Yvette Christiansë, "'Heartsore': The Melancholy Archive of Cape Colony Slavery"
(page 12 of 12)

What is Disappearing, What is Appearing

For Derrida, there can be "no private archive" (Derrida 1998:48).[55] But this does not mean that the public and iterable differences in the archive exhaust the particular knowledge and private experience to which such utterances attest. There is something that can never be made public in the case of Sila and Baro. And this insistent secret cautions contemporary historians against appropriating Sila for the cause of resistance and the history of Western subjects-in-the-making. Deeply private, Baro's death is the factor that will not permit Sila's act to translate itself into resistance, even though this act transgresses the law. Sila and Baro alone have intimate knowledge of the act. And Baro has a knowledge that exceeds even Sila's. This, we can never read. There is no discursive space in the archive for what Baro knew, not even through the law that would speak on behalf of his body, for, in this case, it is not the fact of Baro's fate that offends the law but of Sila's challenge to that law. The certainty of Sila's act may transform her by extending her beyond her delegated position, but the fact that Baro bears the full burden of this violence puts the brakes on any runaway "triumphalism" of late twentieth-century readerly practice.

But, we may ask, are there not other silences that might be measured from elsewhere, in other discourses? What silencing is testified to by a bruise so many inches long and so many inches wide on a woman's back, or a scab on a boy's buttock?

Sila's appeal, clearly penned by her advocate Van Ryneveld, provides quotidian detail about Baro's death, detail that is, in fact, precisely in keeping with what Francus observes to be a trope in English defense strategies in cases of infanticide. This is the appearance of linens (Francus 134). Ironically, Francus' observation relates to the fact that mothers brought their (dead) baby's linens to court to "establish her good character and let them speak for her." In Sila's appeal, there are no linens for Baro, for he was too old for linens—and a slave child, to boot. Rather, what are present are the linens of slavery. In setting up the immediately relevant details of the day of Baro's death, the defense shows Sila obeying her mistress's order that she wash stained household linens. Sila's request that Baro fetch lemons for the purpose of bleaching the linens should also support this image of obedience, an obedience that passes itself on to her child. The account then goes on to say that:

. . . he [Baro] complied therewith, and on his return, complained that he felt much pain all over his body , in consequence of the aforesaid ill treatment, wherefore Memorialist took the little grease she had on a piece of bread and applied it on his body, soon after which he fell asleep on her
knees . . ..

In its shaping of sentiment, this language of the appeal has shifted from the accusatory tone of the Court's record. Moreover, the rhetoric of emotional duress draws into itself that improbably cerebral word, "meditating." Here is a polite but daring insistence upon an interiority and responsivity that refused any dismissal of Sila's act as merely "willful," as the court's sentencing document decreed it to be. That the court would go on to do just this, to dismiss any such humanity in Sila, is evident. What is not so evident is that Sila's claim to interiority is being staged by her advocate in a way that removes the impact of her actions upon Baro. The strategy is, to all intents and purposes, understandable. The idea is to focus the court upon Sila's plight, not upon her crime. Yet the appeal does not succeed. The decision against it remained firmly ensconced within the language of the original trial and sentence.

In the first trial, there was no discussion of slavery itself. There was no discussion of Sila's history and the thwarted will of Hendrina Jansen, Theron, or Hancke. Nothing was said about the sale of Carolina or Camies, of the predicament of the young Pieter, Sila's youngest child, still on Van der Wat's farm. If Sila did speak of this, it could only have been said outside of the court's mandate—to focus upon the crime and finding the punishment for it. Since slavery was not a crime, it had no place as an object of interrogation in these proceedings. This is also suggested by the trial documents' designation of the Van der Wats as Sila's "master" and "mistress." Here, ironically, Sila's position as slave dictates or, at least, shapes the court's language insofar as the Van der Wats, as colonial subjects, are named in terms of their relation to their slaves. Such naming materializes the complicity between slavery's rule and the colonial rule of law.[56] Further, the legislative convention of placing individuals into the allotted speaking or silenced positions shaped by the nouns "witness," "defendant," "victim," or "appellant" is, here, brought into line with slavery's fundamental insistence that the single noun "slave" exists before and after all (slave) names. Although slaves could be called to give testimony in court, they remained outside or beyond the categories of witness or appellant.

