Immediately after the emancipation of Cape Town’s enslaved population on 1 December 1838, the former enslaved moved en masse out of the houses in which they had previously lived. In this article, we investigate why they did so, where they went and how the exodus reshaped the social geography of the city. We argue that their departure from their former owners’ houses was a rejection of their slave past and that they refused to sleep under the same roofs as heretofore. Rather, generally on the basis of the networks which had linked the enslaved to the manumitted, particularly among the Muslims, they found lodging space in highly congested alleys (steegjes) and courtyards and also in the cellars of larger houses. These were to be found, above all, close to the harbour, on the slopes of Signal Hill, in what was to be known as the Bo’kaap, and, increasingly, in newly built cheap houses to the East of the old city centre, around Hanover Street. We use the rate rolls of the Cape Town municipality for 1842 and 1849 to provide maps of the settlement of the newly free and how this changed in the course of the 1840 s. We demonstrate that the areas in which the ex-enslaved men came to live were invariably those where the value of the dwellings was lowest, and, furthermore, that the levels of segregation increased over the period. In contrast to this, however, there was a perceptible move of women out of the poorer districts of the city, which we attribute to the continuation under new circumstances of the pattern of young enslaved women marrying out of slavery.

开普敦的奴役的人口1838年12月1日在解放之后，立即前移到奴役的集体中，他们以前住的房屋了。在这篇文章中，我们调查了他们为什么这样做，他们去了哪里，以及大迁徙如何重塑了这座城市的社会地理。我们认为，他们离开前主人的房子是对他们奴隶过去的拒绝，他们拒绝像以前一样睡在同一屋檐下。相反，通常基于将被奴役者与被奴役者联系起来的网络，特别是在穆斯林中，他们在高度拥挤的小巷（steegjes) 和庭院以及较大房屋的地窖中。最重要的是，它们位于靠近海港的信号山斜坡上，在后来被称为 Bo'kaap 的地方，并且越来越多地出现在旧市中心以东的新建廉价房屋中，汉诺威街附近。我们使用开普敦市 1842 年和 1849 年的费率表来提供新自由人定居点的地图，以及这在 1840 年代过程中的变化情况。我们证明，前奴隶开始居住的地区总是那些住宅价值最低的地区，而且，隔离程度在此期间有所增加。然而，与此形成对比的是，有明显的女性移出城市较贫困的地区，