ABSTRACT
The Cape slave-owners, by incorporating slaves into their family government, were not inventing something new: they were invoking an ancient institution - the Roman patriarchal family. The Cape equivalent came to have much in common with the Roman familia, which, as Friedrich Engels had pointed out, originally referred to all the slaves belonging to the head of the household: The original meaning of the word 'family' is not that compound of sentimentality and domestic strife which forms the ideal of today's philistine; among the Romans it did not at first even refer to the married pair and their children, but only to the slaves. If the colonial family was weak, the authorities went to sometimes eccentric lengths to foster the institution. To find a primary description of Cape paternalism in the seventeenth century would be surprising since the Cape family was only beginning to evolve.
