“Heartsore”: The Melancholy Archive of Cape Colony Slavery

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.¹ 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.”² 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.³

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.⁴ 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.⁵ 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.⁶ 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.

1. 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. [↩]
2. 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. [↩]
3. 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). [↩]
4. For Hester’s sentence, see Court of Justice (CJ) 812, p.595. See also Theal, Records, vol. 16, pp. 379-95. [↩]
5. 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. [↩]
6. See the memorandum from Lord Charles Somerset to R. Wilmot, 20 October 1823, in Theal, Records, vol. 16, pp. 379-381. [↩]