relaxation of the 10-year minimum age, the revised 1856 Masters and Servants Act directed
21 Ibid.22 KAB, CO 4020, 70 Affidavit of Matthys Adriaan Vermeulen, 4 December 1843 and John Campbell to the Attorney
General, 11 December 1843.23 Ibid.24 KAB, CO 4020, 70, John Campbell to the Attorney General, 11 December 1843.25 See Peires, ‘Sir George Grey’, for settler slaving in the wake of the cattle killing.26 Cape of Good Hope, ‘Act for more effectually preventing the improper introduction into this colony of Children
belonging to Native Tribes resident in Territories beyond the Land Boundaries thereof’, No. 22, 1857, Preamble.27 Act 22, 1857, Chapter I.28 An Act to Amend the Laws regulating the relative Rights and Duties of Masters, Servants and Apprentices’, No.
15, 1856, Chapter 3, Clause III.29 See Worden, ‘Between Slavery and Freedom’, and Watson, Slave Emancipation.
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that magistrates ‘shall give public notice in the Government Gazette of the name of every such [destitute child] apprentice, and of the person to whom he shall have been apprenticed’.30 The first, but not the second, part of this instruction was diligently adhered to by magistrates throughout the colony, more than 6,400 individual destitute children being advertised in the government gazette over the half century after 1856, two-thirds of them boys.31 One-quarter of the children were unraced, another 45 per cent were described as coming from the old (‘hottentot’) or new (‘coloured’) rural free labour pool, with only 11 per cent African and 8 per cent white. With a mean age of 8.9 years, their average period of indenture was seven to nine years, depending on their gender. Their advertisements rose steeply to a plateau covering the final quarter of the 19th century between two pronounced peaks in 1879 and 1897, before falling away again sharply from the mid 1900s. This child labour pool was adjusted by the addition of juvenile offenders younger than 16 from 1889 and the removal of white children younger than 15 into subsidised schooling after 1895, the first adding 400+ children and the latter subtracting around 150 by 1909.32 The colony’s major urban centres accounted for fully one-quarter of all advertisements.33 The rural advertisements were unevenly spread, being heavily concentrated in the old slave heartlands of the south-western and southern Cape and the frontier Great Karoo.34
The Great Karoo was divided into as many as 16 magistracies over the 50+ years after 1856, which together reported 1,444 destitute children or one-fifth (22.4 per cent) of the colony total up to 1909 (see Figures 1 and 2).35 The Great Karoo data reflect the same broad temporal trajectory as the rest of the colony, but with an earlier peak in mid 1870s and an earlier and more gradual decline from the mid 1880s.
Alongside the expected dominance of ‘hottentot’ and ‘coloured’ destitute children (49 per cent), the Great Karoo also reflected its frontier location in the significantly higher percentage of Bushmen, African and Koranna children, amounting to a quarter of all advertisments (see Figure 3).36 Historians have long emphasised the importance of violence to labour relations in the Great Karoo.37 That many of the destitute children were refugees from the colony’s ‘wars along the Orange’ in the latter half of the 19th century is suggested by the fact that more than half the bushmen destitute children and two-thirds of the Koranna cluster in the three
30 Act 22, 1856, Chapter 3, Clause VII.31 The following paragraph is based on calculations from the 6,431 destitute child advertisements published in the
Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 1856–1909.32 See Juvenile Offenders Apprenticeship Act, No. 8, 1889; Cape of Good Hope, Report of the Select Committee
on the Destitute Children’s Relief Bill, 1894 (C1–94); Destitute Children’s Relief Act, No. 24, 1895 and Cape of Good Hope, Return showing the extent to which the provisions of the Destitute Children’s Relief Act, 1895 have been availed of since the passing of the Act, 1905 (C18–05). The number of indentured juvenile offenders was calculated from their advertisements in the Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette. See Chisholm, ‘The Pedagogy of Porter’, and Duff, ‘Saving the Child’, for more detailed histories of children in prison and poverty in the late colonial Cape.
33 Cape Town and Wynberg alone accounted for nearly one-fifth of all advertisements, and the urban share rose to 25 per cent when Grahamstown, Kimberley and Port Elizabeth were included.
34 See T.J.M. Rousset, ‘From Slavery to Unfree Labour: An Analysis of the Masters and Servants Legislation and the Use of Destitute Children as a Source of Labour in the Cape Colony, 1856-1910’, unpublished Honours dissertation, University of Cape Town, 2007, for an analysis of this rural distribution.
