"Heartsore": The Melancholy Archive of Cape Colony Slavery
On December 24, 1822, a slave woman in an outlying district of the
Cape Colony (of what would become South Africa) cut the throat of her
nine-year-old son. She had, court records later reported, planned to
take her own life. Instead, she buried her son in a shallow grave and
left the farm on which she was enslaved to walk to another, where she
gave herself up to the district's Field Cornet, or local militia
officer. Of her life, we know almost nothing. In the archive, she
survives only in the fragmented records and palpable silences of
criminal proceedings, recognized under various related names, including,
most frequently, Sila van de Kaap. To the extent that she remains
visible to us now, it is as a shadow figure and a repudiation of
colonialism's will-to-power in knowledge. Even so, it appears that Sila
van de Kaap's story is one not only of thwarted hope, bitter
disappointment, and stubborn presence but also of a desire for speech
resulting from the inability to be heard fully from within slavery's
discourse.[1]
In this highly condensed summary of the act that brought Sila out of
the anonymity of historical silence, two orders of statement are
immediately evident. There are statements of fact: the "where," "when,"
and "who" of her act. There is, too, a statement about
intentionality—not only that she willfully killed her child but that she
intended to kill herself. These statements appear in the Field Cornet's
evidence at her trial and, subsequently, in her appeal against her death
sentence. The statements of fact increasingly overtake all other
inquiries into her fate—who owned her, was she really free? Although
undertaken by the British colonial authorities at the moment in which
slavery has come into increasingly moral and legal question, an
investigation into the background of Sila's act ultimately abandoned any
effort to explain it in terms of the "mitigating circumstances"
constituted by slavery. Tracing Sila's story and seeking the echoes of
her own words, which I attempt to do in this paper, leads one to
conclude with a certain melancholy that Sila appears neither within
slavery nor the legal system that authorized it. As an archival figure,
she responds only to questions and only in the terms and categories
posed by those who anticipated their own future recall in the archive.
She occupies that position so well described by Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak in "Can the Subaltern Speak?" According to Spivak's theory, Sila
is structurally muted in that, although we have words from her, the
state never granted her full subjectivity, and her utterances remained,
for them, utterly illegible.[2]
Archeology of the Cape Archive
As Derrida observes, there can be "no political power without control
of the archive, if not memory."[3]
The fragmented narrative of events
leading to and following this slave woman's murderous gesture comes from
a range of documents held at the Cape Town Archive. Before pursuing her
story, it is necessary to say something about how Sila's life emerges
through these documents. The archive houses the records of colonial
bureaucracy and is, today, predicated upon the idea that such records
are testaments of a national past—conceived in anticipation of the
future. Within such a temporally ambivalent space, the assumptions and
conventions that structure the archive are discernible not only as
organizational principles but also as discursive effects. However,
these effects appear as truth or fact. Their visibility today must be
understood as that which was guaranteed by the particular structures
ordering the archive. Categorized, classified, and made accessible
through alphabetical and numerical coding, as well as chronological
sequencing and governmental function, documents reflect the structures
of both colonial and, now, national bureaucracy within South Africa's
official archive.[4]
At present, these archives fall under the jurisdiction of the
National Archives and Records Service of South Africa, constituted by an
amendment to an older, apartheid-era act that oversaw the maintenance of
and access to materials in the national archival network. The National
Archives and Records Service of South Africa Act (Act 43 of 1996 as
amended), or NARS, has a stated mission "to foster national identity and
to ensure the protection of rights" in the wake of Apartheid (Annual
Report of the National Archivist 6). As such, the national archive
system is informed by an implicit and uneasy memory of the apartheid
regime's disregard for public accountability. In its aim to preserve a
national heritage of public and non-public records "with enduring value
of national significance," the Act makes direct reference to the
"neglected archives" and repositories of the past (NARS 2).
Within its relatively newly constituted role, the South African
archive system is tied to the government's laborious distancing of
itself from the opacity of the apartheid regime's modus operandi.
The promise of transparency is apparent in a statement made on the
National Archives' Web site, which says that the "foundation of good
governance" is linked with ensuring "a better quality archival
legacy."[5]
Rhetoric notwithstanding, total transparency is ultimately foreign to
government, which always arrogates the prerogative of secrecy. NARS
actually stipulates that provisions be made to control the disclosure of
"sensitive" materials. These unspecified materials are subject to other,
equally unspecified legislative acts or the consent of relevant
governmental departments (NARS 8). In this context, the National
Archivist is charged with an educational responsibility to expand
accessibility to the less privileged (NARS 3 and 4), while also
monitoring the public's capacity to know and to bear the burden of
knowledge (especially of government secrets).
The historical record is treated, in this instance, as "information"
(NARS 3), but this information is not merely evidence of presences; it
is also evidence of absence and, more importantly, of exclusion. Thus,
current policy stipulates that the archival system is to make these
documents available to "members of the public who may wish to use them
for purposes of research of past events or to document or vindicate
their rights," (NARS, emphasis added). Clearly, then, the archive
is thought to contain information about the violation of rights or the
withholding of recognition for rights, which are now presumed inherent
and universal.
If something of the anxiety about the national archival relationship
with colonialism and apartheid can be heard in the operational
directives of the post-apartheid government, the legacy of colonial and
apartheid classificatory biases has also been tempered by the
integration of previously excluded materials. Among these is the vast
collection of documents whose existence or revelation was feared by
apartheid's apologists for its capacity to generate future condemnation,
and possibly destruction: namely, the documents of anti-apartheid
activity. Now housed at the University of the Western Cape's Mayibuye
Center are materials previously excluded from apartheid's archival
network precisely because they embodied a limit to the power/knowledge
system of apartheid and the organization and classification of national
history. Over 100,000 photographs, reams of film and video, oral
histories, posters and other documents in this collection date to the
apartheid era (between 1948 and 1994). Many of the documents include
records of apartheid abuses. Others record the existence and fate of
those people annihilated by it. The holdings of the Mayibuye Center have
been assigned a truth value, which derives from their capacity to bear
witness to the fallacious basis of a political system that claimed both
rationality and truth for itself.[6]
Having been in exile, so to speak, these materials were literally and
figuratively "brought home," perhaps already performing what Derrida
would, in another context, refer to as the archiving impulse's creation
of a home in response to exile. In fact, the Xhosa word Mayibuye
translates as come home or let him/her return. Prior to
that repatriation, a single place, or as Derrida coins it, a
jussive (structure) or arkheion (housing), did not exist
for these documentary traces of apartheid, except in the minds of the
anti-apartheid activists, who ironically shared with the colonizers
their anticipation of a future "place"—in both history and in the
representation of the nation.[7]
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