“Heartsore”: The Melancholy Archive of Cape Colony Slavery

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. ¹ 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. ² 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. ³ In May 1823, yet another slave woman, named Rebecca, was sentenced to death specifically for the crime of infanticide. ⁴

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. ⁵ 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. ⁶ 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. ⁷

1. 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.[↑]
2. 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.[↑]
3. 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.[↑]
4. See CO 189, May 1823 return.[↑]
5. 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.[↑]
6.  Letter from Lord Charles Somerset to Earl Bathurst. 31 January 1824 in GH 23/7:70.[↑]
7. 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.[↑]