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]

"Refigurings"

Compared with the materials in the Mayibuye Center, those in the Cape Archive occupy a different status vis-à-vis the newly democratic nation. They reach farther back, into the country's pre-apartheid history. As such, they can now be read as evidence of the historical trajectories that lead from colonial occupation to formal settler communities whose juridical developments underpinned the dispossessions whose end goal was the creation of a state founded on the control or destruction of those marked as racially different.[8] Materials in the Cape Archives and, for example, the South African National Library, are also objects of emerging discourses. These discourses converge and diverge over the issues of how to treat archival materials, how to open or even limit their availability to the public, and how documents will be read as both "events (with their own conditions and domain of appearances) and things (with their own possibility and field of use)."[9] They nonetheless share an ambition to expand the content of the archive, and to have it encompass that which was formerly excluded.[10] However, the documents in the Cape Archive also beg a question concerning the difference between those who sought to evade apartheid's law and thereby remain invisible, and those who sought recognition in and by that law as legitimate subjects within the national body. The difference correlates with the changing forms of representation that could be conceived within or in relation to different kinds of state—of colony, colonial nation-formation, apartheid republic, post-apartheid, or perhaps even postcolonial democracy.

In the introduction to Refiguring the Archive, editors Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris and Graeme Reid draw a line between "old" archiving practices and "new" ones in South Africa. In the "old," historians "'mined' the archives for 'nuggets of fact' in a manner conscious of problems of bias in the record," whereas "today scholars pay greater attention to the particular process by which the record was produced and subsequently shaped . . . before its entry into the archive, and . . . as part of the archival record," (Hamilton, Harris, and Reid 9).

Mining for "nuggets of fact" has always been a fraught, even fiction-making process. As archive studies now shows, "fact" has always been shaped by discursive structures, and its representation mediated by political interests. Yet in the end, the archive may be all that we have. Moreover, for those who were part of the vast body of "nobodies" in the service of "somebodies," it may be the only scene of possible appearance. In these circumstances, one must learn how to listen to echoes of subjects for whom one might not have an adequate language; one must also learn how to discern what they might have been trying to say within the statements attributed to them (but that could very well represent the redactions of colonial officials—notaries, court reporters). In addition, one must prepare to hear and interpret any echo of the unsaid as something that could be nothing more than a trace. It is to the echoes and traces of one such individual, Sila van de Kaap, that I now return.

A Fragmented Story

This paper is grounded in a larger project that, in part, considers the virtual absence of self-articulated slave narratives in the history of South African literature.[11] My immediate attention to the slave named Sila has two projects, neither of which exhausts the record nor excludes other projects. The first is to recover, to the extent possible, some sense of the life and conditions Sila lived in and from which she attempted to speak. The second is to discern the fate of what I hope to show is her failed but effectual attempt to summon the law. This latter fate is bound by and within the archival record and this record's relationship to colonial law. Despite being an inevitably failed gesture, Sila's action nonetheless forced some opening through which we can glimpse her, perhaps even hear her, some 150 years later.

How, then, does one approach a story whose referent is constantly circling back and around itself in the archive or, rather, constantly circling the moment in which a slave woman becomes the subject of legal action and punishment, namely that moment in which she killed her son? Any attempt to speak of the woman who killed her son on December 24, 1822, any attempt to speak of the circumstances that brought her to this point of violence, and any attempt to speak of what befell her as a result, has to negotiate the Cape Archive. It is, in fact, where she "remains," not as a self-authorizing presence but as a trace, perhaps even an echo of a former self who answered to various names. In this "trace," we find her within a triple discursive imprisonment: black female slave. Each term designates a structure of foreclosure, a mode of categorical exclusion from the full and putatively universal subjecthood of "free white male." How does one approach that place where a woman "remains," the place from which, as Spivak describes, speech may emanate but not to be heard, a place in which the muted being is relegated to a position that she must try to make her body signify.

One initial hurdle is the spelling of Sila's name. She is Sila, Siela, Silla, Silia, Drucella, Drusilla, and Drusiela.[12] These variations appear in records of the official slave registry, a widow's will, various court records that contest the will, various prison records, and a royal decree from George IV. These variations may be due to the fact that the spelling of names had not been standardized. Some of the changes could also be accounted for by the translation from Dutch to English and vice versa. Dutch remained the language of legal documents in the colony's outlying districts long after the second, permanent British occupation of the colony began in 1806. These had to be translated into English, the language of the town's court. Yet another factor contributing to the unstable spelling of a name was the common practice in which slave owners changed the names of slaves at the time of purchase, sometimes to evade government oversight (Shell 259).[13] In Sila's case, we are required to ask whether the shifts in spelling were simply the result of linguistic factors or innocuous slippages, or whether they were related to duplicitous actions.