In her analyses of the predicament of another woman "criminalized" by colonial law, Gayatri Spivak writes of "women outside of the mode of production narrative," women whose outsider status "mark the points of fadeout in the writing of disciplinary history even as they mine 'writing as such,' footprints of the trace . . . that efface as they disclose," (Spivak 1999:244). Spivak's choice of phrase resonates fortuitously with the legal position in which Sila's name appears: "We can docket them, but we cannot grasp them at all." Something disappears. In Sila's case, there can only be the incomplete disappearance that being consigned to the archive ensures.

What is dis-appearing then? A name that is one of many versions of itself skirting the vicinity of a woman I have been calling Sila, because that is the name she answers to in the court of law. What is dis-appearing? A word, affectively charged, caught between translation, pointing to an opacity behind which something moves—lives of people, lives moving against each other, away from each other, a woman washing linen, a boy running to fetch lemons, complaining of pain, some bread, some grease, a knife. And the presence of a woman called mistress of a house some three hundred paces away. And, behind her, ox straps close at hand, a man who is called master. A boy, dead. A woman consigned to death. A history of living death. The archive is haunted by them all.

Works Cited

Annual Report of the National Archivist and State Herald, 1999-2000. Pretoria: National Archivist, 2000.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Colonial Office (CO) 189 Letters received, May 1823 return.

CO.

CO 414/A, 107.

Court of Appeals Pleadings, May-Dec 1823. GH 49/25, pp. 478-483.

Courts of Justice Criminal Proceedings (CJ) 626:790.

CJ 817.

De Kock, Victor. Those in Bondage: An Account of the Life of the Slave at the Cape in the Days of the Dutch East India Company. London: Allen & Unwin, 1950.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [first French publication, 1995].

———. "Archive Fever: A Seminar by Jacques Derrida." Refiguring the Archive. Eds. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Freid and Razia Saleh. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. 38-80.

Dooling, Wayne. "'The Good Opinion of Others': Law, Slavery & Community in the Cape Colony c. 1760-1830." Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony. Eds. Nigel Worden and Clifton Crais. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994. 25-43.

Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge: the Discourse on Language. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Random House, 1972 [original French publication 1969]: 126-131.

Francus, Marilyn. "Monstrous Mothers, Monstrous Societies: Infanticide and the Rule of Law in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century England." Eighteenth-Century Life, 21.2 (1997): 133-156.

Government House. (GH) 48/25, Court of Appeals, Pleadings, May-December 1823. 452-483.

GH 1/59 Papers Received from Secretary of State, London: General Despatches, 1826 - December 1827.

GH 49/25 1827. GH 23/8 Papers Dispatched to Secretary of State, London: General Despatches, 1826-1828.

GH 1/65 Papers Received from Secretary of State, London: General Despatches.

Graaff Reinet Archive 1/GR 3/27.

Hamilton, Carolyn and Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh, eds. Introduction. Refiguring the Archive. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. 7-17.

Klein, H. S. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Oxford University, 1988.

"Mission." The National Archives and Records Service. www.national.archives.gov.za.

Rayner, M. "Wine and Slaves: The Failure of an Export Economy and the Ending of Slavery in the Cape Colony, South Africa, 1806-1834." Diss. Duke University, 1986.

RI 334, Commandant of Robben Island 1827, Robben Island Report.

Ross, Robert. Beyond the Pale: Essays on the History of Colonial South Africa. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993.

Slave Office (SO) 3/22, Register of Slaves, George T-Z.

SO 3/22, Slave Cases 1808-27.

SO 6/57, Register of Slaves, George T-Z 1816-35.

Shell, Robert C.H. Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope 1652-1838. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

———. "S.E. Hudson on Marriages and other Customs at the Cape," Kronos. 15 (1989): 49-57.

Spivak, Gayatri. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

———. "The Rani of Samur." Europe and Its Others: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature. Eds. Francis Barker et al. 1. Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985: 128-151.

———. "Can the Subaltern Speak." Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998: 271-313.

