Ward 2 Development Forum

The Caledon Code

Properties3
descriptionThe proclamation of 1 November 1809 that required every Khoekhoe person at the Cape to have a fixed home, carry a pass, and work under a registered contract. It turned Khoekhoe labour into a market fenced in by law, until Ordinance 50 repealed it in 1828.
tagstheme/heritage, lang/en
aliasesCaledon Code, Hottentot Proclamation, Proclamation of 1809, Code of 1809

11 min read

On 1 November 1809 the governor of the Cape, Lord Caledon, issued a proclamation on the Khoekhoe people of the colony [IC]. It required every Khoekhoe person to have a fixed place of abode, to carry a pass to move about, and to work for a farmer only under a written contract registered with an official [IC]. It also gave Khoekhoe workers the right to be paid and to complain against a master who withheld wages [IC]. It is known as the Caledon Code. For almost twenty years it decided where Khoekhoe families in the colony could live, whom they could work for, and whether they could leave. This page belongs with the Markets pages because the code governed a trading function: the exchange of work for wages. See Money and Land.

What the letters in square brackets mean

Facts on this page are followed by a tag that shows where they come from.

  • [IC] Independently Corroborated. Confirmed by at least two sources that do not depend on each other, or by an official record such as a law.
  • [MS] Mission-Sourced. Comes from Moravian mission records, including the missionaries’ diaries, or from one party’s own documents or statements.
  • [TBV] To Be Verified. Seems likely, but nobody has confirmed it yet.

Reading this page

The Markets pages follow the M of the TIME model: exchange at a price. The facts carry tags. The reading of what the code meant, in the section Reading the code through TIME, is the Forum’s interpretation and carries no tag.

About the name

In its own time the proclamation was called the “Hottentot Proclamation”, and historians still call it the “Hottentot Code”. “Hottentot” was the colonial name for the Khoekhoe, and it is now considered offensive. This wiki uses the name only here, to explain it, and otherwise calls the law the Caledon Code. See Khoekhoe.

At a glance

WhenIssued 1 November 1809; strengthened in 1812; repealed by Ordinance 50 in 1828 [IC]
WhoThe colonial government, Khoekhoe workers, and the colonists who employed them [IC]
What was exchangedWork, for wages and “the necessities of life” [IC]
How it workedFixed abode, passes, written contracts registered with officials, and complaints to magistrates [IC]

Before the code

Khoekhoe labour on the farms. By the end of the 1700s most Khoekhoe in the western Cape had lost their land and herds, and many worked on colonial farms [IC]. The missionaries’ diaries of the 1790s show how that work was held in place around Baviaanskloof, now Genadendal. Farmers kept back Khoekhoe children who went to the mission school “against their parents’ will” [MS]. Workers came home from the harvest owing the farmers as much as they had earned [MS]. In 1794 the diarists recorded that the children of a slave father and a Khoekhoe mother had “formerly” been bound to serve the slave’s owner until the age of 25, and that the authorities had abolished this [MS]. In December 1794 the company’s government ordered that the mission take in no Khoekhoe person who had served a farmer without a certificate from that farmer, a paper that worked much like a pass [MS]. See From the Farm to the Classroom.

Rebellion. From 1799 to 1803 Khoekhoe servants on the eastern frontier rose against the colonists, sometimes in alliance with the Xhosa [IC]. The historian Wayne Dooling describes it as “a revolt of farm servants” [TBV]. It convinced the colony’s rulers that relations between masters and servants had to be regulated [TBV].

A Dutch blueprint. In 1801 the Fiscal, Willem Stephanus van Ryneveld, drew up a plan for the colony’s police that Dooling calls “a blueprint of Caledon’s Code” [TBV]. Van Ryneveld wrote that the Khoekhoe, having no cattle “nor any other means of subsistence”, could “not but be servants to the farmers” [TBV]. He is probably the Fiscal “Reinveld” of the Genadendal diaries, who in January 1795 told a group of the mission’s Khoekhoe that he would gladly let them keep their cattle at the mission if the Commissioner allowed it [MS].

The end of the slave trade. In 1807 Britain banned the slave trade, and the import of enslaved people to the Cape ended [IC]. One account says the code was made “to satisfy the labour needs of white farmers” [IC].

Diaries: A363595, lines 6687 to 6732; A363595, lines 7058 to 7097; A363595, lines 7975 to 8006; A363595, lines 12597 to 12683; A363595, lines 13983 to 14134

What the code said

The proclamation of 1 November 1809 set out these rules [IC]:

  • A fixed abode. Every Khoekhoe person had to have a fixed place of abode, registered with the local official.
  • Passes. A Khoekhoe person moving about the country needed a pass from an employer or an official. Any colonist could demand to see it. Anyone without one could be treated as a vagrant.
  • Contracts. Work for a month or longer needed a written contract, made out in three copies and registered before the field cornet or the Landdrost.
  • Service. Servants were to serve “diligently and honestly, with proper submission” [TBV].
  • Pay and keep. Masters had to pay the agreed wages and provide “the necessities of life”, not counting alcohol [TBV]. Servants could complain to the authorities if wages were withheld.
  • Debt. A master could not hold a servant for a debt run up through advances. He had to recover it through the courts [TBV].
  • Punishment. Masters kept a right of “domestic correction”. Proven ill-treatment could be fined 10 to 50 rixdollars, and ill-treatment with mutilation was to be prosecuted [TBV].
  • Explaining the law. Field cornets had to gather at least one Khoekhoe servant from each house and explain “the full meaning” of the proclamation [TBV].

