In the 1970s, there was no significant writing on those who were usually called “prize negroes” in the early nineteenth-century Cape Colony and occasionally known as “liberated Africans.” I stumbled across the topic while teaching African history at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and learning of liberated Africans in Sierra Leone, and because of my interest in the late 1970s in the history of black Africans in the western Cape, arising from a wish to challenge the apartheid policies of the time that sought to exclude such Africans from the western Cape. After exploring the Cape Archives for material on liberated Africans, I began publishing a series of articles on the topic in 1983. But it was only one of my historical interests in what was, for anyone then living in South Africa, a particularly traumatic decade. In the early 1900s, as South Africa went through its transition to democracy, I abandoned any further research on liberated Africans, moving instead to aspects of the transition from apartheid to democracy in southern Africa. But I kept a “watching brief “ on liberated Africans at the Cape, and I am glad to have the opportunity here to review what has been written on liberated Africans at the Cape since my original articles.