The South African Commercial Advertiser, No. 1 January 7 1824 to No. 18 May 5 1924, Together with Facts Connected with the Stopping of the South African Commercial Advertiser. Cape Town: South African Library, 1978.

Theal, G.M. Records of the Cape Colony, 1799-1826. London: Government Printers, 1905.

———. Records of the Cape Colony From 1st January to 6th February 1826. London: Government Printers, 1905.

Van der Spuy, Patricia. "Infanticide, slavery and the politics of reproduction at Cape Colony, South Africa, in the 1820s." Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000. Ed. Mark Jackson. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2000: 128-148.

Worden, Nigel & Clifton Crais (Eds.). Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994.

Endnotes

1. Slavery began at the Cape Colony in May 1652, shortly after the arrival of the first Dutch East India Company commander, Jan van Riebeek; it ended with the British Emancipation Decree of 1833, which was, however, brought into effect in 1834 (with a four-year apprentice period that meant the former slaves were "truly" free after 1838). The British Abolition of Slave Trade Act of 1807 also applied to the Cape Colony since this fell within the period of the first British occupation of the colony. This did not mean, however, that the trade actually ended. The colonial archive contains many memoranda between the colony and Colonial Office in London detailing this fact. [Return to text]

2. Gayatri Spivak, The Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). I cite Spivak here with the caution that comes from not wanting to collapse differences between the "situatedness" of her archival work and my own. Spivak, here, is revisiting her essays "Can the Subaltern Speak" and "The Rani of Samur," in which she considers the hegemony of the colonial archive and its relationship to nineteenth-century European historiography in the act of "creating" and using the Rani as a political foil for British colonial ends. See "The Rani of Samur" in Europe and Its Others: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature vol. 1. Francis Barker et al (Eds.), (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985): 128-151. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" originally appeared in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Eds.) (Chicago: University of Illinois, 1988): 271-313. [Return to text]

3. See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [first French publication, 1995]): 4. [Return to text]

4. In its current form, the Cape Town Archive is one of ten major repositories in the national system. With over 30,500 linear meters of occupied shelf storage, it is second in size to the National Archives in Pretoria. See the Annual Report of the National Archivist and State Herald, 1999-2000 (Pretoria: National Archivist, 2000): 17. [Return to text]

5. See "Mission." The National Archives and Records Service. www.national.archives.gov.za. [Return to text]

6. Most of these materials had been sent outside of South Africa during the apartheid years, for safe keeping at such places as the International Defense and Aid Fund in London. After bans against the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid organizations were lifted in 1990, the IDAF's collection was returned to the Mayibuye Center for History and Culture in South Africa. In September of 1996, shortly after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings began, the collection was the subject of intense negotiation. At the end of these negotiations, the newly democratically elected ANC government established the Robben Island Museum, which gained control of the Mayibuye Center. Although still housed at the University of Western Cape, it now operates under the title of The University of Western Cape-Robben Island Mayibuye Center. [Return to text]

7. See Derrida's comments upon the relation between his work in Archive Fever and his invited response to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in "Archive Fever: A Seminar by Jacques Derrida," in Refiguring the Archive, Eds. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris and Graeme Read, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh. (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002): 38-80. See especially p. 1, p. 2. [Return to text]

8. It is unclear whether it is possible to see any of these materials as evidence of antecedent events that nonetheless did not lead to later forms of government, as Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests should also be considered. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). [Return to text]

9. Michel Foucault, "The Statement and the Archive," The Archeology of Knowledge: the Discourse on Language. Trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1972 [original French publication 1969]): 128. [Return to text]

10. The archive's role in emerging discourses was brought to the fore at a 1988 conference sponsored by the University of Witwatersrand, the National Archives, the Gay and Lesbian Archives, and the South African History Archive. These archives came into the same space as colonial and other governmental archives in the formal papers and discussions that reveal the overlap among them all, in that seminar organizers were influenced, even if negatively, by Michel Foucault's proposition that an archive mirrors selective biases and performances of power, and that it is actually constitutive of the knowledge upon which governmentality functions. See the joint introduction to the volume that came out of the seminars: Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, and Graeme Read, Introduction, Refiguring the Archive, pp. 7-17. See especially p. 9. [Return to text]