At the time of her criminal deed, according to the record, Sila van de Kaap was between thirty and thirty-five years of age—the record does not mark the date of her birth. She had belonged to at least two, possibly three, owners prior to arriving on a farm in Plettenberg Bay in the outlying district of George. The first of these owners to be recorded is a woman named Hendrina Jansen (and also the separated wife of Petrus Theron the elder). Her elder son and heir, J. J. Theron, and a merchant named Hancke, each claimed that they owned her before she ended up on the farm of Jacobus Stephanus van der Wat in Plettenberg Bay. The latter is the one to whom the records of her criminal trial defer.

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.

What matters is the timing of his claim—which only came to light after the 1816 requirement that all slaves be registered—and when, in response to this, Hancke attempted to record Sila and her children as his. This struggle is documented in the Orphan Chamber's 1827 investigation into Sila's history prior to de Laurentz's discovery of her in the Cape Town prison. Ironically, it is from this self-vindicating report that a fuller narrative emerges, one that reveals the myopia of colonial bureaucracy, as well as its weakness vis-à-vis slave holding. This narrative takes us back to Hendrina Jansen and her death in 1806, at which time her will was to have been enforced.

The Orphan Chamber's 1827 report states that Theron claimed to have purchased a slave woman named Alima from his mother thirty years before her death. This slave had three children: Fanny, Philippina, and Drusilla.[20] Between 1806 and 1810, he ignored or fought the Orphan Chamber's repeated requests for proof of this ownership so that it might settle his mother's estate. Finally, in January 1810, he produced a deed that supposedly proved his mother had sold her entire estate to him in 1783, including all but two of her slaves (GH 49/25:480). The first evidence of this deed was a much later date, 1789. He produced it in a lawsuit against his mother that year and attempted to use it as evidence in his claim upon a group of slaves in her possession. That lawsuit ended with the court ruling against him and stipulating that he return to his mother all of the slaves he attempted to appropriate. However, the ruling did not actually name them all. This oversight appears to have been beneficial to Theron for, after his mother's death in 1806, he used this technicality to claim that the omission of Sila's name from the 1789 ruling against him was proof that she was his property (GH 49/25:480). In October 1810, the Orphan Chamber dismissed Theron's claims to Sila and other slaves named in his mother's will as insufficiently supported. As in 1789, the court stopped just short of calling his claim fraudulent.

A month later, in November 1810, Theron reappeared to say that most of the slaves named in his mother's will were living on his farm. The exceptions were Philippina and Sila. Theron now claimed that Philippina had been sold during his mother's lifetime. As for Sila, he informed the Orphan Chamber that he had sold her to Hancke for one thousand Rix dollars, five hundred of which had been paid (GH 49/25:481). This was the amount stipulated in Hendrina Jansen's will as the price Sila was to work off to compensate the estate for her freedom. It can only be guessed that, in 1810, Sila had not challenged the sale and that, as she would later claim, she had been under the impression that she was working to pay off her bond.

The Chamber's records go silent until April 1816, the month of the government proclamation requiring the registration of all slaves. It was this time that Hancke and Theron began disputing each other's ownership of Sila, with both attempting to register her; the irony, here, is that the government's proclamation indeed exposed something that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Both men appealed to the courts for a ruling, each firm in his belief that she was his property. In May 1817, after Sila had been tugged back and forth between Theron and Hancke, Theron was summoned once more to give an account of the whereabouts of the slaves from his mother's estate. This time he contradicted his earlier testimony of November 1810, when he had claimed that many of them still lived on his farm, with the exception of "Drucella" and Philippina. In the new statement, he claimed that a number of the slaves named in his mother's will were dead (GH 49/25:481), and he, in fact, added Philippina to the list of the deceased. In a confusing move, he then amended his earlier claim upon Alima and her supposed children (Sila/Drucella, Fanny, and Philippina) to say that his mother had sold them away to other slavers before her death. How this would have entitled him to Sila is not actually questioned in the court documents.