35 The Great Karoo magistracies are defined as Beaufort West, Britstown, Calvinia, Carnarvon, Colesberg, De Aar, Fraserburg, Hanover, Herbert, Hopetown, Philipstown, Prieska, Richmond, Sutherland, Victoria West and Williston.
36 Bushmen comprised 5 per cent, Africans 9 per cent and Koranna 1.1 per cent of all destitute child advertisements in the Cape Colony, 1856–1909. Their signal in the Great Karoo over the same period was +9 per cent, –2 per cent and +2.9 per cent, respectively.
37 See, for example, Penn, Forgotten Frontier; B. Nasson, Abraham Esau’s War: A Black South African War in the Cape (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983); W. Dooling, ‘Reconstructing the Household: The Northern Cape Colony before and after the South African War’, Journal of African History, 50, 3 (2009), pp. 399–416.
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five-year periods, 1856–60, 1869–73 and 1879–83, which coincide with these wars.38 Similarly, one-fifth of the Great Karoo’s destitute African children were reported in the five years of
38 See Strauss, War Along the Orange.
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910
Num
ber
Year
Destitute Children 5 per. Mov. Avg. (Destitute Children)
Figure 2. Great Karoo magistracies destitute child advertisements, 1856–1909. (Source: calculated from data contained in Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 1856–1909.)
Figure 1. Great Karoo magistracies destitute child advertisements, 1856–1909.
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the great rinderpest epidemic and Langeberg Rebellion, 1895–99.39 The relationship between colonial warfare and personal destitution is confirmed by individual children’s accounts of the whereabouts of their parents.
The decadal levies of war refugee children from the frontier were enlarged by the steady seepage of destitute children from among the post-emancipation rural proletariat of ‘hottentots’ and ‘coloureds’. The only clues to the causes of these children’s destitution are those contained in the advertisements themselves, and more than half provide no information at all about either the mother (53 per cent) or father (59 per cent).40 Magistrates had little interest in reuniting destitute children with their families except in the case of whites, and their wards were often too young, traumatised, intimidated or illiterate to provide personal information. Even when it was forthcoming, there is no way of knowing its source or assessing its accuracy.
That said, two-thirds of destitute children whose advertisements provided parental information reported the death of a mother and more than half that of a father; one-fifth were reportedly orphans, some as a result of war.41 Desertion was the other main cause of child destitution; more than a third of children for whom parental information was provided were reported deserted by their fathers (36 per cent) and less than a quarter by their mothers (23 per cent), a small minority owing to incarceration in state asylums, hospitals or prisons.42 The high levels of parental death and desertion underlying child destitution point to the strains on rural underclass family ties in the Great Karoo.43 Claims on family were weakest for children born bastards or unwilling to submit to adult authority. The latter regimes, backed-up by corporal punishment, were often brutal to children, particularly those living with extended family or committing crimes, whose subsequent flight or conviction made them wards of the state.
The number, distribution and biography of destitute children are suggestive of the underlying political economy of child labour in the post-emancipation Great Karoo. They were, however,
39 See K. Shillington, The Colonisation of the Southern Tswana 1870–1900 (Johannesburg, Ravan, 1985); Shillington, Luka Jantjie.
40 Calculated from the Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 1856–1909.41 Ibid.42 Ibid.43 See Scully, Liberating the Family?
Hottentot32%
Unknown19%
Coloured17%
Bushman14%
African9%
Koranna4%
White3%
Other2%
Figure 3. Great Karoo destitute children by race 1856–1909. (Source: calculated from the Cape of Good Hope, Government Gazette 1856–1909.)
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only a tiny fraction of the child population of the region, which rose from 21,000 under-15s in 1865 to more than 37,000 by 1891.44 In order to assess the extent to which the glancing traces of destitute children’s lives are representative of the life histories of the majority, a greater understanding of the everyday practice of child labour in the Great Karoo after emancipation is required. This can be gained from the second new paper trace generated by the child labour reforms of the mid 1850s, the so-called ‘indentures of apprenticeship by parent’ (IAP) contracts taken out in increasing numbers by employers after 1856 to protect themselves against seizure of their child labour by the colonial state.