11. Historians who compare Cape Colony slavery with the dimensions of slavery in the New World's sugar, cotton, and tobacco plantations declare the former to have occurred on a much smaller scale. The conclusions drawn from this usually suggest that this scale be considered in conjunction with New World slavery's contribution to European economies. H.S. Klein estimates that the number of slaves at the Cape Colony never reached more than 40,000. Nigel Worden and Clifton Crais draw upon statistics offered by H. S. Klein to compare this number with the 167,000 slaves estimated to have been in Jamaica in 1768, or the 1,700,000 slaves in Brazil in the 1850s, or the four million slaves accounted for in the United States in 1862. See Nigel Worden and Clifton Crais, Breaking the Chains (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994): 1. See also H.S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University, 1988): 134-35. Despite these comparisons, it is nevertheless true that Cape slavery enhanced the colony's importance as a port crucial to traffic between Europe and its South-East Asian, Indian, and Pacific colonies. Moreover, while the Cape Colony's population at the time of Sila's actions was smaller (compared with that of Jamacia), the slave population was estimated to be almost equal to that of the slave owning population. See, for example, Robert Montgomery Martin, History of the Colonies of the British Empire (London: W. H. Allen and Co, 1843), p. 477. It is also not clear if indentured Khoi peoples are included in the Worden/Crais calculation—their status being slaves in everything but official name. Although Shell's argument skirts the issue of emergent racial divisions that gave lower-class Dutchmen the chance of upward mobility, he contends that forms or degrees of indenture for Dutch knechts, or bondsmen, masked the enslaved conditions of individuals and, one can surmise, the larger tally of enslaved/indentured peoples. See Robert C.-H. Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope 1652-1838 (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994). [Return to text]

12. The spelling of her name changes from memorandum to memorandum, from page to page, and even, in some documents, from paragraph to paragraph. [Return to text]

13. There is also the factor of self-naming. Shell acknowledges that slaves did, in fact, increasingly resist the racial "jokes" of names assigned by slave owners, such as names derived from gods or animals, or coined as outright insults (Shell 260). He does, however, note that names were used faithfully in many other instances (Shell 260). [Return to text]

14. For a discussion of this, see "Letter from the Guardian of Slaves to the Secretary, Court of Justice," in SO (Slave Office) 3/22, Slave Cases 1808-27, No. 84, dated 16 May 1827. [Return to text]

15. M. Rayner, "Wine and Slaves: The Failure of an Export Economy and the Ending of Slavery in the Cape Colony, South Africa, 1806-1834." Diss. Duke University, 1986. [Return to text]

16. See "Proclamation by His Excellency General the Right Hon. Lord Charles Henry Somerset," dated 26 April, 1816, in Theal pp. 28-33. The logic behind such proclamations in the Cape, as well as in the British West Indies, was the monitoring of the slave trade after 1807. While slower to adopt a registration system—Trinidad established its registry in March 1812 (PC 2/192) and in St. Lucia and Mauritius in September 1814 (PC 2/192)—the Cape did not drag its heels as long as Bermuda and the Bahamas, which were among the last to introduce slave registries in 1821 and 1822 respectively. [Return to text]

17. Letter from Lieutenant Colonel Bird to the Reverend, Mr. Hough. 17 September 1817, in G. M. Theal, Records of the Cape Colony, 26 Volumes (London: Government Printers, 1905). See especially vol. XI, from November 1815 to May 1818, pp. 385-389. [Return to text]

18. GH (Government House) 48/25, Court of Appeals, Pleadings, May-December 1823, pp. 452-483. [Return to text]

19. Both reports were appended to her appeal against her death sentence. For the Orphan Chamber's report, see pp. 478-483. For the Fiscal's report, see pp. 484-497. Note, the Orphan Chamber report refers to Sila as "Drucella (alias Silla)" (GH 49/25:479). See also SO 32/22:84, 16 May 1827. The Guardian of Slaves sets Sila's history out as "information" he has "been able to obtain." [Return to text]