What does emerge is that Sila is cited as having provided counter-evidence to Theron's constantly metamorphosing testimonies to the Orphan Chamber (GH 49/25:482). It was Sila/Drusella who in fact told the court in 1817 that the supposedly "dead" slaves had been sold, giving details of this, as well as of Philippina's sale and whereabouts. She gave the names of the slaves sold and the masters to whom they had been sold. How Sila was able to maintain knowledge of, and even contact with, those she no longer worked with remains a mystery and a compelling sign of a woman who observed, who cared about someone else—possibly a sister, possibly a friend—and who had some access to conversations that enabled her to glean information. While these avenues of conversations might have been outside of the law's range, they enabled her to make a powerful accusation—one that the Chamber felt wanting of its attention.

Perhaps spurred on by Sila's claims, the Orphan Chamber made one more attempt to summon Theron to account for the whereabouts of the slaves named in his mother's will. This time, he not only ignored the summons but also denied that he had done anything wrong, insisting that he had fulfilled the wishes of his mother's will. He also lodged a complaint against the Chamber for failing to execute all matters relating to this will. The result was hardly unexpected. Exhausted financially and lacking the desire to pursue Theron further, the Chamber let the matter slip out of view.[21] At Hancke's insistence, the matter became a criminal one, and the Court of Justice stepped in. Theron was ordered to deliver Sila and her children to Hancke and to pay a fine of 500 Rix dollars. He was also threatened with a three-month sentence on Robben Island if he did not give Sila up to Hancke (GH 49/25:488).

At this point, it is unclear whether the Chamber regarded Sila as a slave or a woman still working off her manumission bond. Theron's silence did, however, force the Chamber to act. It did so by placing Sila and her children under the law's "protective" custody. In April or early May of 1817, they were "seized . . . dragged and carried" to prison to await a settlement, with Sila protesting and asking for her case to be taken before the governor (GH 49/25:456). Bizarre as this protective incarceration may now seem, it was not uncommon in matters of insolvent estates (Shell 100). With the tacit approval of the Fiscal, or public prosecutor, who presided over insolvent estates, Sila, Carolina, Camies, and Baro were literally "dragged" out of prison by Hancke, who immediately escorted them to the town's outer border at Hottentot's Holland. There, he handed them over to a traveling merchant named Mokke (GH 49/25:457). Mother and children were then taken to the farm Stoffpad, owned by Jacobus Stephanus Van der Wat in Plettenberg Bay in the outlying district of George.

Clearly, they had been sold again, this time by Hancke. In May 1818, Van der Wat registered a boy named Baro who was described as about two-and-three-quarter years old. The name Drusilia appeared beneath the entry for Baro (spelled Barro in the Register of Slaves for George).[22] The registry date for Sila is the same as Baro's, and her age is given as about thirty years. Four months after arriving at Van der Wat's farm, Sila gave birth to another child, Pieter, who was immediately registered by Van der Wat as his property. Another four months later, Van der Wat sold Carolina and Camies to one H. Stroebel.[23] In one set of documents, they are said to be seven and three, respectively, at the time of the sale.[24] In the legal proceedings surrounding Sila, the sale receives hardly any attention. Had it occurred after March 18, 1823, however, it would have been in direct contradiction of a government proclamation that prohibited children under the age of ten from being sold away from their mother.

Details of the lives of Sila and those children who remained with her are largely absent. What is known comes from the very act of Sila killing of Baro, namely that she and he were subjected to violent beatings, one of which involved a blow to her head that resulted in the loss of hearing in one ear. According to the court records, matters became critical on December 24, 1822, when Sila was ordered by her mistress to clean some linen.[25] She sent Baro to pick lemons for the removal of stains from the linen. On his return to "the wash place," where Sila awaited him, he complained of pain resulting from another beating by Van der Wat. The sentencing document sets out what she allegedly said happened next:

. . . she thereupon rubbed the child with fat which she had scraped from her bread for the purpose, — [and] while she was so employed the child fell asleep, [and she] through heartsore and grief, cut the child's throat with a knife which she had with her. (CJ 817:242)

After this, Sila placed Baro's body under a bush before running from the Van der Wat farm to the neighboring farm of Witte Drift, owned by the Field Cornet. In the presence of another man, Carl Schaffen, she confessed her deed, breaking down and weeping as she did so. Van Huisteen and Schaffen would both testify to this weeping and to her claim that she had been driven to kill Baro because of the violence of the beatings from her master and mistress.

