Yvette Christiansë,
"'Heartsore': The Melancholy Archive of Cape Colony Slavery"
(page 8 of 12)
In November 1821, four women were charged with the murder of a
newborn infant in the small district community of Graaff Reinet, in the
Karoo, east of Cape Town. This crime did not involve any claims of
desperate action in response to ill treatment. And the record attests to
the local authorities' readiness in focusing on the criminality of these
slave and servant women, rather than investigating the role played by
their mistress in this murder. The greatest burden of guilt was assigned
to Rosalyn, a slave to her fifteen-year-old mistress, Anna Sauer, whose
infant she was accused of killing. The other two accused were Khoi women
named Philida and Mina, the former a servant who worked for Anna Sauer's
father, and the latter a servant in a neighboring home.[38]
Mina was exonerated, but Rosalyn and Philida were initially sentenced to death
for their deeds. Nevertheless, as with Sila's case later, this sentence
was never carried out. In this instance, the governor found the case to
be "so voluminous," and the evidence so "contradictory" and
"inconsistent," that he was loath to sanction the
executions.[39] In
part, Philida's evidence against Rosalyn was considered suspect. She had
testified that she had overheard Rosalyn advise their mistress to kill
her baby rather than suffer social condemnation for having a child out
of wedlock. Anna Sauer was fully acquitted after she pled insanity.
Rosalyn and Philida had their sentences commuted to hard labor, despite
the contradictory and inconsistent evidence against them.
Notwithstanding her claims that she had no part in the murder beyond
overhearing Rosalyn's advise to Anna Sauer, Philida was severely
punished. In many ways, the case is clear—she did nothing to save the
child. What is not clear is how Sauer's guilt could be so easily
overlooked in favor of the more public punishments of the slave and
servant women. After their sentences were commuted, Philida was
initially "exposed with a halter around her neck under the gallows,"
after which she was "scourged . . . branded" and "confined in irons." The
confinement was to be for life on Robben Island. This was amended to a
year's hard labor at the public works in the district of Graaff Reinet.
Rosalyn also spent five years on Robben Island before being returned to
Graaff Reinet and a new master, having been sold by her mistresses'
father. In this, one might insert a careful speculation that the
conversion of these extreme sentences into relatively brief ones is
perhaps an indication of the suspicion with which higher authorities (in
the Cape) viewed local (district) judicial proceedings. In another case,
in September 1822, two slave women named Rachel and Deel killed a young
slave girl named Tamar during an attempted escape from their master.
Tamar had joined them, but when they were forced to turn back, Rachel
and Deel apparently killed her out of fear that she would reveal the
truth of their attempted escape to their master.[40]
In May 1823, yet another slave woman, named Rebecca, was sentenced to death specifically
for the crime of infanticide.[41]
By the time Sila was brought before the Courts of Justice, Cape
judges, including Truter, had presided over three significant cases
relating precisely to this issue. Only Hester had been executed, and it
is thus necessary to ask why. One discerns in the court record a basic
dichotomy in the categorization of these cases—a dichotomy that concerns
the presumptive state of the women's consciousness rather than the
crime. At issue was the question of maternal nature, even in the case of
a slave woman who would not have been considered in the same (human)
light as a white woman. They were judged, nevertheless, according to
whether their crimes seemed a repudiation or misguided defense of that
putatively natural bond. Between these two extremes was the mitigating
fact of obedience to a murderous master or mistress (as it was for
Rosalyn, Philida, and Mina). Where, for example, Hester's acts were
described as "willfully . . . evil" and monstrous, Rosalyn was described as
a slave woman who, though misguided, merely obeyed her mistress, Anna
Sauer. As Van der Spuy points out, Sauer's acquittal rested upon the
court's readiness to perceive her as having been temporarily unhinged
and therefore not a murderess—and certainly not a monster (Van
der Spuy 137). Additional divisions emerge here, and they appear to
follow the contours of accusation observed by Marilyn Francus in her
study of how English law portrays murderous mothers and other
child-slaying women during the Restoration and the eighteenth
century.[42]
Francus argues that the socio-economic factors underpinning
infanticide notwithstanding, "early eighteenth-century courts
functionally categorized the accused mothers into two types, docile and
rebellious, and consistently acquitted the former and convicted the
latter," (134). Anna Sauer's narrative, along with the servant Mina's
testimony that she had overheard Rosalyn advising Anna to slay her
infant, certainly convinced the court that she was the helpless, passive
participant in a monstrous act, the monster being Rosalyn. Yet,
contingent upon slavery's own demands for absolute obedience, Rosalyn's
fate was, in fact, decided by the madness of the court's own obedience
to slavery's laws. A dutiful slave was clearly valuable, even if her
duty involved keeping a monstrous secret.