Indentures of Apprenticeship by Parents in the Post-Emancipation Great Karoo
In stark contrast to the metropole, where children were actively excluded from the labour market by law in the latter half of the 19th century, the Cape Colony removed all barriers to entry by abolishing the minimum age for child employment and imposing compulsory education on only a tiny minority from the 1890s.45 The 1841 Masters and Servants Act required that all child apprenticeship be committed to a written standard contract form, and directed that
every such … contract of apprenticeship shall be made and signed … in three parts, one of which parts shall be given to the master, and one to the apprentice, and the third part shall be filed and registered in the office of the magistrate by whom it is attested … an entry of it shall be made in a book, to be kept by him for that purpose, and the said third part shall be transmitted by him to the magistrate for the district, in which the master by whom such contract has been made usually resides, to be filed and registered in his office.46
Given the lengthy periods of indenture involved, these contracts had a long shelf-life, yet few have survived and no single series covers the whole period 1856–1909.47 The magistrate of Colesberg’s archive contains an apparently complete set of IAP contracts for the quarter-century c. 1869–96, with a few outliers before and after.48 Read for the trends in their aggregate features, these records make it possible to track the changing everyday forms of child labour in the Great Karoo over the half-century after emancipation.
The IAP contracts were essentially made between adults: the employer and the parent(s) or guardian (the magistrate himself acting in loco parentis for ‘destitute children’), witnessed by the state. Despite the fiction of these being agreements between equals, the contracts betrayed in both their written form and remuneration the steep race gradient of the Great Karoo, where settler employers’ monopoly over literacy and the labour market enabled them to set the terms of exchange. The settler literacy rate in Colesberg was 64.6 per cent in 1865, increasing to 69.9 per cent by 1891, compared to the near complete illiteracy of the black population in 1865, with 84.7 per cent still unable to read and write by 1891.49 Settler power was further manifested in the customary paternalistic obligations imposed on employers by the printed contract form, which required that they ‘find and provide … suitable and sufficient Meat, Drink, Clothing, Washing, Lodging, and all other things necessary and fit’ for their child labourers, in addition to the agreed remuneration.
44 Calculated from data contained in Cape of Good Hope, Census, 1865 and Cape of Good Hope, Census, 1891.45 See, for example, H. Cunningham, ‘The Decline of Child Labour: Labour Markets and Family Economies in
Europe and North America since 1830’, Economic History Review, 53, 3 (2000), pp. 409–28, for a useful critical review of the metropolitan trend.
46 Ordinance No. 1, 1841, Chapter 3, Clause XI.47 See, for example, KAB 1/BFW, 11A/1–3 (1872–1915); 1/HTN, 8/1/1 (1858–76); 1/SUT, 7/1/1 (1886–1915) and
1/WIL, 5/1 (1896–1932) for other 19th-century magistrates’ archives of IAPs from the Great Karoo.48 See KAB 1/CBG, 9/1/1–2 for the source, and T. Gutsche, The Microcosm (Cape Town, Howard Timmins, 1968),
for a deeply racist and romanticised white history of 19th-century Colesberg.49 Calculated from data contained in Cape of Good Hope, Census, 1865 and Cape of Good Hope, Census, 1891.
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The size of the Colesberg small stock flock declined gradually over the second half of the 19th century as settler pastoralism shifted from subsistence to commercial wool production. From a peak of nearly 600,000 sheep and goats in 1865, the flock shrank by 25 per cent, to less than 450,000 animals in 1891, and a further 12.5 per cent, to fewer than 400,000, by 1911.50 Colesberg settlers complained of the shortage, indiscipline and independence of black labour from the 1840s and called for more coercive masters and servants laws to remedy the situation.51 Their demand for black child labour was in inverse proportion to that of adults, rising during periods of adult labour scarcity, when children acted as a damper on the rising adult wage rates (see Figure 4).52
The only period when this damper failed was in the 1870s, when the discovery of diamonds and the resultant labour demand from the mines, and their concomitant public works programmes, including the constructing a bridge over the Orange river (opened in 1880) and a railway from Cape Town (reaching Colesberg in 1883), dramatically inflated adult male wages. The colony-wide recession in the 1880s restored adult wages to their historically ‘normal’ levels, after which the employment of children as farm (boys) and domestic (girls) servants, reinforced by the rapid spread of enclosure, effectively maintained them at this level for the remainder of the
50 Compiled from data contained in Cape of Good Hope, Census, 1865; Cape of Good Hope, Census 1891 and Union of South Africa, Census 1911.
51 See, for example, KAB, CO 4023, 146; CO 4137, 17 and CO 4141, 219 for labour problems in Colesberg.52 See, for example, J. Humphries, ‘Cliometrics, Child Labour and the Industrial Revolution’, Critical Review: A
Journal of Politics and Society, 13, 3–4 (1999), pp. 269–83, for the dampening effect of child labour on the wage rates of adult workers.