Three days later, on December 28, 1822, the District Surgeon, Sommerville, was summoned to examine Sila, presumably while she was in the custody of the Field Cornet but definitely in response to her complaint "of ill usage," (CJ 817:244). Sommerville detailed the many bruises on her body, measuring them and comparing them—above her left eye, across the upper parts of her body, her arms, her thighs, and her legs. He stated that he found bruises of a "livid color" on the "upper eyelid of the left eye," (CJ 817:245). Another bruise measured three by two inches "in an oblique direction upon the middle and back parts of the right arm." Another measured "about four inches by two" upon the left shoulder. Another, measuring about three inches, was found a "little above the inner hamstring of the right leg," (CJ 817:246). Other marks include a "small" scab on Sila's left elbow and "several indurated tumors with a various state of the veins upon the back part of the legs." Sommerville concluded that these bruises appeared to be the result of a flogging by her mistress. He also recorded that Sila had complained to him that Van der Wat flogged her with leather straps used for yoking oxen (CJ 817:245).

At her trial in March 1823, Sila's defense called upon another slave on Van der Wat's farm to corroborate her story of ill treatment. Sila reportedly said that this slave, Jephta, had been so badly treated that he ran away after being flogged by Van der Wat. She gave details—that the beating resulted from failing to find two oxen and that Jephta had been missing for two months, during which she had taken Baro's life. He was found by the time she went to trial.

Jephta's testimony refuted Sila's claim. He accused her of being a drunk. Although he admitted he had run away, he denied ever being flogged, even when he returned to the farm. He went so far as to say that his master and mistress had never treated him badly. On the contrary, he and the other slaves on the farm were well treated. The fact that he was obliged to return to Van der Wat's farm after his testimony—and that this might have had some bearing upon his claims—went unchallenged.

. . . 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.

An Emergent but Stalled Discourse

Colonial archives always impose their own logics of legibility. Someone like Sila can be admitted only as a disturbance. But Sila's case also marks the limitations of the Colonial Archive in a different way. The catalog's claim to order reveals itself to be disordering, and not only of the lives it cannot recognize.[32] Here, Sila's presence, like other slaves drawn to the law's recording attention, is haunting and stubbornly elusive but emphatically palpable.

With rare exceptions, the bureaucratic record acknowledges almost nothing beyond the fact of slaves' existence, and sometimes their repudiations of the conditions of their lives. Yet in detail, their lives, daily trials, and hopeful desires are utterly absent. Perhaps it is in such a context that Derrida's observation of the paradoxical simultaneity of the death drive and the counter response of preservation in the archive (Derrida 1996:10-11) offers some way to comprehend the fact that materials referring to the existence of slaves have survived. Such materials indict colonialism now as much as they indicted the slaves then. The anticipated future, or the afterlife to which archivists consigned their records, turns out to be fatal. What is destroyed is the very foundation of the law upon which colonialism and its heirs grounded their rule.

In this context, it becomes necessary to read the traces of those slave women who, around the time of Sila's killing of Baro, were troubling the rule of slavery. For it is between 1819 and 1823 that four notable cases emerge in which slaves were charged with infanticide (the murder of newborns or infants) and child slaying in the Cape Colony. One such case occurs in 1819, another in 1821, and still another in 1823, the same year as Sila's case. While not the first recorded murders of children, these slayings occurred in the wake of an attempt to generate debate about slavery's cruelties in the Cape Colony. The particular focus on the deaths of slave children was generated by William Wilberforce before the House of Commons in 1817. Citing as his authority a traveler, R. B Fisher, as well as a soldier in the colonial army, Wilberforce claimed that infanticide was so common in the Cape that it was not unusual to see the corpses of drowned infants lying on the beach, which he referred to as the "most abominable corruption of manners."[33] Stung by these accusations, the Colonial Office called for a report from the Cape governor. While Governor Somerset informed the Colonial Office that the accusations were untrue, and while he and other Cape officials and farmers seemed to be on the same side for once, he gave the task of a full, legal, refutation to the Colony's leading judge, Chief Justice John Truter. Truter's rejection of Wilberforce's figures ended with a final—and indignant—insistence upon the "civility" of the colonial government, which, he claimed, always gave homes to unwanted children.[34]

Perhaps this is why, when a case emerged that had the potential to galvanize all sides of this debate, Cape justice, led by Truter, was violently retributive. In 1819, a slave woman named Hester, aged about twenty-six, was executed for the murder of her children.[35] The colonial government could not have had a better case with which to prove its vigilance, and English abolitionists could not have had a better case to prove their claim that slavery drove people to desperate measures.[36] For, in this case, Hester's testimony was of an untenable burden of service and cruelty.

