“Heartsore”: The Melancholy Archive of Cape Colony Slavery

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.¹ 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.² In 1816, for example, the British colonial authority issued a proclamation requiring owners to register and provide descriptions of all slaves.³ 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.”⁴

Nevertheless, Sila’s appeal was mounted in August of 1823, five months after she was sentenced to death.⁵ 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.⁶ 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.

1. 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. [↩]
2. 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. [↩]
3. 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. [↩]
4. 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. [↩]
5. GH (Government House) 48/25, Court of Appeals, Pleadings, May-December 1823, pp. 452-483. [↩]
6. 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.” [↩]