Figure 4. Magistrate of Colesberg, average adult monthly wages (shillings) and IAPs, c.1856–1909. (Source: compiled from data contained in Cape of Good Hope, Blue Book/Statistical Register, 1852–1909 and KAB, 1/CBG, 11A/1-3. The adult average monthly wages shown in shillings are those for male (M) ‘coloured’ farm servants and
female (F) ‘coloured’ domestic servants.)
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colonial period.53 By 1904, half of Colesberg was enclosed by wire fencing, and the number of black farm workers employed was 42.7 per cent lower than it had been in 1891.54
The magistrates of Colesberg signed more than 260 IAPs for children, including half of the 80 destitute children they advertised in the Government Gazette in the quarter-century after c. 1869 (see Figure 5). This suggests that every second destitute child advertised in Colesberg in the final quarter of the 19th century was reclaimed by his or her extended family, underlining the value of child labour in the region and the social stigma attached to the destitution of white children.55 Twelve of the destitute children advertised but not indentured in Colesberg were white (31 per cent), as were at least two of the four indentured by the magistrate without
53 A. Mabin, ‘The Making of Colonial Capitalism: Intensification and Expansion in the Economic Geography of the Cape Colony, South Africa, 1854–1899’, PhD thesis, Simon Fraser University, 1984, for the 1880s depression; Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 16 February 1892, Proclamation No. 46, for the implementation of the Fencing Act in Colesberg; L. van Sittert, ‘Holding the Line: The Rural Enclosure Movement in the Cape Colony, c. 1865–1909’, Journal of African History, 43, 1 (2002), pp. 95–118; F. Lilja, The Golden Fleece of the Cape: Capitalist Expansion and Labour Relations in the Periphery of Transnational Wool Production, c. 1860–1950 (Uppsala, Uppsala Universitet, 2013), for the labour-saving effect of enclosure in pastoral divisions.
54 Calculated from data contained in Cape of Good Hope, Census, 1891 and Cape of Good Hope, Census, 1904. By 1911, 90.3 per cent of Colesberg was enclosed with wire fencing.
55 See Duff, ‘Saving the Child’.
0
5
10
15
20
25
1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910
Num
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of I
APs
Year
IAP DC Ad
DC In 5 per. Mov. Avg. (IAP)
5 per. Mov. Avg. (DC Ad)
Figure 5. Magistrate of Colesberg destitute children and IAPs, 1860–1897 (Source: compiled from data contained in Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 1856–1910 and KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1-2.)Note: DC Ad = destitute children advertised; DC In = destitute children indentured.
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advertisement.56 Of the 41 destitute children indentured in Colesberg, at least half (53.7 per cent) were indentured to the person who reported them to magistrate.57
The average age of all indentured children in Colesberg was 8 years for boys and 7 for girls, yielding mean contract terms of ten and nine years, respectively, though 45 per cent of boys and one-third of girls were indentured for longer than a decade.58 The shorter average indenture of girls (12.4 per cent less than five years, 66 per cent ten years or less) reflected their greater reproductive value to the household economy.59 This importance is also evident in the fact that fewer girls (41.4 per cent) were indentured than boys (58.6 per cent), mothers signed two-thirds of girls’ indenture contracts (compared to less than half of boys’), and that boys were three-and-a-half times as likely to be indentured as ‘destitute’ than girls.60 The colonial state also recognised the gendered nature of child labour value by placing a ceiling of 16 years on the purchase of girls’ labour, two years lower than that for boys.61
The greater value of girl child labour was further reflected in the higher price it commanded in the market: nearly two-thirds of Colesberg female child indentures being remunerated in cash (compared to less than half the boys’) and fewer than one-quarter in kind (compared to 45 per cent of boys’).62 The relatively higher number of girls receiving no remuneration other than board and lodging masked a practice of informal adoption (36 per cent of unremunerated girl indentures), again underscoring the value of girls’ labour in the rural economy. Remuneration was paid in either cash or kind, averaging £2 or two ewes per annum for girls over the final quarter of the 19th century, compared with average wages for boys 25 per cent lower in cash (£1.10s) and 50 per cent higher in kind (3 ewes) (see Figures 6 and 7).63
These means averaged a wide range of different remuneration formulas, with considerable variation about the means as both parties manoeuvred for best advantage in the volatile pastoral environment: employers to defer payment for as long as possible and pay in kind, and parents for their children to be paid in standard calendar units (months or years), preferably in cash. Thus 6.3 per cent of contracts paid nothing other than the contractually stipulated board and lodging, and one-third (35.7 per cent) only at the end of the contract period.64 Although deferred payment contracts were equally divided between girls (17.1 per cent) and boys (18.2 per cent), their time spread was strikingly gendered (see Figure 8).65
The inverse relationship between deferred payment contracts for girls and the number of hawkers’ licences issued in Colesberg after 1882 (as a proxy measure of economic conditions) suggests that surges in the former reflected periods of economic stress for employers. Conversely, deferred payment contracts for boys surged during periods of economic prosperity as a check on their greater mobility at such times.