In a state of acute distress over her inability to care for her own children and protect them from abuse, she removed them from her owner's home in Cape Town at noon on August 16, 1819 and went down to the ocean at Roggerberg. Where Sila's intention to kill herself was refuted by the court, Hester's were irrefutably telegraphed by her act of placing stones in her own pockets and those of her children before taking them into the water with her. Only she and one child (out of three) were pulled out alive.

Hester was tried immediately and sentenced to death by strangulation. The sentence was swiftly executed; no appeal was entertained. Her claim that ill treatment drove her actions was brushed aside in the judgment against her:

. . . as it therefore appears that the prisoner in this case has been guilty of willfully [and] with evil intention, depriving her three children of their lives, as also of attempting to destroy herself in the same manner, without being able to allege any other reason in excuse of her crime than that she was from time to time scolded by her Master & Mistress, & neither she, the prisoner nor her eldest child could give satisfaction to her Mistress; although she was obliged to acknowledge her being extremely well treated in other respects; and as such a crime cannot be tolerated in a country where Justice prevails but on the contrary should be rigorously punished according to the Laws as an Example to deter others from doing the like. (CJ 812)

With some exceptions, there was no real abolitionist movement in the Cape at the time. This, and the sheer fact of geographic and temporal distance between the colony and English abolitionists, stalled any public declarations on behalf of Hester or, indeed, Cape slaves. Hester's case did surface again, however, in 1823, shortly after Sila killed her son Baro. At that time, it was mentioned in the English House of Commons when, due to another prompting by Wilberforce, the English secretary of state expressed concern over the matter of a slave woman having killed her children. It remains unclear whether Sila's case had any bearing on this briefly revived interest in Hester or the more generalized concern about slave women killing their own children. Nonetheless, the British secretary of state expressed his perturbation about the matter when he wrote to Governor Somerset. More than a hint of unease emerged in the secretary's language as he asked under what circumstances a mother could possibly want to kill her children—in this, we see a hint of possible concern about the conditions of slave lives at the Cape. His official position remained clear, however: Hester had to be punished, and her death had to serve as a strong warning to all other slave mothers.[37] Despite this, at least three other instances of slave women slaying children came to the law's attention between Hester's case in 1819 and Sila's in 1823.

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]

To Be Heard, Not Overheard

What conditions exist for discerning the effect of any slave woman's utterance? In what context does she speak? How can she be heard? One aspect of the context in which Sila lived is the absence of generic forms for slave self-articulation in the Cape Colony. It is an absence often confused with willful silence. By contrast, abolitionist networks in the United States and England created a considerable discursive space and market to support slave narratives from the Americas and the Caribbean. As stated earlier, little effective abolitionist activity occurred in the Cape itself, although English abolitionists did direct their attention to the colony, and missions in the colony's outlying districts constantly drew the ire of slave owners for trying to hide runaways or to purchase manumissions. Any attempt to establish a printing press that might have lent itself to the opinions of such men as John Fairbairn and Thomas Pringle, outspoken opponents of slavery in the Cape, was thwarted by the tight control exercised by the colonial government.[45] Even the formation of the Cape of Good Hope Society for Aiding Deserving Slaves and Slave Children to Purchase their Freedom did very little to open the discursive space in which slaves might speak for themselves and of their conditions in a public arena. Not a single slave was invited to any of the Society's meetings. Indeed, members were so anxious about offending slave owners that it invited the governor to its first meeting, with the express purpose of reassuring him that the Society's prime purpose was not to end slavery but to purchase slave children out of a humanitarian impulse.[46] Such children were to be purchased and placed in indentured service. The Society received little real financial support, relying upon the government for the redirection of funds derived from fines for the contravention of slave laws. Over a period of five years, it emancipated 127 children.

