The Slave Trader in My Family Tree

When I arrived in Cape Town a few years ago, I wasn’t looking for my name on the map. It found me anyway. Passing through District Six one day, I spotted a sign for Tennant Street. A while later I went to visit friends in Wynberg, and there it was again: they live on Tennant Street. There is something unsettling about ringing a friend’s doorbell at an address that carries your own surname. Two streets, one unusual name. Flattering, I thought, until I started asking why.

The two addresses are a Cape Town history lesson on their own. Wynberg is where my ancestor built his estate, the leafy heartland of colonial respectability. District Six was home to the descendants of the enslaved, to freed slaves, immigrants and working families, until the apartheid government declared it a whites-only area in 1966 and sent in the bulldozers. One surname, signposted in the neighbourhood of the people who held the power and in the neighbourhood of the people it was used against. Most families have to pick a side of history. Mine got a street on each.

So I started digging. Most people who research their family tree turn up a war hero, a bigamist or a great-aunt who ran off with the organist. I turned up an invoice.

His name was Alexander Tennant. Born in Ayrshire in 1772, died in Cape Town in 1814, and in between he bought and sold human beings. As a guide who spends his days telling visitors the hard truths about this city, I could hardly leave him out.

A good Scottish family

On paper, the Tennants were the very model of Georgian enterprise, and Robert Burns was a family friend. In 1786 he wrote a verse letter to Alexander’s brother James, sending greetings down the line of Tennant brothers: “Preacher Willie”, later a chaplain in India, and “wabster Charlie”, the weaver who would go on to build a chemical empire in Glasgow. (A third brother, David, became a privateer, which is a polite word for a pirate with paperwork.) Young Alexander, then about fourteen, got a couplet of his own:

An’ Lord, remember singing Sannock,Wi’ hale breeks, saxpence, an’ a bannock!

Sannock is Sandy, short for Alexander, and Burns was wishing him the basics of a decent life: trousers without holes, a sixpence in his pocket and a bannock to eat. Alexander would go on to do considerably better than that. Nobody wrote a poem about how.

Around 1795 Alexander set off to visit Willie in India. He got as far as the Cape, which Britain had just taken from the Dutch, noticed that a new colonial government meant new opportunities, and stayed.

Tennant and Trail

“Tennant and Trail” sounds like a firm of country solicitors. It was not. His partner, Donald Trail, had already earned notoriety as master of the Neptune, a convict ship to New South Wales on which a shocking number of prisoners died. When choosing a business partner, Alexander seems to have looked for the one man in the merchant fleet with a worse reference than his own.

The firm shipped convicts to Australia and brought enslaved people from Mozambique to be sold to settlers at the Cape. Historians describe their dealings as sitting right at the edge of the law, and in 1801 Alexander landed in the High Court over financial irregularities in a shipping deal.

When Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, he reportedly responded with the sort of agility business schools now charge a fortune to teach: he changed flags, and carried on under Portuguese colours. Accounts from the period say a late cargo of enslaved people, arriving after abolition, was simply left to fend for itself. Here the jokes stop, because there is nothing funny about it.

Laundering a reputation

It’s remarkable what a good marriage and a few acres in Wynberg can do for a man. In 1796 Alexander married Cornelia Sandenberg of an established Cape family. By his death in 1814 he owned considerable land and had acquired, as one historian put it, an air of respectability. His son Hercules became a magistrate at Uitenhage; his grandson, Sir David Tennant, was Speaker of the Cape House of Assembly for over twenty years. Slave money became land, land became standing, and standing became titles. Very few fortunes announce where they came from.

Carrying the name

The strange thing about inheriting a story like this is how respectable the paperwork makes it look. Alexander survives in baptism registers, marriage records, land deeds and lawsuits, all in tidy copperplate. Read in one order, it’s the rise of an enterprising Scottish immigrant. Read honestly, it’s a business plan with human beings listed as stock.

Those same records fall silent on the people he traded. The men, women and children brought from Mozambique appear, at best, as numbers. No names, no ages, no record of what became of them. Burns wrote verses about the Tennants; nobody wrote anything about the cargo. Looking for them, and mostly failing to find them, has taught me more about who gets to be remembered in this city than any history book.

The name isn’t going anywhere; the city has already put it on two street signs. Alexander spent his later years buffing it to a respectable shine. I’d rather keep it as it is, scuffs and all, and make sure people know what’s underneath.

Why I tell it on tour

I spend my working days asking visitors to look honestly at colonial conquest, slavery, forced removals and apartheid. I can’t do that with a straight face while quietly editing my own ancestry. So when I’m guiding a group around Cape Town, I tell them about Alexander. It is, I can confirm, the fastest way known to silence a minibus.

It isn’t a confession, and it isn’t about me. It simply makes the history concrete. Slavery at the Cape wasn’t run by faceless institutions; it was run by people with names and ambitions, some of whose descendants now lead tours. And the people I work with across Cape Town have met it with more grace than I had any right to expect.

Both Tennant Streets are still there. Between them they tell the story better than I can: one marks where a fortune like Alexander’s settled down and grew respectable, the other where the people that kind of fortune was built on were eventually swept away. I walk both now, and I no longer find either one flattering.

I can’t give back what Alexander took. What I can do is tell the truth about it, in the city where it happened, and keep listening to the people whose ancestors were on the other side of his ledger.

Join me on a tour of Cape Town and ask about him. I’ll tell you the whole story, jokes and all, except where there shouldn’t be any.