56 See KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1 Apprenticeship of Destitute Child William Fritz, 6 August 1877 and KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/2, Apprenticeship of Destitute Child Henry John Alfred Wentworth, 14 May 1880, for the two white children. Also KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1 Apprenticeship of Destitute Child Frederick Hendricks, 18 March 1873 and KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/2, Apprenticeship of Destitute Child Stuurman, 22 October 1896, for the other two indentures of destitute children not advertised in the Government Gazette.
57 Calculated from the Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 1856–1909. The name of the rapporteur and/or employer is unrecorded for one-third (29.3 per cent) of the destitute children advertised and indentured in Colesberg, meaning that the number indentured to their rapporteur may have been even higher. The minority (17.1 per cent) were not indentured to their rapporteurs. This suggests there was a strong self-interest in reporting destitute children in Colesberg and that this mechanism remained a potential means of legalising trafficked children from beyond the colony’s borders despite Act 22 of 1857.
58 Calculated from data contained in KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1–2. Ordinance 1 of 1841 permitted a maximum adult contract period of only three years, increased to five years in 1856.
59 Calculated from data contained in KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1–2.60 Calculated from data contained in Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 1856–1910 and KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1–2.61 Ordinance 1, 1841, Chapter III, Clause II and Act 22, 1856, Chapter III, Clause II.62 Calculated from data contained in KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1–2.63 Ibid.64 Ibid.65 Ibid.
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Another way of disciplining child labour was through payment in kind (see Figure 9). Payment in kind declined for both girls and boys at the end of the 1870s, indicative of the gradual monetisation of the pastoral economy, but its resurgence again in the 1890s for boy labour suggests its greater utility to employers and parents alike as a more effective check on mobility than deferred payment. Given that parents not children negotiated the terms of the indenture, and many benefited directly and often entirely from the wages earned (see below), they had as much interest as employers in children serving out their terms. That no return to
Figure 7. Magistrate of Colesberg IAPs average remuneration in kind, c.1856–1909. (Source: calculated from data contained in KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1-2.)
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payment in kind occurred for girls reflects their higher market value and lower social mobility compared to boys.
Kind was ubiquitous to indenture, the provision of ‘suitable and sufficient Meat, Drink, Clothing, Washing, Lodging, and all other things necessary and fit’ being a standard obligation on employers in all contracts. Wages in kind were different and the form of more than one-third
Figure 8. Magistrate of Colesberg IAPs with no, advanced or deferred payment, 1856–1909. (Source: calculated from data contained in Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 1856–1910 and KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1-2.)
Figure 9. Magistrate of Colesberg IAPs paid in kind, 1856–1909. (Source: calculated from data contained in Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 1856–1910 and KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1-2.)
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(36 per cent) of all Colesberg contracts.66 In the Great Karoo, wages in kind always meant livestock, almost exclusively sheep ewes and she-goats, but with a smattering of high-value ‘mares’ and ‘heifers’ among indentured boys’ wages. The earliest surviving contract from the Colesberg magistracy to remunerate a child with livestock paid the 7-year-old Sarah an advance of a single she-goat for eleven years’ indentured service.67
The value of the colony’s rural livestock currency fluctuated locally over the six decades after 1856, with major devaluations in Colesberg in the late 1860s and 1880s (see Figure 10). When the market value of sheep and goats declined, so too did settler employers’ ability to contract child labour. The way in which wages in kind were paid was also crucial to their real value in a labour market where the average indenture lasted around a decade. Contracts paid in kind almost always specified ewes (80.4 per cent), to enable interest to be earned on the capital through natural increase.68 If the animals were paid in regular (annual) instalments over the duration of the indenture, the natural increase could significantly inflate the contractually stipulated wage, particularly if the accumulating flock also produced a saleable annual wool crop. For this reason, too, contracts not only specified the animals’ sex (‘ewes’), but that they be of breeding age (‘2–4 teeth’) and wool-bearing (‘merino’ or ‘angora’).69 Some also put in writing that when paid in instalments their natural increase accrued to the child; they were
66 Ibid.67 See KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1, IAP Sarah (aged 7, 11 years), 29 September 1861.68 Calculated from data contained in KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1–2.69 See KAB 1/CBG, 9/1/1, IAP Katrina (aged 5, 16 years), 17 January 1870, for first contract to specify ‘merino’ ewes,
and KAB 1/CBG, 9/1/2, IAP, Klaas Booysen (aged 6, 15 years), 4 November 1892, for first to specify ‘2–4 teeth’.