In the absence of effective abolitionist discourse, then, there is no discursive arena in which Sila speaks or could speak for and by herself. What remains is merely the official record and its response to the problem that she presented. Nor is Sila's case exceptional in this regard, as the work of Worden, Ross, and Shell, among others, makes clear.[47]

The Cape archival record operates as the written proof that slavery existed in one of only two modes: as perpetuity and as a problem for the law of perpetuity.[48] As the latter, slaves appear in criminal hearings, in arguments over manumission, and in complaints against their masters/mistresses. They are either problematized or criminalized. Wayne Dooling describes an "inherent contradiction in the legal position of slaves. Non-property owning, they were property. Not allowed to marry or own property, they were nevertheless permitted to cohabit."[49]

And despite a legacy within the Roman-Dutch legal code that recognized slaves as personae de jure, they were regarded as non-persons de facto. Indeed, the Roman provision for their status as personae aside, neither the law nor the courts viewed slaves as having equal rights with their masters. More importantly, the record makes clear that they were never treated as the responsible authors of meaningful statements. Every gesture they made was re-read but not heard by power. Robert Ross points out that "the ruling ethos of European society," which also governed the Cape Colony, was "not equality but hierarchy, and the task of the courts of law, among others, was to maintain this necessary subordination of underlings and superiority of masters," (Ross, 156). Prosecution of slave owners for excessive punishment was always post facto, and the justice system offered very little effective preventative protection, despite provisions for slave complaints against masters. Success in such cases might have been linked to the increasing effort to give slavery a more paternalistic face, particularly from the 1820s onward. But it was also related to the fact that the colonial government (whether in the earlier form of the Dutch East India Company's commercial enterprise or the later British colonial rule), keen to maintain control over its ever-expanding terrain, "reserved the right of punishment, even of slaves, to itself," (Ross 158). Slaves could thus be said to be negatively recognized by the law.

Some provision for the overseeing of slaves named in the settlement of deceased estates fell under the jurisdiction of the Orphan Chamber prior to 1826. After this date, slaves' wellbeing fell under the jurisdiction of the Protector of Slaves. The move was, in part, a response to pressure from abolitionists in the metropole. At the local level, slave-owning colonists rioted to protest the creation of this office. In this forum, slaves could take grievances that fell within the office's definition of justified complaint, but the entire process also reaffirmed both the slave's status as slave and the office's paternalistic rule over beings considered incapable of self-governance and self expression.

A slave's testimony before the Guardian of Slaves or her/his appeal to a religious/missionary body did not present the immediately identifiable figure of an heroic narrative, however. Cape Colony slaves often experienced difficulty securing corroborating evidence in their complaints against slave owners (as Dooling documents for the Stellenbosch District during both 1770 and 1820). By contrast, slave owners had little trouble finding evidence of their munificence toward their slaves. Often, support for slave owners came from other slave owners or even the local Field Cornets (Dooling 44). Colonial bureaucracy was not unaware of this, as a letter between Colonial Secretary William Huskissen to Governor Bourke reveals: "The legal presumption is in favor of slavery." Accordingly, slaves bore the burden of proof as "the weaker and more ignorant party."[50]

In the Cape Colony, then, the slave's articulation of the "I"—as the subject of freedom, who says "I can"—was limited to government institutions (such as the courts) but only in extreme cases of abuse or as defendants against accusation. It was in this sense that Sila's criminality was negatively recognized by the law and consigned to colonialism's record. It was in this sense that she laid her claim to a will limited by and to negation. It is a bitter gratitude that binds us to her now. Had she died a slave rather than a killer of a slave, she would never have achieved visibility. Even so, she remains largely unknowable, the bearer of unbearable knowledge, the keeper of secrets, including, most powerfully, the meaning of a word that erupts in testimony, the word "hartzeer."

In a Word

It is tempting to imagine the effects that women such as Sila, Hester, or Rosalyn might have had on the law. It is tempting to imagine that Sila's actions might have caused the law to respond, even if this response was simply a (re)consolidation. But this would suggest that the law recognized her or its susceptibility to such a figure. It would suggest, too, that there was, in the law, a discursive space in which a slave woman—or maid or slave man—could achieve legibility, and hence a future presence.

Yet Sila, like Hester, is present as a vanishing figure. Sila is not in the present moment of this, my project. To claim that she is present in the moment that one accesses documents in the archive would be to create fiction that, in fact, makes a lie of her single and irrefutably other reality. Spivak's caution against imbuing the written word with the aura of absent presence is a salutary reminder of the risk of wanting to rewrite history, not only nostalgically but also sentimentally (Spivak 1999: 321). We cannot "recover" Sila (or Hester). What remains is that which was and still is in excess of the law and, indeed, in excess of her. This excess is suggested in the utterance that echoes in a single word, the word that comes to us as a transliteration of the Dutch "hartzeer."

