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.1 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.2 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.
- There is some vagueness about when these women were born to Alima, making it impossible to calculate their ages according to his testimony. [↩]
- 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). [↩]