Figure 10. Magistrate of Colesberg average livestock prices (shillings) and IAPs, 1852–1909. (Source: compiled from data contained in Cape of Good Hope, Blue Book/Statistical Register, 1852–1909 and KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1-2. The price of non-woolled African or Cape sheep closely followed that of woolled sheep and has been omitted for
clarity.)
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marked as the child’s property and enjoyed free herding and grazing on the employers’ farms.70 These refinements to the wording of contracts reveal the rural proletariat’s collective encounter with employers’ use of their monopoly on literacy to exploit loosely worded contracts to their best advantage. Deferred payment in kind not only denied any accrual of interest over the term of the contract, but, by paying all the animals in a single lump sum at the end, potentially jeopardised the capital too, if payment coincided with drought or a stock epidemic. Instalment payment, by spreading this risk over several years, was a form of insurance against the vagaries of the pastoral economy.
More than half the Colesberg child indentures were remunerated in cash (55 per cent), divided equally between girls (27.1 per cent) and boys (27.9 per cent), but with a greater synchronicity over time than in wages paid in kind (see Figure 11).71 The monetisation of wages was led and sustained by the higher-value girl children, with boys suffering a reversion to kind after the mid 1880s. Here, too, how wages were paid mattered. Deferred payment put the wage at risk to employers’ financial distress or insolvency over the long duration of a contract.72 Instalment payments were thus far preferred because they spread this risk, but were in turn vulnerable to fraud through both employers’ monopoly over, and parents’ ability to manipulate, literacy. For this reason the government savings bank and magistrate were increasingly written into contracts as guarantors of the required regular payment of cash instalments and protectors
70 See KAB 1/CBG, 9/1/1, IAP, Jephta Jantjies (aged 12, 9 years), 18 March 1875, for the first contract to specify child’s right to increase of stock, and IAP, Jephta Gordon (aged 7, 14 years), 18 August 1874, for first to specify that child’s stock be marked and have grazing rights and free herding on employer’s farm.
71 Calculated from data contained in KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1–2.72 See Ordinance 1, 1841, Chapter IV, Clauses I–IV and Act 22, 1856, Chapter IV, Clauses I–IV.
Figure 11. Magistrate of Colesberg IAPs paid in cash, 1856–1909. (Source: calculated from data contained in KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1-2.)
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of the accumulated capital plus interest, bank deposit books being vested in their care until the completion of the contract.73
The war of position between employers and parents revealed by the variable terms and endless refinements of wording in the contracts of indenture suggest that the latter were anything but passive victims of settler employers, coerced into giving up their children for nothing or next to nothing. Many indenture contracts did indeed specify the number of years in which a child’s labour was ‘free’ of wage remuneration from employers (see Figure 12).
Free labour after the early 1860s was very much an epiphenomenon of the monetisation of the labour market, a deduction made by employers from wages paid in cash rather than a measure of their absolute power in the market. Nearly four-fifths of contracting parents (77.9 per cent) indentured only one child (60.4 per cent of indentured children).74 Three-quarters of those who indentured two children, and one-third who indentured three, did so in a single calendar year, suggesting that the second half of the 1870s and first half of the 1890s were periods of severe stress for rural proletarian households.75 A minority of parents who indentured more than one child (35.1 per cent) did so over multiple years, with a mean interval of 4.9 years (7.8 for those indenturing three), suggesting the careful cultivation of long-term patrimonial relations, not immediate household stress in these instances.76
Another measure of proletarian parents’ strategic commodification of child labour was the extent to which they were able to either garnishee or appropriate children’s earnings entirely for themselves (see Figure 13). Parents claimed part or all of the wages earned by 13.7 per cent of indentured children, overwhelmingly from the higher-earning, cash-remunerated labour of
73 See KAB 1/CBG, 9/1/1, IAP, Destitute Child Hans (aged 5, 13 years), 16 November 1877, for first contractual stipulation that cash must be paid into the government savings bank, and KAB 1/CBG, 9/1/2, IAP, Hendrika Booysen (aged 15, 1 year), 13 April 1889, for first contract to stipulate that the magistrate must retain the bank deposit book.
