Working Children

Abstract

There is a lacuna in the scholarship on child labor in Africa in general and the Cape Colony in particular between the abolition of slavery in the 1830s and the start of state regulation of childhood around the turn of the twentieth century. This is not for want of sources. Historians of the Cape colony have traditionally mined the criminal records to divine relations of production in the postemancipation countryside, which they have unsurprisingly characterized as marred by high levels of violence between settlers and black labor. There is a danger in the reliance on the criminal records of (mis)taking the exception for the rule or of doing history “backward.” The records generated by the implementation of the Masters and Servants Acts offer a much needed corrective to the criminal record, documenting as they do the everyday relations of production in the postemancipation colonial Cape countryside rather than the exceptional moments of breakdown. Read for their aggregate trends, they provide a rich and illuminating source on ordinary child employment practices and suggest the fashioning of postemancipation rural black childhood as manual labor. The surviving archives of two Great Karoo magistracies, Beaufort West and Colesberg, contain the indenture contracts of more than 550 children over the half century after 1856, two-thirds of whom were indentured by their own families and the other third by magistrates acting in loco parentis for either “destitute children” or “juvenile offenders.”