Many white South Africans still take for granted the fact that black women do their housework, without considering that the situation has its origin in slavery, a violent institution that lay at the heart of the colonial enterprise not only in Africa but also in Asia, the Caribbean and the Americas. Because the Dutch settlement desperately needed labourers, enslaved people were brought to the Cape and became the colony's most important source of labour. In 1658 the importation of slaves was institutionalised, and by then there were 166 white men (officials and free burghers), 187 slaves (most owned by the VOC), 20 Dutch women, and a few children at the Cape. The original local inhabitants were not counted.

Robert Shell's study, Children of Bondage: A Social History of Slavery at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838, includes a chapter on enslaved women with the ambiguous and ironic title ‘Tender Ties’. In the chapter, Shell demonstrates how the ‘choices slave and free women made and the constraints they lived under shaped the families, the households, and the psychology of the slave society of the colonized Cape’. The institution of slavery was driven by the economic interests of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost- Indische Compagnie, or the VOC), but was entrenched in private households and working relationships on farms. Shell argues that, while frontier and class interests were significant factors in South Africa's racial and political philosophies, these influences were secondary manifestations of a more universal force, namely the family as the fundamental unit of subordination. The evolution of attitudes and identities between enslaved people and their masters and mistresses took place in the intimate domestic setting of the home.