74 Calculated from data contained in KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1–2.75 Ibid.76 See, for example, KAB 1/CBG, 9/1/1, IAP, Thys January (aged 13, 1 year), 15 December 1879; KAB 1/CBG,
9/1/2, IAP, Carl January (aged 13, 5 years), 12 September 1881, and KAB 1/CBG, 9/1/2, IAP, Esau January (aged 13, 5 years), 16 March 1891.
Figure 12. Magistrate of Colesberg IAPs total years of stipulated free labour, 1856–1909. (Source: calculated from data contained in KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1-2.)
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girls (70.3 per cent, two-thirds paid in cash).77 The relatively low number of such contracts and the disappearance of the practice after c. 1890 suggests both a residual nervousness on the part of magistrates about adult trafficking in child labour and also their increasing recognition of children as ‘free labour’ in their own right.
To guard against official corruption, magistrates were regularly rotated, no fewer than ten incumbents signing child indenture contracts in Colesberg in the quarter-century after 1869, and only once in their own favour.78 That said, one magistrate, P.A. Maeder, was the namesake of the largest employer of child labour in the division, and there were numerous complaints of bias by settlers against the magistrates and other public officials of Colesberg.79 There is, however, no evidence that a few employers monopolised the child labour supply (see Figure 14).
The 71 per cent of employers indenturing just one child accounted for 43.1 per cent of all children employed, while the 8 per cent employing four or more children employed 25.8 per cent of the total.80 E. Maeder of Middelwater, one of the two biggest employers of child labour in Colesberg, indentured five girls (with an average age of 4.8) and four boys (with an average age of 7) over the quarter-century after 1869, for a combined total of 114 years, all paid deferred wages in kind, amounting to 134 merino ewes, 20 goats and a mare.81 The other,
77 Calculated from data contained in KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1–2.78 See Cape Town Archives Repository, M. Potgieter et al., ‘Inventory of the archives of the Magistrate of Colesberg,
1837–1985’, p. 4, for a list of magistrates and their tenures, 1837–1959; 1/CBG, 9/1/1, IAP, Thys January (aged 13, 1 year), 15 December 1879, for the only child indentured to a resident magistrate, and S. Trapido, ‘Landlord and Tenant in the Colonial Economy: The Transvaal 1880–1910’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 5, 1 (1978), pp. 26–58, for an example of the conversion of public office into personal wealth through labour brokerage from the South African Republic.
79 Calculated from data contained in KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1–2, and see KAB CO 4021, 87; CO 4022, 126–7; CO 4138, 118; CO 4139, 56; CO 4143, 27, 37 and 42–3; CO 4147, 37; CO4156, 75–6; CO 4202, V40; CO 4218, S106; CO 4244, S2 and S6 and LG 541, 1399, for complaints of bias against Colesberg magistrates and other officials.
80 Calculated from data contained in KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1–2.81 See KAB 1/CBG, 9/1/1, IAP, Katrina (aged 5, 16 years), 17 January 1870; IAP, Anna (aged 6, 10 years), 31 January
1874; IAP, Klass (aged 8, 10 years), 1 July 1876; IAP, Piet (aged 2, 16 years), 13 July 1876; IAP, Dora (aged 2, 14 years), 7 March 1878; 1/CBG, 9/1/2, IAP, Griet (aged 2, 12 years), 21 June 1890; IAP, Flora Matiwes (aged 9, 12 years), 22 March 1893; IAP, Philip Koopman (aged 7, 14 years), 17 December 1894 and IAP, Carolus (aged 11, 10 years), 20 April 1896.
Figure 13. Magistrate of Colesberg IAPs payment of wages to parents, 1856–1909. (Source: calculated from data contained in KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1-2.)
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J.H. Badenhorst of Meerdewyk, indentured six girls (average age 5.3) and two boys (average age 7) over the same period, for a total of 86 years, at a cost of £34 and 30 sheep.82
Both Maeder and Badenhorst remunerated their child labour at well below the average rate. Their ability to secure child labour, and particularly high-value girls, in such abundance and at such a discounted rate readily suggests coercion, but can equally be read as a measure of their success in attracting clients. Neither Maeder nor Badenhorst employed destitute children, nor did two-thirds of the other Colesberg ‘big men’ employing more than three children.83 To these men, children were not just cheap labour but also tribute from clients who were themselves ‘big men’ among the rural proletariat, with child labour to spare sufficient to invest it in building their own patronage networks by offering it at below market value as tribute to the big house.