The word was first cited (as "hertseer" and "hartzeer") in the depositions of Field Cornet Van Huisteen and his guest Carel Schaffen, who was present when Sila arrived. According to Van Huisteen, Sila is said to have claimed that she acted "uit hartzeer [en] verdriet," (CJ 626:790 and CJ 817:240). These testimonies preceded Sila's own appearance in court, but their use of the phrase "hartzeer [en] verdriet" has the status of a verbatim citation. In the English translation made for the Cape Town Court of Justice, the phrase is "heartsore and grief," though it might also have been rendered "heartache and despair." In March 1823, the Cape Town Court of Justice's affirmation of the original judgment by the Court in the District of George is in English, and the phrase is set down as "grief and affliction" (CJ 626:465).

In Van Huisteen and Schaffen's testimonies, the phrase is not surprising, as both have some immediate proximity to the emotion of her arrival and disclosure of what she had done. Van Huisteen states that Sila handed over a knife:

[en] het storten van tranend te kennen gegeven, dat zy haar kind, Baro, genaamd uit hartzeer & verdriet hem [Baro] met een mes, het welk by ziy had, de keel had afgesneeden. (CJ 626:790)

The official English translation reads:

. . . and shedding some tears [acquainted the Field Cornet with the news] she, through heartsore & grief, had cut the throat of her child named Baro with [the clasp] knife. (CO 189 and 190)

The word heartsore also appears in Sila's interrogation.[51] The transcripts of that interrogation reveal only three questions from the prosecutor and three brief answers from Sila. In response to the prosecutor's question as to whether she admitted to the crime of cutting her son's throat, Sila allegedly answered [the translation is mine]: "Yes, because I was heartsore [hartseer] when I cut the throat of my son Baro."[52] Asked if she knew that this was a crime for which she would have to answer, her reply was, "Yes, because I was heartsore, that is why I did it."[53]

Here, in response to the law's demand for corroboration of what it already claims to know, are her answers, and they are both the same. Yet they exceed the straight confirmation expected of her. The word hartzeer, or its transliterated form, "heartsore," appears to come directly from Sila; it is strange and, especially its transliteration, doubly foreign. The word seeps out across the official documents. It will not be contained. It echoes within the archive—excessive, dangerous, and struggling to rationalize a theft of the law's prerogative over life and death and the monopoly over the definition of crime and gift, crime and accusation. By contrast with the affective urgency and immediacy of this term, the law is exposed as sluggish, dogged, and belated because it is unable to hear her the first time she answers.

And yet, caution is needed when attempting to "read" this word floating seductively in the archive. For a researcher, the libidinal frisson derived from archival practice carries within itself the hope for discovery or surprise, and in that hope lies the danger of a narrow reading of self-assertion. Confronted by such a figure as Sila, a researcher must skirt a longing for evidence of agency or escape. Again, Spivak provides a cautionary paradigm about the fate of feminized speech. And one must ask, despite this heartrending word, to what extent Sila's speech is hers at all.[54]

What happens to this word, particularly in the appeal on her behalf by the advocate Van Ryneveld, is revealing. The document now describes her in a mode that draws upon the language of sentimentality. Thus, a scene is literally "drawn" for the Court of Appeals, a scene in which Sila holds the sleeping Baro:

. . . then meditating as usual, of her fate and that of her children and concerning that she had no hope, for relief, [Sila] was overwhelmed with grief and sadness and resolved to kill her child and then to destroy her own life also, in order that an end may be made to their miseries, in which moment of utmost desperation, she cut her child's throat, but on seeing the blood was [struck] with terror, and as it were rendered unable to commit the intended suicide, and then ran to the house of the Field Cornet of the ward and reported the occurrence to them. (CJ49/25:458-459)

Here is a tableau that clearly attempts to negate and redeem Sila's image as a rebellious monster slave. It works to fit her into a ready discourse: mother with sleeping boy-child in her lap, a boy-child who is already dead in such a scene, since the meditative grief of the mother is what gives to the tableau its poignancy. That this image might also invoke another tableau of mother and son cannot be overlooked. In that other tableau, there is a narrative of divine sacrifice that is, also, a gift of death and freedom. What is necessary for such a messianic tableau is, however, a father figure that consigns his son to the work of sacrifice. Such a figure is missing in Sila's tale, since paternity is nowhere mentioned in the records relating to her. But the former archetypically Christian tableau can nevertheless be summoned here. Even now, reading the document, the image invoked is conceptual as much as it is given a specific form in the names of Sila, slave, and Baro, her child. This conceptual image of "mother-and-child" works both to beg Christian sympathy and charity from the court and to risk an awful contrast. For, between the allegorical tableau and the brutal actuality of a mother and her dead, murdered child is the problem of agency. If Mary submitted, then Sila refused. Their sons' deaths incarnate the difference in form through which their wills sought expression.

