Accommodation and Resistance: The Housing of Cape Town’s Enslaved and Freed Population Before and After Emancipation

Immediately after the emancipation of Cape Town’s enslaved population on 1 December 1838, the former enslaved moved en masse out of the houses in which they had previously lived. In this article, we investigate why they did so, where they went and how the exodus reshaped the social geography of the city. We argue that their departure from their former owners’ houses was a rejection of their slave past and that they refused to sleep under the same roofs as heretofore. Rather, generally on the basis of the networks which had linked the enslaved to the manumitted, particularly among the Muslims, they found lodging space in highly congested alleys (steegjes) and courtyards and also in the cellars of larger houses. These were to be found, above all, close to the harbour, on the slopes of Signal Hill, in what was to be known as the Bo’kaap, and, increasingly, in newly built cheap houses to the East of the old city centre, around Hanover Street. We use the rate rolls of the Cape Town municipality for 1842 and 1849 to provide maps of the settlement of the newly free and how this changed in the course of the 1840 s. We demonstrate that the areas in which the ex-enslaved men came to live were invariably those where the value of the dwellings was lowest, and, furthermore, that the levels of segregation increased over the period. In contrast to this, however, there was a perceptible move of women out of the poorer districts of the city, which we attribute to the continuation under new circumstances of the pattern of young enslaved women marrying out of slavery.