20. There is some vagueness about when these women were born to Alima, making it impossible to calculate their ages according to his testimony. [Return to text]

21. This exhaustion can be detected in the statement added to Sila's appeal against her death sentence, wherein the Chamber laid out its convoluted dealings with Theron, concluding that "it will appear that Drusilla [sic] has constantly been claimed by J.J. Theron as his own property" and that he had "constantly found means to hinder" the execution of his mother's will, "in defiance of the [Chamber's] exertions," (GH 49/25:483). [Return to text]

22. SO 6/57, Register of Slaves, George T-Z 1816-35, p. 9. There is a penciled comment that was clearly added some time later: "Murder on 24th December 1822, Vide Memorial [illegible]." There is also a reference to 18 July 1835 and Robben Island, suggesting that the register had been kept to date, tracking Sila's movements. The sale of "problematic" slaves was a form of punishment that also acted as a warning to other slaves. Shell finds that such sales were usually out of the country, via passing ships that plied the old Dutch East India trade routes or sailed to the Americas (Shell 97). However, the sale of slaves "upcountry" in the Cape was also common (Shell 97-98). See also Theal, Records, "Cape Proclamation, 18 March 1823, by His Excellency General the Right Honourable Lord Charles Henry Somerset," xxxiv, 309. [Return to text]

23. SO 3/22. [Return to text]

24. GH 49/25 1827. [Return to text]

25. Case No. 26 in Courts of Justice Criminal Proceedings (CJ), vol. 817, pp. 224-257. See p. 243. [Return to text]

26. Letter from Acting Governor Lieutenant Colonel Bird to [unknown]. 25 October 1826 in GH 23/8 Papers Dispatched to Secretary of State, London: General Despatches, 1826-1828. See Memorial No. 43. [Return to text]

27. GH 1/59 Papers Received from Secretary of State, London: General Despatches, 1826 December - 1827 March, Reference 341, p. 852. [Return to text]

28. See Alan F. Hattersley, The First South African Detectives (Cape Town: Howard Timins, 1960): 30-31. [Return to text]

29. Letter from GH 1/65 Papers Received from Secretary of State, London: General Despatches. See memorial number 942. [Return to text]

30. RI 334, Commandant of Robben Island 1827, Robben Island Report, No. 32. [Return to text]

31. This entry in the register spells Sila's name as Drusilia and lists her as the mother of Talmag, whose age is given as forty-three-and-a-third. Once again, the arithmetic does not add up and points to some clerical error, at best, or outright obfuscation. Sila/Drusilia is also listed as the mother of a young slave girl named Lena, aged about seven-and-a-third years. Her registration date was January 3,1820. Was she indeed Sila's child? The court records are utterly silent about this, and Lena does not appear in any other documents listing Sila's children. If she was Sila's child, one assumes that mention would have been made of her in the various investigations into her claim that she was a free woman as a result of the will of the widow, Hendrina Jansen. [Return to text]

32. Indeed, stories of slaves whose actions brought them to the law's attention also reveal what would otherwise have been the reality of the contemporary norm, namely the realities of Cape slavery. Referring to the case in which a slave, Dina, was badly beaten by her master, also in the district of George, John Edwin Mason remarks that "without Dina, these stories would never have been preserved and could not be retold here." One could add any of the cases in which slaves used the British amelioration laws to complain about their masters or mistresses. See John Edwin Mason, "Paternalism Under Siege: Slavery in Theory & Practice During the Era of Reform c1825 through Emancipation," in Nigel Worden, Clifton Crais (Eds.), Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994): 45-78. See especially p. 47. [Return to text]