Neither Hester nor Sila received such forgiveness. Indeed, the same
warning uttered in the court's sentencing of Hester in 1819 sounded in
March 1823 when Sila was sentenced to death by the same judges. They
dismissed and condemned her "assertion of gross ill treatment" as an
attempt to incriminate her master, and they condemned her for attempting
to draw another slave, the man Jephta, into her lie. Not only
disobedient and murderous but also contaminating of other slaves, she
had to receive a death sentence. The judges' decision contained the same
insistence upon the maintenance of a law-abiding country that occurred
in nearly all judgments, including that against Hester. And yet the
language of the judgment is drawn into the very thing it abhors—speaking
about the crime again, while maintaining the possibility that Sila's
claims could have been true:
And as it therefore appears that the prisoner in this
case has been guilty of the willful murder of her [Sila's] child, which
crime cannot be tolerated in a country where Justice prevails, but on
the contrary, should be vigorously punished according to the Laws, as an
Example to deter others from doing the like, without that the Prisoner's
assertions, even were they the truth, can so far plead in her defense,
as to save her from the Punishment which she has so justly incurred, &
especially not, because, excepting the superficial appearances found on
her own body, the pretended ill treatment of her child Baro, which
according to the prisoner's statement had cause him such severe pain
that he the same say complained of it to her ([which] she said was the
immediate cause of her having taken away his life just at the moment he
was asleep in her lap) . . .. (CJ817, Case 15)
The judgment refers to the testimony of the Field Cornet and Carel
Schaffer as refuting any evidence of Baro's ill treatment, stating that
they had "immediately examined the whole of the child's body [and] found
nothing but a trifling mark of an old sore on the right thigh." Sila is
accused of rancor against her master and mistress. Jephta's testimony is
cited as further proof of her guilty attempt to "invent, if possible,
some kind of excuse under the pretext of bad usage." This is despite the
district surgeon's listing of the marks on her body as evidence of
frequent and severe beatings. Mention is made of her own "confession"
that she "had never been beaten" by her mistress, "but once with a
switch." The judgment proceeds:
And whereas under all the existing circumstances, the
prisoner cannot escape the consequences of such a horrid act, but on the
contrary has incurred a punishment adequate to her
crime.
The colonial government's monopoly over life and death appears to
have been reinstated in the judgment. A slave woman had challenged the
law of a "country where Justice prevails." In the instant of doing so,
and without anywhere else to turn—not the Cape Philanthropic Society,
not the Guardian or Protector of Slaves, not the law itself—she is made
to serve the law as the conduit through which it can restore its power
over life and death.
It is hard to say, precisely, what effect Sila and Hester or Rosalyn
and the others had on the colony's law at the time. However, it is also
not enough to say that they did nothing but call forth its force. The
Colonial Office issued a proclamation forbidding the flogging of slave
women, and in May 1823, Governor Somerset attempted to enforce this
decree.[43]
It was in fact one of several ameliorating acts that had been
mandated for the Cape and other British colonies a year earlier. While
it is almost impossible to read the relationship between the ban on
flogging slave women and the actions of Sila, Hester, and the others in
any way, it remains true that the colonial government was embarrassed by
allegations made in the British parliament and thus attempted to refute
them.[44]
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