Doctoral Degrees (History)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (History) by Author "Bergemann, Karl Jason"

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    The runaways : a study of enslaved, apprenticed and indentured labour flight at the Cape in the emancipation era, 1830-42
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Bergemann, Karl Jason; Fourie, Johan; Fourie, Johan, 1982-; Ekama, Kate; Mitchell, Laura; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of History.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Desertion at the Cape is a “tradition” that spanned centuries and encompassed scores of runaways from different social strata. This thesis uncovers the lived experiences of enslaved, apprenticed and indentured labourers in one of the colony’s most crucial defining moments: the emancipations of the enslaved in the 1830s. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods to tell their stories, it creates a further nuanced landscape of desertion by placing these actors at the centre of the study and showing both individual and collective biographies of labourers at the very lowest end of the hierarchical scale. Using two primary sources, the Government Gazette, the mouthpiece of the colonial government, and De Zuid Afrikaan, the first Dutch colonial newspaper in the colony, runaway advertisements have been extracted and collated into two unique datasets. From these advertisements a collection of variables has been deduced and grouped to provide investigations of broad themes within runaway advertisement. These offer insight into themes of demography and personal description; sightings, advertiser supposition and runaway skillsets; information about whereabouts and possible avenues of pursuit; flight cycles, advertising trends and advertorial lag; and finally, information on advertisers themselves, including the locations from where runaways escaped, the rewards offered for their recapture and the masters who advertised for their return. The thesis frames an investigation into the motivations of escape as well as the mechanisms that allowed escapees to create new lives on the run, suggesting a new mode of flight in the form of “assimilation marronage”, where, unlike runaways in earlier periods of the colony’s history, escapees lived within the framework of colonial society rather than escaped it outright. Further questions concerning who the runaways were, when they chose to run, where they ran to and from, what they did while on the run, as well as who placed the advertisements and what rewards were offered were asked of the sources. Overall, the thesis adds to a global narrative of disaffection and reformulation of social existence, positing that runaways at the Cape took necessary steps to alleviate their social deaths and showed that life in the colony was more porous in this state of legal transition than it had ever been before.