Milk and Bondage: Enslaved Wet Nurses in the Eighteenth‐Century Cape Colony

This article examines the social history of enslaved wet nurses in the eighteenth‐century Cape Colony, arguing that the romanticised depiction of these women within settler households was not a softening of the system of slavery but an integral part of how it functioned. Drawing on criminal records from the Court of Justice, petitions to the Council of Police and church council records and read against the grain of their colonial production, the article centres on three case studies: Jacomijn, whose lactating body was hired out while her own infant was left without care, resulting in the child's death; Sara, whose wet‐nursing labour was entangled with sexual exploitation by a European settler and whose child remained legally the property of her enslaver; and Hanna and Catryn, a mother and daughter rented out across two generations by the Dutch East India Company, whose manumission was secured through an exchange of enslaved men. Using the analytical framework of dependency, the article demonstrates how the affective language of colonial documents (from Lady Anne Barnard's sketch of an ‘imperfect sleeping Madonna’ to the Dutch term minnemoer, meaning ‘love mother’) operated in concert with, rather than in tension with, the transactional logic of reproductive labour extraction.