Children In Between: Child Migrants from England to the Cape in the 1830s

Between 1833 and 1841 the Children’s Friend Society, a London-based philanthropic organization, sent some eight hundred children from England to the Cape, where they were apprenticed to local settlers. This article focuses on two of them: Alfred Brooks, aged thirteen or fourteen, and twelve-year-old Elizabeth Foulger. Both of these children appear in archival traces because they transgressed and were subsequently disciplined by their masters. The article argues that a series of binaries shaped these young migrants’ lives: between infant and adult, black and white, and colonizer and colonized. The in-between status of the CFS apprentices had the potential to disrupt increasingly rigid hierarchies at the colonial Cape, during a time of significant social and political turmoil. The context of slave emancipation, as well as concerns over juvenile delinquency in London, affected these children’s experiences. Concerns over their categorization illustrate the complicated range of positions that migrant workers in the British empire could hold beyond simply ‘free’ and ‘unfree’. Thinking through the position of these young white emigrant workers in the post-emancipation Cape sheds light on the fragility of classed, gendered, racialized, adult and free identities in that context.