Boer slavery was racial adjustment rather than conquest or accumulation

Evidence

Slavery in the case of the Boers was a form of adjustment of a European people to a black race, and only superficially resembled those historical instances when it had been a result of conquest or slave trade. No body politic, no communal organization kept the Boers together, no territory was definitely colonized, and the black slaves did not serve any white civilization. The Boers had lost both their peasant relationship to the soil and their civilized feeling for human fellowship. “Each man fled the tyranny of his neighbor’s smoke” was the rule of the country, and each Boer family repeated in complete isolation the general pattern of Boer experience among black savages and ruled over them in absolute lawlessness, unchecked by “kind neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums” (Conrad). Ruling over tribes and living parasitically from their labor, they came to occupy a position very similar to that of the native tribal leaders whose domination they had liquidated. The natives, at any rate, recognized them as a higher form of tribal leadership, a kind of natural deity to which one has to submit; so that the divine role of the Boers was as much imposed by their black slaves as assumed freely by themselves. It is a matter of course that to these white gods of black slaves each law meant only deprivation of freedom, government only restriction of the wild arbitrariness of the clan. In the natives the Boers discovered the only “raw material” which Africa provided in abundance and they used them not for the production of riches but for the mere essentials of human existence. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 504

Categorization

• XREF: The Boers’ isolation and lawlessness prefigures Arendt’s later account of pariah communities and statelessness; also connects to how colonial rule degenerates into rule for survival rather than politics. — connects to: Boer grievance focused on losing privileged control over natives — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1411
• DEFINE: Defines what distinguishes ‘racial adjustment’ slavery from conquest/commercial slavery — a distinction central to her argument that colonial race-thinking emerges from isolation, not from economic calculus.