Once a former wine cellar, the Museum van de Caab at Solms Delta explores the slave past of the vineyard. Photo by author. All rights reserved.
October 2016 saw the release of a documentary titled Bitter Grapes – Slavery in the Vineyards, directed by a Danish journalist named Tom Heinemann. The documentary, which initially aired on Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian television, alleged that by paying low wages – at times below minimum wage requirements – providing unsanitary living conditions, and depriving workers of human rights in other ways, farmers in South Africa’s wine and fruit producing Western Cape were guilty of upholding conditions amounting to slavery.
Such claims are not necessarily novel and have appeared in the media before. Most notably, a 2011 report from Human Rights Watch provided comprehensive evidence of human rights degradations, issues around pay and living conditions, the active obstruction of unionisation, and even the illegal eviction of staff. Both Bitter Grapes and the HRW report posited these contemporary phenomena as the latest manifestation of a historical continuum of exploitation originating in the time of slavery. Slave labour, which became illegal in 1834, was the backbone of early Cape wine farming, and the suggestion is that the economic interests of the former slave owning class continued to be served by unequal labour relations. To fully understand the issues discussed by Bitter Grapes and HRW, we must therefore look into the past.
