Satyendra Peerthum,
Historian, Writer, & Lecturer
On Thursday, 1st February 2024, as we celebrate the abolition of slavery and the triumph of human freedom over human bondage, it is important to have an academic discussion and reflection on the meaning and significance of colonial slavery and freedom. According to Orlando Patterson, an Afro-Jamaican slave historian, in his landmark book published more than forty years ago, Slavery and Social Death, observed that slavery had existed at one time or another in around 178 cultures, societies, and civilizations throughout recorded world history over the past 6,000 years. 
It is possible that “there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or slaveholders”. Slavery, as a mode of production or as an economic system, was known to every ethnic group and human society in world history. In one form or another, it still exists to this day in some parts of the world. Thus, without a doubt, slavery may be described as a universal and global institution in world history.
Slavery, Violence, & Slave owner Paternalism
Between the 1970s and the early 2000s, David Brion Davis, an American slave historian, explained that there were three main features of slavery: slaves are the property of another person, their will is subjected to the authority of the slave-owners, and their labor belongs to their owners. Slaves either have no rights or very few rights and freedoms and they can be sold, moved, and inherited without regards to their feelings. In any country or society where slavery existed, the slaves formed part of a “social stratum” and they constituted a “class at the very bottom of the social ladder”. Slaves were almost always severely mistreated, brutalized, and sometimes even killed by their owners. 
Therefore, it is not surprising that colonial slavery in the former Cape Colony in South Africa, just like in other contemporary slave societies, such as Mauritius in the Indian Ocean and Jamaica in the Caribbean region, including the other 15 former slaves colonies in the British Empire, was extremely cruel and brutal. After all, violence was the bedrock upon which slavery rested thus, violence was inherent in slavery. The lives of the slaves, “in all spheres”, including housing, food, and their right to visit family and friends was “dominated by the arbitrary violence of the master”. Arbitrary violence was a very common feature among slaveholders in the Western Cape located in the former Cape Colony in South Africa. This situation also prevailed in the slave and plantation societies of Mauritius and Jamaica.
Between the 1960s and 1980s and after, Eugene Genovese, a major American slave historian, explained that paternalism emerged from the need of slave owners to discipline and give moral justification for the exploitation of their slaves. At the former Cape Colony, as well as in Mauritius and Jamaica, the slaveholders used paternalism to legitimize the subjugation of their slaves by “infantilizing them” and treated them as “permanent minors” in their households. This was also almost the same situation for the slaves who lived outside the households of their masters, on the wheat and wine estates or farms in the Cape Colony and on the sugar plantations and small estates in Mauritius and Jamaica. 
In these three slave societies, the majority of the slave owners saw themselves as the father, or the “patriarch”, in their households, as well as the absolute rulers of their farms or sugar estates, and the slaves as being their “children”. Most of the slaveholders firmly believed that they had the right to discipline and punish their slaves as they saw fit and they did not have to answer to anyone for their actions, not even to the colonial authorities. This attitude formed part of their slaveholding mentality, or “habits of mind”, which perpetuated slave-holding practices like arbitrary corporal punishment on the slaves.
In general, the belief of the slave owners in paternalism and their habits of mind form part of their “world-view” or ‘world-views”, or the way in which they saw and understood the world. Furthermore, the ideas and theories that guided their actions are embedded in these world-views. In Mauritius, at the former Cape Colony, and in Jamaica, the colonial officials, slave holders, and colonial laws clearly acknowledged that violence played a central role in the maintenance of the master-slave relationship.
Violence was the chief means used by the slave owners to deny “the possibility of equality between themselves and their slaves”.One good example would be the fact that in many slave societies, the slave owners consciously used to whip their slaves not only as a way of punishing them but, also to remind the slaves of their subordinate position. Thus, whipping was used as an instrument to discipline the slaves as well as a form of social control over them.
After all, Orlando Patterson points out that “there is no known slaveholding society where the whip was not considered an indispensable instrument”. Violence was “crucial to the survival of the master-slave relationship from moment to moment” and it played an important role in the continuation of slavery in slave societies from one generation to the next. Indeed, it goes without saying, that slavery was an inhumane system which physically, psychologically, socially and economically oppressed its victims.
