Just as cultural heterogeneity and geographic dispersal among burgher households delayed the creation of a common slave culture, individual slave owners' awareness of broad differences in the origin of their slaves occasioned the wholesale construction of slave stereotypes by origin. Such stereotypes, arising at the household level, may best be seen in the varying auction prices of slaves from different origins. Premiums based on origin were not unique to the Cape, as was recognized at the time. Philip Curtin and other scholars have also noted that stereotyping by origin characterized all New World slave societies:
"Slave buyers distinguished between African cultures following a set of stereotyped "national characters" highlighting traits that seemed important to slave owners—industry, proneness to rebellion, faithfulness, honesty, or physical suitability for fieldwork. Such stereotypes differed through time and from one colony to another, but they could have a marked influence on the price offered in particular American markets."
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The same stereotyping process occurred in the Cape, though here, where the slave population was more heterogeneous than in any other slave society, stereotyping rose to unprecedented, even fantastic, levels.
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Settlers' and officials' perceptions, subject to a variety of influences, appear to have been the most decisive factor in stereotyping slaves and assigning slaves' occupations. Otto Mentzel, for instance, noted: 'Female slaves from Bengal or the coast of Coromandel, from Surat and Macassar, are in great demand, because they have a reputation as skilful needlewomen.
Imported women slaves from these areas were set to needlecraft within the house rather than used in agricultural work. This set a pattern: Their skills in fact earned all other slave women the right to stay out of agriculture.
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Initial stereotypical notions of eastern women slaves in the western Cape had important long-term consequences for the role of all slave women in later Cape Households. Even African women imported as slaves in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were likewise employed within the Cape household. With respect to the influence of stereotypes on gender roles, the Cape also stands in striking contrast to the New World, where African slave women, from the outset of colonisation, were immediately placed to work in the field.
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Hudson describes a division of labour at the Cape based entirely on perceived attributes of origin. It is doubtful that such geographical/ethnic stereotypes approached reality, given that societies other than the Cape developed different stereotypes for the same people. And once started, these stereotypes were constantly updated within each host sociert, each stereotype having an arbitrary history of its own. By the nineteenth century, Cape householders considered it "natural" that Malagasy and African slaves worked in the fields, that Indonesian slaves were the artisans, and that Indian slaves were the service workers of the colony.
Shell, R.C.H. (1994). 'The Tower of Babel: The slave trade and creolisation at the Cape, 1652 - 1834' in Eldredge, E.A. and Morton, F. (eds) Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labour on the Dutch Frontier, pp. 19 - 22.