“Heartsore”: The Melancholy Archive of Cape Colony Slavery

To Be Heard, Not Overheard

What conditions exist for discerning the effect of any slave woman’s utterance? In what context does she speak? How can she be heard? One aspect of the context in which Sila lived is the absence of generic forms for slave self-articulation in the Cape Colony. It is an absence often confused with willful silence. By contrast, abolitionist networks in the United States and England created a considerable discursive space and market to support slave narratives from the Americas and the Caribbean. As stated earlier, little effective abolitionist activity occurred in the Cape itself, although English abolitionists did direct their attention to the colony, and missions in the colony’s outlying districts constantly drew the ire of slave owners for trying to hide runaways or to purchase manumissions. Any attempt to establish a printing press that might have lent itself to the opinions of such men as John Fairbairn and Thomas Pringle, outspoken opponents of slavery in the Cape, was thwarted by the tight control exercised by the colonial government. ¹ Even the formation of the Cape of Good Hope Society for Aiding Deserving Slaves and Slave Children to Purchase their Freedom did very little to open the discursive space in which slaves might speak for themselves and of their conditions in a public arena. Not a single slave was invited to any of the Society’s meetings. Indeed, members were so anxious about offending slave owners that it invited the governor to its first meeting, with the express purpose of reassuring him that the Society’s prime purpose was not to end slavery but to purchase slave children out of a humanitarian impulse. ² Such children were to be purchased and placed in indentured service. The Society received little real financial support, relying upon the government for the redirection of funds derived from fines for the contravention of slave laws. Over a period of five years, it emancipated 127 children.

In the absence of effective abolitionist discourse, then, there is no discursive arena in which Sila speaks or could speak for and by herself. What remains is merely the official record and its response to the problem that she presented. Nor is Sila’s case exceptional in this regard, as the work of Worden, Ross, and Shell, among others, makes clear. ³

The Cape archival record operates as the written proof that slavery existed in one of only two modes: as perpetuity and as a problem for the law of perpetuity. ⁴ As the latter, slaves appear in criminal hearings, in arguments over manumission, and in complaints against their masters/mistresses. They are either problematized or criminalized. Wayne Dooling describes an “inherent contradiction in the legal position of slaves. Non-property owning, they were property. Not allowed to marry or own property, they were nevertheless permitted to cohabit.” ⁵

And despite a legacy within the Roman-Dutch legal code that recognized slaves as personae de jure, they were regarded as non-persons de facto. Indeed, the Roman provision for their status as personae aside, neither the law nor the courts viewed slaves as having equal rights with their masters. More importantly, the record makes clear that they were never treated as the responsible authors of meaningful statements. Every gesture they made was re-read but not heard by power. Robert Ross points out that “the ruling ethos of European society,” which also governed the Cape Colony, was “not equality but hierarchy, and the task of the courts of law, among others, was to maintain this necessary subordination of underlings and superiority of masters,” (Ross, 156). Prosecution of slave owners for excessive punishment was always post facto, and the justice system offered very little effective preventative protection, despite provisions for slave complaints against masters. Success in such cases might have been linked to the increasing effort to give slavery a more paternalistic face, particularly from the 1820s onward. But it was also related to the fact that the colonial government (whether in the earlier form of the Dutch East India Company’s commercial enterprise or the later British colonial rule), keen to maintain control over its ever-expanding terrain, “reserved the right of punishment, even of slaves, to itself,” (Ross 158). Slaves could thus be said to be negatively recognized by the law.

Some provision for the overseeing of slaves named in the settlement of deceased estates fell under the jurisdiction of the Orphan Chamber prior to 1826. After this date, slaves’ wellbeing fell under the jurisdiction of the Protector of Slaves. The move was, in part, a response to pressure from abolitionists in the metropole. At the local level, slave-owning colonists rioted to protest the creation of this office. In this forum, slaves could take grievances that fell within the office’s definition of justified complaint, but the entire process also reaffirmed both the slave’s status as slave and the office’s paternalistic rule over beings considered incapable of self-governance and self expression.

A slave’s testimony before the Guardian of Slaves or her/his appeal to a religious/missionary body did not present the immediately identifiable figure of an heroic narrative, however. Cape Colony slaves often experienced difficulty securing corroborating evidence in their complaints against slave owners (as Dooling documents for the Stellenbosch District during both 1770 and 1820). By contrast, slave owners had little trouble finding evidence of their munificence toward their slaves. Often, support for slave owners came from other slave owners or even the local Field Cornets (Dooling 44). Colonial bureaucracy was not unaware of this, as a letter between Colonial Secretary William Huskissen to Governor Bourke reveals: “The legal presumption is in favor of slavery.” Accordingly, slaves bore the burden of proof as “the weaker and more ignorant party.” ⁶

In the Cape Colony, then, the slave’s articulation of the “I”—as the subject of freedom, who says “I can”—was limited to government institutions (such as the courts) but only in extreme cases of abuse or as defendants against accusation. It was in this sense that Sila’s criminality was negatively recognized by the law and consigned to colonialism’s record. It was in this sense that she laid her claim to a will limited by and to negation. It is a bitter gratitude that binds us to her now. Had she died a slave rather than a killer of a slave, she would never have achieved visibility. Even so, she remains largely unknowable, the bearer of unbearable knowledge, the keeper of secrets, including, most powerfully, the meaning of a word that erupts in testimony, the word “hartzeer.”

1. See, for example, the final edition of The South African Commercial Advertiser, Monday, May 10, 1824. Here, Fairbairn’s objections to government censorship made little reference to slavery. See also The South African Commercial Advertiser, No. 1 January 7 1824 to No. 18 May 5 1924, together with Facts Connected with the Stopping of the South African Commercial Advertiser (Cape Town: South African Library, 1978): 155-158.[↑]
2. South African Commercial Advertiser, 7 August 1833. See also Minute Book of the Cape of Good Hope Society for Aiding Deserving Slaves and Slave Children to Purchase their Freedom. See also CO 48/141, “The Formation of the Cape of Good Hope Philanthropic Society for Aiding Deserving Children to Purchase Their Freedom, Cape Town 1828.”[↑]
3. See Robert Ross, Beyond the Pale: Essays on the History of Colonial South Africa (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993); Nigel Worden & Clifton Crais (Eds.) Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press); 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).[↑]
4. In recent history, the importance attached to the archive was made patently clear when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began its hearings in July 1996. It suddenly became necessary to arrive before eight in the morning to secure a space at what had become a gold field for many. Scholars from around the world joined South African historians, as well as people seeking their family histories. Yet, given the archive’s classification about the “truth” of such roots under the apartheid system, it remains imperative that the archive itself is the subject of scrutiny.[↑]
5. Wayne Dooling, “‘The Good Opinion of Others’: Law, Slavery & Community in the Cape Colony c. 1760-1830,” in Eds. Nigel Worden and Clifton Crais, Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony (Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press, 1994): 25-24. See especially p. 29. Those who performed excessive punishments were deemed to have fallen outside of the codes of behavior and were publicly condemned. The definition of “excess” in such cases remains an unstable notion, as will be seen in the case of Sila. However, the law was not applied uniformly, a point also made by Ross (Ross 155). As a further comment, Roman Dutch law was introduced to the colony by the Dutch and maintained even after the British took control—from 1795 to 1803 after the Dutch East India Company collapsed and then after the second Dutch occupation (1803-1806). The British remained in control from 1806 until 1905, three years after the end of the Boer War.[↑]
6. Theal, Records, Vol. 33, pp. 465-66.[↑]