Yvette Christiansë,
"'Heartsore': The Melancholy Archive of Cape Colony Slavery"
(page 6 of 12)
. . . to death
Sila was condemned to death by strangulation in the district of
George but was transported to Cape Town for the sentencing. Three years
later, however, in 1826, her name appeared in a series of letters
between the secretary of state in London and various officials in the
colonial government in Cape Town. Sila, it was "discovered," was still
alive. In response to a memorial from London, Acting Governor Bourke
wrote on October 25,1826 that it "would appear that the case has . . . been
overlooked."[26]
The prime reason: Sila was pregnant when sentenced to
death in March 1823. Under British law, a pregnant woman could not be
executed (GH 23/8).
Sila's child was born in the Cape Town prison in November 1823 but
died a few months later. The arithmetic of this timing demands a series
of brutal questions. Counting back from November and assuming that she
carried the child to full term, Sila would have conceived this child in
March, presumably while in custody and somewhere between Plettenberg Bay
and Cape Town. As Bourke was forced to admit, she subsequently bore
another child who was alive and living with her in prison in October
1826. Perhaps in shame, Bourke recommended her:
as an object for the Royal mercy, beseeching His Majesty
to commute her sentence to labour [sic] on the public works for twenty
years from the date of her confinement and that her child, whom I take
to be the property of the Crown, may be apprenticed at the proper age
[and] subsequently manumitted. (GH 23/8)
The response from the secretary of state was to demand an
investigation into "all the circumstances of the case." He directed
Bourke to take care "to ascertain why the officers who reported the
pregnancy of the prisoner in the first instance, omitted to report to
the Governor when there no longer existed that impediment to the
execution of the capital punishment."[27]
Bourke's reply was to criticize
the "very defective discipline at the Goal" (GH 23/8:852).
There was some truth to Bourke's reply. The state of the colony's
prisons had already led the Cape government to seek a new superintendent
of police. Baron Konrad de Laurentz arrived at the Cape in early 1826,
having been appointed by the Colonial Office (over the existing Fiscal,
Van Ryneveld, who had handled Sila's appeal, and who had hoped to be
promoted to superintendent of police). It was his attempt to reform the
prison system that uncovered Sila's existence in the Cape Town
prison.[28]
Bourke's letter to London suggests what might have befallen Sila when
he writes that she had been "allowed from some neglect or other to
linger in prison for three years and a half with a sentence of death
hanging over her head, and to demean herself during that time in a
manner little calculated to prepare her for another world" (GH
23/8).
Overlooked, demeaned, and having borne two more children, the
implication is that Sila was being used as a prison prostitute. As a
result of de Laurentz's investigation, Bourke argued that he had
"perused some of the papers in this case" and had "the strongest grounds
for believing that Sila and her children [were] in truth entitled to
their freedom" (GH 23/8). And as a further result of his urging, Sila
received a royal pardon from George IV in November 1827 on condition
that she serve fourteen years at hard labor.[29]
Sila was sent to Robben Island in September 1826, where she was one
of three female prisoners among well over a hundred male prisoners. The
circumstances were unpropitious, to say the least. The commander's
monthly return in January and February contained its usual summary of
productivity in the island's quarry. He listed the numbers of round
stones cut, their weights, the weights of the number of oval stones, and
he remarked upon progress on the construction of a jetty. In an aside,
he wrote that a number of the contractors, prisoners, and guards had
been sentenced to whippings and imprisonment for "picking the lock" of
the female prisoners' hut and then "cruelly using" the three women on
the night of January 25.[30]
Almost exactly nine months later, in
September 1827, Sila gave birth to another baby. Van der Wat, on his
farm all the way out in Plettenberg Bay, registered a new slave child
named Catherina, born to Drusila [sic], who was listed in the District's
Slave Register as "currently on Robben Island for murder."[31]
From the date of the rape onward, the Robben Island Commandant's monthly reports
complain of the insolence of two slave women, Sila and Mina. And still
the abuse continued.
Sila bore another daughter who did not survive. Of her daughter,
Catherina, nothing else appears in the archival record other than Van
der Wat's registration of her. Of Sila's other children, there is one
report that Carolina, sold by Van der Wat to Stroebel, bore a girl named
Rosie, and both were subsequently sold to another man named Sterling.
Nothing else is recorded of Camies or Pieter, other than a notification
that Camies had been sold to an owner in Uitenhage. Sila herself simply
drops out of the record after 1830. It is possible that she, like all
other women prisoners, were transferred off Robben Island to the town
prison in 1835. Whether she survived or not is still unclear.
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
Next page
|