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This is a Literature Review study.

August 26, 2025

The Runaway Child: Identity Subterfuge and Employment Opportunity in an Emancipation Era Cape Colony, 1830–42

Key Points

Runaway children employed strategies of subterfuge to escape and find work, contributing to their resistance against slavery.
Key data highlights the demographics of child runaways and their tactics, as recorded in colonial advertisements.
Analysis of runaway advertisements from two major colonial newspapers provides insight into children's resistance and plight.
These findings indicate significant aspects of everyday resistance during the transitional period of emancipation in the Cape Colony.

Abstract

Abstract: Though the trade in enslaved persons was abolished throughout the British empire in 1807, slavery remained the primary labor source in the Cape Colony until final emancipation in December 1838. Both before and after emancipation, desertion featured as one of the primary forms of everyday resistance available to coerced workers, including the scores of children that appeared in runaway advertisements in colonial newspapers. Using two of the Cape's largest advertising platforms, the De Zuid Afrikaan and the Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette , this paper highlights the demographic make-up of child runaways and the strategies of subterfuge they used to operate within the frameworks of colonial society.

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