Liberated Africans in Cape Colony in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

From 1808 Africans aboard slave ships bound for the Americas were seized by the British navy off the West African coast and taken to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where they were adjudged prizes of His Majesty and their human cargoes released. John Peterson and others have provided vivid accounts of what happened to the Liberated Africans on the Freetown peninsula, and how a Creole society evolved there.1 But the fact that Africans were landed at the southern tip of the continent in a similar way has gone almost unnoticed. In recent years scholars have at best made brief reference to those called at the Cape,2 and neither their numbers nor what became of them has received close attention. The five thousand British settlers who arrived at the Cape in 1820 have been studied in great detail. At least as many Prize Negroes were taken into service at the Cape over the four decades after 1808, and they played a not unimportant role in the transition from slave to free labor following the end of British involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.