“Heartsore”: The Melancholy Archive of Cape Colony Slavery

“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.¹ 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).”² They nonetheless share an ambition to expand the content of the archive, and to have it encompass that which was formerly excluded.³ 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.⁴ 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.⁵ 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).⁶ 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.

1. 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). [↩]
2. 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. [↩]
3. 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. [↩]
4. 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). [↩]
5. The spelling of her name changes from memorandum to memorandum, from page to page, and even, in some documents, from paragraph to paragraph. [↩]
6. 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). [↩]