HIST 382 Chapter reading: Reading Protesting the Vagrancy Ordinance
Document Summary
Six years before the abolition of slavery in the british empire, the cape"s new rulers ended the system of peonage. Ordinance outlawed indentureship of children without the express permission of their parents and permission khoesan to own land. White farmers didn"t like the new law because they thought it would increase vagrancy and theft and therefore they would not be able to discipline their workers. Missionaries liked this because they thought the new freedoms would allow them to spread chrsitanity and create peasant communities at the various mission stations in the colony. One communities was along the kat river. In 1834 the british colonists in the eastern cape enacted a vagrancy law. The residents of kat river met to protest the legislation and recounted their histories of peonage. The law did not pass but in 1856 the government enacted the. Masters and servants acts and this followed with the legislation of the vagrancy act of 1879.