Yvette Christiansë,
"'Heartsore': The Melancholy Archive of Cape Colony Slavery"
(page 3 of 12)
It was J. J. Theron who sought to be her owner by thwarting his
mother's will and the Orphan Chamber. Insofar as there was no indexed
cross-listing in the slave registry, insofar as the British Colonial
office investigation into Sila's case had to include a long list of
names under which she had appeared in order to make sense of her
movements prior to the murder of her son, insofar as this investigation
reveals a relation between these name changes and a systematic effort to
hide her status as a free woman and the free status of her children, and
insofar as other names (those of her children) were spelled in the same
way consistently throughout all documents in which they appear, it is
possible to speculate that the repeated metamorphoses of the spelling of
Sila's name(s) is not entirely innocent.
Sila's first chronologically dated appearance is in Hendrina Jansen's
will.[14]
In this document, a woman name Drucella, together with a number
of other slaves, were to be manumitted once they paid off a specified
amount to the Jansen's heir, J. J. Theron. To do so, they were to be
hired out for a fee with which they would compensate him for their
freedom. Upon the widow's death in 1806, the Orphan Chamber, which
oversaw all estate matters, including the disposal of slaves of the
deceased, took over her estate. Some of her slaves were leased to other
farms, and some were left with Theron. Sila was among this last group
and was sent by Theron to a Cape Town merchant named Carl Hancke in
1810, the same year that Britain's Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of
1807 went into effect in the Cape Colony (SO 3/22:84). She would be with
Hancke until mid 1817. During this period she bore three children:
Carolina, Camies, and Baro.
The years 1810 to 1817 also coincide with a number of legal reforms
by the British Colonial Office to codify Cape slave law and to bring the
Dutch farmers under further control.[15]
In 1816, for example, the
British colonial authority issued a proclamation requiring owners to
register and provide descriptions of all slaves.[16]
To this end,
registries were established in all districts of the Colony. As a direct
effect of this law, Sila's status vis-à-vis Hancke was revealed,
for in June 1816, both Theron and Hancke approached the registry,
claiming ownership of her and her children. Sila, it turns out, was not
working off the price of her freedom, as stipulated in Hendrina Jansen's
will, but had been sold to Hancke by Theron.
What followed could be called a comedy of bureaucratic fumbling were
it not for the fact that lives were at stake. Hancke registered Sila and
her three children as his property on the basis of a deed of sale from
Theron dated 1810. However, in a struggle for ownership in 1816, Theron
refuted the finality of the 1810 deed by claiming that Hancke had made
only a partial payment for Sila. As a result, the sale was not
completed. On these grounds, Theron claimed Sila and her children as his
property. His claim, it would be revealed, had an older history, one in
which he and his mother had been locked in battle over the ownership of
Sila and other slaves.
Although the Orphan Chamber had become the guardian of her estate, it
proved weak and vulnerable to Theron's stallings and obfuscations. Just
how easily the Chamber was thwarted was revealed in full many years
later and ironically because of Sila. Her slaying of her son and her
survival of a death sentence prompted two instances in which the law
turned to its own emerging archive to make sense of its own
failings.
The first of these was a collection of documents gathered by the
public advocate to mount her appeal against her death sentence in 1823.
The second came later with the discovery that, after the failure of her
appeal, she simply vanished from sight until 1827, when a newly
appointed Superintendent of Police, Baron Konrad de Laurentz, "found"
her in the Cape Town prison. In response to de Laurentz's discovery and
call for clemency, the Colonial Office demanded a full accounting of the
colony's mishandling of her case. While clearly not interested in her,
the demand generated a textual record of how the law remained
un-enforced. And this, in turn, generated a trace of the very
woman who had seemed to have disappeared.
At first sight, Sila's appeal might suggest that a slave had recourse
to justice, but this must be considered within the larger scheme of
England's control of the Cape Colony. At the time, England was
attempting to maintain the viability of its colonies, including the
Cape, where a large part of the population was, still, Dutch. At home,
governmental colonial interests were also under fire from an
abolitionist movement (linked with the one in America) that was
successfully thwarted from any effective growth in the Cape, which
served the Colonial Office for a pragmatic reason. Despite legislation
designed to ameliorate the conditions of slavery, the colonial
government still regarded slaves as property and, in doing so, protected
the property rights of the largely Dutch settler community that was
already straining against amelioration. One of the ironies of British
rule was that the local colonial government had to negotiate its
allegiances to London and the immediate task of not estranging local
settlers over the issue of property rights. As a letter from Colonial
Secretary Charles Bird makes clear, slaves are the "best property of the
Colonists."[17]
Nevertheless, Sila's appeal was mounted in August of 1823, five
months after she was sentenced to death.[18]
At that time, compelled by
the letter of the law and by England's ameliorative acts, the Cape Court
of Appeals had to call upon the Orphan Chamber and the Fiscal's Office
for their responses to claims that this appeal was made on her
behalf.[19]
These documents were taken up by the then Guardian of Slaves in
1827, in response to the Colonial Office's call for an explanation for
Sila's continued survival. In these documents, we have the nearest
account of what befell her in the years between the death of Hendrina
Jansen and the moment in which she appeared before the courts charged
with murder.
Ironically, the Orphan Chamber's report uses statements attributed to
Sila as moments in which she did not articulate a claim to freedom.
These are used to vindicate the Orphan Chamber of any responsibility for
the fact that Sila never received the freedom for which the widow's will
provided. Rather than remembering and enforcing the stipulations of this
will, the Orphan Chamber's 1827 report belatedly supports Theron
and Hancke, and later, the slave owner with whom Sila eventually
lived, Van der Wat, in the District of Plettenberg Bay.
As a slave, Sila lived with the reality that any children born to her
would also be slaves and, therefore, property. Whoever could secure
ownership of Sila in 1816 would have quadrupled his slave holdings.
Theron's fight for Sila was thus a matter of common self-interest, and
if it led him into conflict with his mother, his predicament was not
unusual. As scholar Robert Shell observes, widows in the Cape Colony
often manumitted their slaves, but this often lead to familial tension
when relationships were constrained by the expectation of inheritance
(112-113). Such expectations appear dominant in Sila's case. Theron
claimed absolute prerogative in the affairs of his mother's estate,
probably on the basis of local precedent in which "most slaves of
deceased estates were still 'reserved' for family members," (Shell 114).
This practice, not codified until March 1823, when the British colonial
government officially banned such separations, tended to ensure that
slave families were rarely separated.
Manumission through wills was also not guaranteed. An official letter
of freedom would not be issued until a manumission bond had been paid in
full. If the bond was not paid, the wishes of the deceased were
considered only "an expression of intent," (Shell 118). Again, slaves
were dependent upon their owners' heirs, who could retain or free them.
However, as would be revealed in the long legal appeal following the
slaying of her son, Sila appears to have been under the impression that
her time at Hancke's went toward payment of her manumission bond, as
stipulated in Hendrina Jansen's will. Theron, on the other hand, clearly
exercised his "right" to disregard this stipulation as nothing more than
an "expression of intent [emphasis added]." In the violent
tautology of slavery's economy, his claim was proof enough for him that
Sila was a slave.
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