Kate Ekama is a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past (LEAP), Department of Economics, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Trained as a historian, Kate’s work deals with slavery in the Indian Ocean world, spanning the Dutch and British colonial periods in Sri Lanka and South Africa. Kate is currently working on a series of articles on emancipation in the nineteenth-century Cape Colony, addressing questions of credit and debt, manumission, landlordism, and compensation payments. She is affiliated to the Cape of Good Hope Panel project and is a 2023 visiting fellow at the Beniba Centre for Slavery Studies, University of Glasgow, Scotland.
This Sawyer Seminar is funded by the Mellon Foundation.