Crossing Oceans: The Asian Diaspora and Enslavement in Dutch Colonial Cape Town (1652–1795)

Paper Abstract: When discussing the Asian diaspora in South Africa, the focus is usually on the indentured labourers brought from India by the British to work on South Africa's sugar plantations and mines in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, the diaspora began much earlier, with the Dutch East India Company establishing a port at Table Bay in South Africa in 1652. Jan van Riebeeck, the first Dutch colonial administrator, requested the importation of enslaved labour. This led the Dutch to begin trafficking people from areas around the Indian Ocean to the Cape, which continued until the end of the Dutch colonial role in South Africa in 1795. This forced migration included displaced people from South and Southeast Asia. The Dutch also sent exiled political leaders from uprisings in Indonesia to the Cape. Chinese merchants can also be found in the sources. These enslaved, freed and free people from Asia in Cape Town in the 17th and 18th centuries will be the focus of my presentation. I would like to explore and discuss the following questions at the conference: How can we identify people of Asian descent in colonial records? Can we find evidence of shared cultural or religious identity formation and forms of creolization between the Asian and African populations in Cape Town?