burghers baptized few slaves and manumitted an even srnaller proportion
than the company. As a result, the manumission rate was low: during the
eighteenth century, on average, no more than one person was manumitted
for every six hundred slaves each year, and the free black population was
never more than 8.4 percent of the free burgher population. Only a handful
of former slaves, moreover, were able to acquire capital and land and set
themselves up as farmers, and as time went on nearly all of them were"
squeezed out. The free Blacks were therefore concentrated in the relatively
fluid society of Cape Town, where they made a living as artisans, cooks,
44