The Resistance and Resilience of the Slaves
It is evident why many slaves at the former Cape Colony in South Africa, as well as in Mauritius and Jamaica, resented slavery so much. These slaves definitely did not accept in a passive way, neither the role which paternalism had set up for them, nor their master’s reading of paternalism. Thus, they actively resisted and rejected, as much as possible, the imposition of their owners’ paternal authority and their subordinate status as children. Therefore, it is not surprising that Herbert Aptheker, a famous American slave historian who was one of the pioneers in the study of slave resistance in the United States through his groundbreaking work American Negro Slave Revolts published in 1943, once declared, that it was resistance and resilience and certainly not acquiescence and total subordination which forms the core of the history of slavery.
After all, in societies where slavery had firmly been established for a long time, such as in the slave colonies of the British Empire, slave resistance was not the exception, but the norm. In his illuminating book, Black People in the British Empire, published more than forty years ago, Peter Fryer explained: “Nowhere in the British Empire were black people passive victims. On the contrary, they were everywhere active resisters. Far from being docile, they resisted slavery and colonialism in every way open to them. Their resistance and resilience took many different forms both individual and collective”.
In British slave colonies like Mauritius, the Cape Colony, and Jamaica, there existed a long tradition of resistance. In these slave societies, the slaves actively resisted such things as being forbidden from having family relations, being denied the fruits of their labour, arbitrary punishment, and having virtually no freedom of movement. Furthermore, some of them even completely rejected their subordinate status as slaves and they sought a better life for themselves as free individuals in these three colonial societies as well as in the other 15 slave colonies of the British Empire.
It is evident that the aim of many of these colonial slaves was the same as all other unfree and subordinate social groups in world history, basically the general desire for the freedom to make a better life for themselves as free individuals. Since the slaves were determined to be free, they were willing to do almost anything to achieve this grand and noble objective. Furthermore, through their acts of resistance, they also helped to shape the slave societies in which they lived, such as in Mauritius, at the former Cape Colony in South Africa, and in Jamaica. After all, as Eric Williams, a Trinidadian historian and former Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean, in his magum opus Capitalism and Slavery published in 1944, explained that during the last years of British colonial slavery, the slaves may be considered as being “the most dynamic and powerful social force in the colonies”. Without a doubt, this was one of the major reasons which led to their emancipation such as on the 1st February 1835 in Mauritius.
Reflections on Slavery and Freedom
One of the most important legacies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the twentieth century was “the concept of individual freedom and the rejection of slavery and human bondage”. This individual freedom essentially means self-possession or possession of oneself, freedom of action, and autonomy of the individual in forging and maintaining relationships with others. It was already shown that these were some of the basic human rights that the slaveowners always denied their slaves and these were the same rights which the slaves struggled to obtain which we celebrate each 1st February in Mauritius.
It is evident that the opposite of slavery is freedom and when compared to a slave, a free man cannot legally be sold, bought, inherited, and physically mistreated by another free individual. A person of free status could choose his/her job, employer, and lifestyle, and he/she could own and sell his/her property. A free man or woman could also marry, have children, and have a family of their own. Thus, it is evident: “In contrast to freedom”, “slavery means economic, social, and political deprivation, legal impotence and oppression” for the slaves.
Thomas Holt, an American slave historian, eloquently explains that “freedom emerges not as just a state of being or even a relationship” but, rather, as a process of becoming something, which can only be achieved through hard work and struggle. As Holt indicates the slaves resisted in various ways and they were resilient and were determined to be free because for them “freedom was something to be brought into being, created, and struggled for rather than merely accepted or taken for granted”. It is this very concept and idea of freedom that each 1st February we commemorate and celebrate in Mauritius and which will continue for many years to come.
Accroche
In general, the belief of the slave owners in paternalism and their habits of mind form part of their “world-view” or ‘world-views”, or the way in which they saw and understood the world. Furthermore, the ideas and theories that guided their actions are embedded in these world-views. In Mauritius, at the former Cape Colony, and in Jamaica, the colonial officials, slave holders, and colonial laws clearly acknowledged that violence played a central role in the maintenance of the master-slave relationship.