33. Letter from R. B. Fisher to William Wilberforce 13 September 1816. (Theal, vol. 11:176-183), especially p. 177. Fisher's letter makes it clear that he does not lay the accusation of infanticide at the feet of slaves alone. He claims to have seen "the bodies of three white infants . . . on the beach" (Theal, Vol. 11:176) and quotes "an officer of a very respectable character" as having seen thirteen dead infants on the beach. Also R. B. Fisher to Earl Bathurst. 13 September 1816. (Theal vol. 11: 173-175). For (the Governor) Lord Charles Somerset's response, see his letter to Earl Bathurst, May 19, 1917 (Theal, vol. 11 pp. 455-345). For various colonial officials' responses, see Theal vol. 11 pp. 344-349. The term infanticide appears to be used specifically in relation to the deaths of newborns or infants whose bodies Fisher claimed to have seen washed up on a beach. While Shell argues that infanticide per se was not a major crime at this time, it is also true that very little work on this issue has been undertaken in the history of the Cape. Patricia van der Spuy's work begins to address this gap. She points out that, while Shell's comments are about slaves, there remains no discussion of infanticide in settler communities. See Patricia van der Spuy, "Infanticide, slavery and the politics of reproduction at Cape Colony, South Africa, in the 1820s," in Ed. Mark Jackson, Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2000): 128-148, especially 132. [Return to text]

34. Theal. Letter from J.A. Truter to Lord Charles Somerset. 27 March 1817. Van der Spuy notes with irony Truter's claim that "since 1800 'only' eight inquests had been performed on infant corpses," (Van der Spuy 132). [Return to text]

35. For Hester's sentence, see Court of Justice (CJ) 812, p.595. See also Theal, Records, vol. 16, pp. 379-95. [Return to text]

36. Theal. Letter of R.B. Fisher to William Wilberforce. 13 September 181[year unknown], 11.176-183; also Letter from Bathurst to Lord Charles Somerset. 24 September 1816, 11:188, 334-349. [Return to text]

37. See the memorandum from Lord Charles Somerset to R. Wilmot, 20 October 1823, in Theal, Records, vol. 16, pp. 379-381. [Return to text]

38. Khoi or Khoekhoe refers to a group of peoples who are closely related Khoisan language groups. They were among the first indigenous peoples of the South African region (reaching from the western Cape up into present-day Namibia and the western border of Botswana). "Hottentot" is the old derogatory Dutch name for these peoples. The condition of such peoples, particularly women, in the Cape Colony was close to slavery. [Return to text]

39. See Governor Somerset's letter to the Colonial Secretary, Earl Bathurst, dated 28 April 1823 in Colonial Office (CO) 48/60. Mina appears to have played a questionable role in this entire affair—having been consulted by Rosalyn, who was charged by the then-pregnant Anna Sauer with finding abortificant substances. The abortion failed, and Anna Sauer gave birth to a son whom, in one testimony, she allegedly ordered Rosalyn (and possibly Philida) to kill. Patricia van der Spuy speculates incest or rape in the matter, in part because of the absence of Sauer's father in any of the proceedings. See Patricia van der Spuy, "Infanticide, slavery and the politics of reproduction at Cape Colony, South Africa, in the 1820s," in Ed. Mark Jackson, Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2000): 128-148. See p. 140. One begins to see other possible dramas in this family's secrets. How might one read the death of another Sauer slave, a man named Letjou, who was purportedly linked with Rosalyn? Letjou's death occurred shortly after the birth of Anna Sauer's child. Does the drama of incest give way to something else? Was Anna Sauer's testimony that she had lost her mind (temporarily) a familiar defense against miscegenation in the case of a white woman having consorted with a black man? There is something dangerous about such speculation, and yet the impulse is fuelled by the record itself—the Court's demand for explanation is missing in the matter of paternity, and in this, Van der Spuy's consideration points to the fact that some veil has been drawn. The truth has vanished together with Anna Sauer, Rosalyn, Philida, Mina, and Letjou. For Sauer's defense and the testimonies of Rosalyn, Philida, and Mina, see Graaff Reinet Archive 1/GR 3/27. [Return to text]

40. See CJ 817:866. For an account in the mode of travelogue, see Victor de Kock, Those in Bondage: An Account of the Life of the Slave at the Cape in the Days of the Dutch East India Company, (London: Allen & Unwin, 1950): 184, 185. [Return to text]

41. See CO 189, May 1823 return. [Return to text]

42. Marilyn Francus. "Monstrous Mothers, Monstrous Societies: Infanticide and the Rule of Law in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century England." Eighteenth-Century Life. 21.2 (1997): 133-156. [Return to text]