Three-quarters of destitute children were indentured to employers who employed fewer than four children, but even these were of sufficient means to employ child labour, subject to the terms of a written contract supervised by the state. Patrimonialism, not coercion, was the primary organising mechanism of the formal child labour market superintended by the colonial state, with less than 5 per cent of written indenture contracts failing to run to term.84 Coercion was more a feature of the informal child labour market, where tenants ceded children grudgingly and unprotected by law to the big house, in terms of oral contracts open to contestation and invisible to the magistrate except when ruptured by excessive demands or violence and recorded in the criminal records, through which exceptional lens historians have traditionally read the post-emancipation Cape countryside.
82 See KAB 1/CBG, 9/1/1, IAP, Lena (aged 4, 12 years), 8 April 1871; IAP, Griet (aged 2, 14 years), 9 February 1874; IAP, Doortjie (aged 7, 9 years), 18 June 1877 and 1/CBG, 9/1/2, IAP, Serina (aged 3, 13 years), 22 April 1880; IAP, Jan (aged 7, 11 years), 22 April 1880; IAP, Wilhelmina Pretorius (aged 9, 7 years), 12 October 1886; IAP, Hans Damaras (aged 7, 11 years), 4 August 1892 and IAP, Mina Jukskei (aged 7, 9 years), 9 May 1896.
83 Calculated from data contained in KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1–2. Of the four big men employing destitute children, only one employed them exclusively, and that in the 1890s.
84 Calculated from data contained in KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1–2.
1 Child71%
2 children13%
3 children8%
4 children3%
5 children3% 6 children
1%
70%
80%
9 children1%
Figure 14. Magistrate of Colesberg number of indentured children per employer, 1860–1897. (Source: calculated from data contained in KAB, 1/CBG, 9/1/1-2.)
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762 Lance van Sittert
Children for Ewes: Child Labour in the Post-Emancipation Great Karoo
It would be wrong to read the declining numbers of ‘destitute children’ advertised by the Great Karoo magistrates over the half-century after 1856 as indicative of either the emergence of modern ‘childhood’ or the belated disappearance of child labour from the pastoral economy.85 Destitute children were the weakest and most exposed members of the rural underclass scoured off by capitalism’s glacial advance over the social bedrock of the Great Karoo, and any assessment of the latter’s progress must be made instead from the indenture of apprenticeship by parent contracts, resurgent again in Colesberg by the end of the 1890s, after the sharp depression of the late 1880s. These reflected the continued importance of child labour to both settler and proletarian rural households seeking to harness the nascent labour power of the latter’s children as a subsidy to their own (re)production, and utilising the colonial state to make a market in which children could be exchanged.
That the colonial state was anything but an impartial broker is a commonplace of the existing scholarship, and cannot be disputed on the evidence of the Masters and Servants Act and the contracts of indenture derived from it. To assume, however, as the existing scholarship does from its reading of the criminal record, that unremitting settler coercion was the primary governor of rural social relations in the Great Karoo is to commit the dual fallacy of mistaking the exceptions for the rules and idealising the proletarian household as a haven from exploitation for children. Proletarian households, too, looked on children as labour to be utilised, unpaid within the household or exchanged in the market to best advantage. The latter may have been structured in favour of settler employers, but rural proletarian parents still found room for manoeuvre within its written contract form to strategically subsidise and supplement their own household production through wages and patrimonial networks.
This room to manoeuvre existed precisely because the Great Karoo was integrated late, violently and unevenly into the colonial economy. This left space for a rural proletariat to pursue independent production as farm tenants or squatters on public land, made a market for black child labour in settler households, and allowed these two strategies to be combined with adult waged labour in dialectical fashion, simultaneously enabling and constraining capitalism’s halting march over the harsh terrain of the Great Karoo. To follow its tracks through time and space requires careful reconstruction and critical reading of its everyday rather than its extraordinary traces in the archive. These can be found not it the sensational violent excesses of occasional criminal trials, from which post-emancipation labour relations have been largely written, but in the ordinary paperwork of local magistrates, quite literally hidden in the ‘fine print’ of contracts.
Lance van Sittert
Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch, 7701, South Africa. E-mail: [email protected]
85 See Duff, ‘Saving the Child’; Duff, ‘Onschuldig Vermaak’; Duff, ‘Unto Children’s Children’, for the invention of white ‘childhood’ in the late 19th-century Cape Colony.