The image of "mother-and-child" also resolves a tension that emerges between the high emotion of the images of "grief and sadness" and the legalistic formality of such words and phrases as "meditating," "concerning that," and "utmost," as well as "rendered unable to commit the intended" and "reported the occurrence." The appeal has stilled the strangeness of the word "heartsore" by translating it into something much more stable. This is the waiting frame of a tableau in which not only the notion of "mother-and-child" is invoked but also the notion of "Woman" herself. This is crucial because, in the earlier dispute between Theron and Hancke, what persuaded the Fiscal that Sila was indeed a slave was the reference to her as meid or maid. The issue surfaced again in the rejection of Sila's appeal, wherein it was claimed that her crime had been prompted by the denial of her own and her children's freedom as stipulated by the will of Hendrina Jansen. In its decision against the appeal, the court noted that:

Although the Memorialist has endeavoured to lay some stress on the wording of the sentence of this 6th March 1827 wherein Druzilla [sic] has been called der meid Drusilla [sic] I do not see, but that the Court has therein acted in conformity to a very common practice, whereby a female slave in this Colony is called meid. Should this remark not satisfy the author of the memorial, then let him remember that the worshipful Court by having condemned J. J. Theron to restore the possession of der meid Drusilla and her children [emphasis added to original document in the form of an underline] to Mr. C. Hancke has shown beyond the reach of contradiction that Drusilla [sic] was considered by the Court to remain in the state of slavery. (GH 49/45:495)

This ruling suggests that Sila herself had attempted to define the meaning of the word maid as (free) domestic servant, as opposed to the "very common practice" of referring to a female slave as a junior and unmarried woman. It opens a further space in which some faint tremor of voice may resonate.

While meid or maid could be dismissed readily by the Court of Appeals, the word "hertseer," or "heartsore," apparently could not. Within the bureaucratic language that demands and promises the transparency of explanation, the word appears to register among what was considered the language of a female slave—emotional, irrational, and on the edge of unpredictability. At this point, an instability is revealed within the fortress of prerogative that shapes the law to which Sila is subject. She may speak but only as a slave woman is expected to speak, and in a manner that makes her speech evidence of her confinement to that status. In effect, when she is before the courts, Sila can only answer, and what she says is what has been already said, but not by her. The archive redoubles this structure and the punitive violence that inhabits it. But Sila's action, violent as it is, attempts to summon the law as a full subject might summon it, to question and not merely answer, to speak and not only confirm what has been heard.

It is possible to read—and one can only read the archive—Sila's gesture of surrender as an act that, whatever her intention, now reveals a smooth mirroring surface. It is that surface in which the Field Cornet—as the local representative of the law—confronts the violence of the law that has already condemned Sila and all other slaves, including Baro, to violence. Sila, however, is not a nymph who frets and pines away. She does not wait, passively stalking the object of her desire. She acts. Yet this act remains deeply private, despite its iteration and re-iteration, citation and recitation in the legal domain. This domain, the cornerstone of the public sphere, persists, but it is split in and by history. This history is shaped by the colonial context and its laws. It is further shaped by apartheid and the laws it shared with colonialism's practice of assigning the face of slavery to the face of black people. It is significant that the apartheid government's control of the archive did not lead to the erasure of Sila's (or any slave's) existence, and this is mainly because the context in which she (and other slaves) appear is that of criminality. Where the paternalistic face of slavery could claim the need to subject slaves to a "civilizing" code of labor, apartheid could claim that its own racial stratifications were, literally, the "civilizing" burdens of whiteness, for which figures like Sila (Hester, Rosalyn, and others) were historical precedent and proof in that they, as criminalized black women, could always be on record as the "evidence" of a racialized inhumanity that, in Judge Truter's 1819 ruling against Hester, could not be "tolerated in a country where Justice prevails but on the contrary should be rigorously punished according to the Laws as an Example to deter others from doing the like.

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]