43. Letter from Lord Charles Somerset to Earl Bathurst. 31 January 1824 in GH 23/7:70. [Return to text]

44. See Governor Charles Somerset's letter to London, denying "the unjustified calumny" of claims of unjust treatment of slaves. GH 23/7, Reference 56a. In this letter, Somerset insists that slaves under the jurisdiction of the government are treated with "every degree of kindness & indulgence." He is referring specifically to the government's intervention in cases of slave intransigence. This intervention took the form of selling slaves as public displays of discipline. [Return to text]

45. See, for example, the final edition of The South African Commercial Advertiser, Monday, May 10, 1824. Here, Fairbairn's objections to government censorship made little reference to slavery. See also The South African Commercial Advertiser, No. 1 January 7 1824 to No. 18 May 5 1924, together with Facts Connected with the Stopping of the South African Commercial Advertiser (Cape Town: South African Library, 1978): 155-158. [Return to text]

46. South African Commercial Advertiser, 7 August 1833. See also Minute Book of the Cape of Good Hope Society for Aiding Deserving Slaves and Slave Children to Purchase their Freedom. See also CO 48/141, "The Formation of the Cape of Good Hope Philanthropic Society for Aiding Deserving Children to Purchase Their Freedom, Cape Town 1828." [Return to text]

47. See Robert Ross, Beyond the Pale: Essays on the History of Colonial South Africa (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993); Nigel Worden & Clifton Crais (Eds.) Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press); Robert C.-H. Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope 1652-1838 (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994). [Return to text]

48. In recent history, the importance attached to the archive was made patently clear when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began its hearings in July 1996. It suddenly became necessary to arrive before eight in the morning to secure a space at what had become a gold field for many. Scholars from around the world joined South African historians, as well as people seeking their family histories. Yet, given the archive's classification about the "truth" of such roots under the apartheid system, it remains imperative that the archive itself is the subject of scrutiny. [Return to text]

49. Wayne Dooling, "'The Good Opinion of Others': Law, Slavery & Community in the Cape Colony c. 1760-1830," in Eds. Nigel Worden and Clifton Crais, Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony (Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press, 1994): 25-24. See especially p. 29. Those who performed excessive punishments were deemed to have fallen outside of the codes of behavior and were publicly condemned. The definition of "excess" in such cases remains an unstable notion, as will be seen in the case of Sila. However, the law was not applied uniformly, a point also made by Ross (Ross 155). As a further comment, Roman Dutch law was introduced to the colony by the Dutch and maintained even after the British took control—from 1795 to 1803 after the Dutch East India Company collapsed and then after the second Dutch occupation (1803-1806). The British remained in control from 1806 until 1905, three years after the end of the Boer War. [Return to text]

50. Theal, Records, Vol. 33, pp. 465-66. [Return to text]

51. The section in which Sila took the stand has been collated out of sequence in the bound volume held at the Cape Archive. In another convention of the time, questions and answers are numbered. In the bound volume CJ 626 held at the Cape archive, Sila's interrogation begins with a question numbered one on page 844. The answer, also numbered one, follows. Yet the second and third questions and answers appear on page 853. [Return to text]

52. I have kept to the transliteration since this is the word ("heartsore") that appears in many of the English translations of her trial. [Return to text]

53. The Dutch reads, "Ja het is van hartseer dat ek dat gedann heb." [Return to text]

54. One has to ask in what sense a slave might possess language. The answer to this deserves and requires a sustained consideration, which I am addressing in the larger project of which this present essay is part. [Return to text]

55. Speaking specifically to the impact of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Derrida equated the gathering of victim's testimonies with archiving or, more specifically, "the problem of the archive." For him, the Commission was itself "a place of archive" that would, through mass mediation, be public. Commenting upon the archive's future, Derrida used the predictive verbal clause, "It's going to be a public archive." [Return to text]

56. One is reminded here that one of the judges who presided over Sila's (and Hester's) trial, Sir John Truter, was the same judge who penned a series of objections to the amelioration acts of 1822 onwards, particularly to the creation of the office of the Protector of Slaves on the grounds that this would interfere with the jurisdiction of judges and magistrates. CO 414/A, 107. [Return to text]

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