How it worked in practice

The officials who enforced the code were often farmers who needed labour themselves [TBV]. Dooling found that some Landdrosts altered contracts after they had been drawn up, and that their own names appeared on contracts “made in their own favour” [TBV]. Officials also had wide power to separate Khoekhoe children from their parents [TBV].

In 1812 Lord Caledon’s successor, Sir John Cradock, added the apprenticeship proclamation. It let a colonist who had kept a Khoekhoe child on his farm for its first eight years keep the child in unpaid service for ten more [IC]. Dooling counts at least 2,295 children apprenticed between 1812 and 1823, out of 3,933 born in the districts he studied, and writes that the law bound whole households to the farms [TBV].

The code also gave Khoekhoe workers a way to complain. Circuit courts took judges from Cape Town into the country districts from 1811 or 1812. Sources differ on whether Caledon or Cradock set them up [TBV]. The court’s tour of 1812, which settlers called the “Black Circuit”, heard charges brought largely through missionaries. Seventeen colonists were charged with murder, and nearly a hundred leading families were implicated. None was convicted of murder, and those found guilty of ill-treatment received light sentences [TBV]. In 1822 a colonist named Louis Daniel Smit was hanged for beating his Khoekhoe servant to death [TBV].

The end of the code

Missionaries, above all John Philip of the London Missionary Society, campaigned against the code in the 1820s [IC]. In 1828 Ordinance 50 repealed it [IC]. The ordinance removed the pass requirement for Khoekhoe and other free people of colour, let them choose their employers, allowed them to own land, and gave them equality before the law [IC]. A companion ordinance, Ordinance 49 of the same year, kept passes for Africans from beyond the colony [TBV].

The freedom did not last unchanged. After slavery ended in 1834 to 1838, the Masters and Servants Ordinance of 1841 again made breaking a labour contract a criminal offence [IC]. It was replaced by the Masters and Servants Act 15 of 1856 [IC]. See The Laws That Shaped the Valley.

In the valley

The code applied to the Khoekhoe families of the whole colony, including those in and around the valley. The diaries of Genadendal end in 1805, so they do not show the code at work there. What they show are the practices it later put into law: workers bound by debt, children held back by farmers, and a certificate from a farmer needed before a worker could move to the mission [MS].

Genadendal had more than 1,000 Khoekhoe residents by 1806 [MS]. Mission stations were among the few places where Khoekhoe families could have a recognised home without serving a farmer [TBV]. Under the code, that made the mission a fixed abode of a different kind: a place where a family’s home, and its children, did not belong to a farm. The town of Caledon, named after the code’s author in 1813, became the seat of the district that took in Genadendal and Greyton [TBV].

Reading the code through TIME

This section is the Forum’s interpretation.

Ending movement. The Khoekhoe way of life, the Tribes form, rested on moving with the herds and the seasons. The code made staying in one place a legal duty and moving a matter of permission. It pinned people down so that the colony’s Institutions could see them, count them, and hold them to contracts.

A market fenced in by law. The code treated Khoekhoe work as something exchanged for wages under contract: the Markets form. Yet the workers were not free to take their labour elsewhere. They needed a pass to look for another master, and without one they were vagrants. It was a labour market built and fenced by Institutions, in which the price and the place of work were largely set for the worker.

The state above the master. Dooling reads the code another way as well. Before 1809 a farmer ruled his servants largely by his own authority. The code put a written law, officials, and courts between master and servant. Masters could be fined, taken to court, and in the end hanged. In the terms of the TIME model, the Institutions form reached past the farm gate for the first time. That same reach made the code a means of control and a means of protection at once.

Who gained and who lost. Farmers gained a steady supply of labour, secured by law, at a time when they could no longer buy slaves [TBV]. Khoekhoe workers gained written contracts, a right to their wages, and courts to complain to, but lost the freedom to move and, after 1812, often the right to decide where their children would grow up [IC]. Their labour was not unpaid, but its price was set on terms they did not choose.

What is still open

  • Whether residents of Genadendal needed passes under the code to work on nearby farms, and how the mission’s residents were registered.
  • How the code was enforced in the Overberg, and by whom.
  • How many Khoekhoe children in the Caledon and Swellendam districts were apprenticed under the law of 1812.
  • Whether the rule the diarists described in 1794, that children of slave fathers and Khoekhoe mothers served the slave’s owner until 25, had in fact been abolished, and when.
  • How Khoekhoe families in the valley remembered the years of passes.

Have your say

If your family holds stories or papers from the years of passes and contracts, contact the moderators via How to Submit.

References

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