Theorizations of slavery in the Indian Ocean world often draw upon analyses of enslavement in the anglophone Black Atlantic world, productively highlighting continuities between systems of unfree labor migration across oceans. This chapter, however, focuses mainly on how enslavement in the Indian Ocean diverged from Atlantic models, and the implications this has had for the literatures of slavery. If the anglophone Black Atlantic can be considered a sphere of autobiographical speech and legal silence, the Indian Ocean world of enslavement is one of autobiographical silence, but legal speech. The rich heteroglossia of Indian Ocean legal records stands in contrast to portrayals of the Atlantic Ocean slave trade as a process of silencing and erasure. The existence of these legal records affects the representation of the enslaved in later, fictional narratives of slavery, which share an interest in voice, testimony, and the law. After a brief summary of the historical contexts of slavery in the Indian Ocean world, this chapter examines depictions of enslaved voices in legal archives and fictional works. The final section turns to literatures of indenture, a more recent form of coerced labor migration, to suggest why we should not consider indenture as simply a continuation of slavery.

This chapter examines the use of martial law powers during four frontier wars against the Xhosa people, in 1835, 1846, 1850 and 1877, and two rebellions by mixed-race ‘Hottentot’ and Griqua people, and discusses the debates over the nature of martial law which followed. During the first two wars, martial law powers were largely used to facilitate the raising of troops, but questions were raised about whether martial law could be used to govern newly acquired areas. As the debates over the status of the territory east of the Keiskamma river showed, martial law could not be used to govern land incorporated into the colony, but it could be used to administer conquered lands. Martial law powers were also used to conduct trials and imprison rebels in 1851 and 1878, which led to debates between law officers in London and Cape Town regarding the nature of these powers. In these debates, the law officers endorsed the English common lawyers’ view which had emerged after 1865. A strong commitment to the rule of law was also expressed by the Cape Supreme Court when dealing with the case of Griqua prisoners, detained without trial at Cape Town after the rebellion of 1878.

In Africa, the Dutch settled at the Cape of Good Hope, originally planned as a stop-over for the East Indiamen en route to and from Asia, in addition to the conquest and construction of several forts in present-day Ghana, which became important in the Dutch slave trade. In some ways the Dutch expansion in the Atlantic resembled that of England and France. All three founded settlement and plantation colonies and all three, together with Portugal, established some footholds on the African coast. The Dutch in South Africa, however, incorporated large numbers of foreigners both as settlers and as soldiers.

In the history of southern Africa, the Irish are rarely mentioned as a distinct ethnic group. They are instead subsumed under larger categories such as ‘white’ or ‘English’. There was, however, a significant Irish Catholic presence in the region and especially in the Cape Colony. This chapter examines that community, its development, and its relationship to other groups, both European and indigenous.