LOST VOICES: Slave
Voices
Gerald Groenewald
Before I can say something regarding the cases
in Trials of Slavery (VRS, 2005) and
how they can be used or not to reveal slave voices, I first want to give some
basic background to slavery at the Cape during
the 18th century.
Beginnings
By the time the VOC established a refreshment
station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, slavery was a well-established
institution in its empire in the Indian Ocean.
Van Riebeeck, the first commander who had previously
served in the East, was therefore well-familiar with the use of slave labour.
During the first few years of his tenure at the Cape when he was struggling
with his few men to do the heavy work of building a fort and trying to farm,
etc, he often requested the directors of the VOC to send some slaves to the Cape. He even at times considered capturing the Khoikhoi to use them as slaves, but his superiors forbade
this. The first major import of slaves to the Cape
happened in 1658 as a consequence of the establishment of free burgher farmers
the previous year. These slaves came in two groups, one originated from Guinea (modern Dahomey) and another from Angola. Thus
the first slaves in SA came from West Africa, but this Atlantic origin of
slaves was an exception in the history of Cape
slavery, and all slaves subsequently came from the East.
Origins of slaves and
the slave trade
In the century and a half after this, slaves
were brought to the Cape in three ways. [1]
VOC-sponsored voyages brought slaves from Madagascar and, in the last decades
of the 18th century, Mozambique; [2] return fleets from the East
Indies (modern Indonesia) normally brought a few individual slaves to the Cape
(since slaves could not be taken to the Netherlands) who were mostly sold to
private individuals; and [3] foreign slave ships who stopped at the Cape on
their way to the Americas from the slave markets in East Africa, Mozambique and
Madagascar.
Where did these slaves come from? It is
important to keep in mind that over the 140-year period of Dutch rule, the
origins of Cape slaves changed continually.
Taken globally, i.e. all the slaves who were important to the Cape over this
period counted together, slaves came in more or less equal numbers from Madagascar, India
& Ceylon, the Indonesian
islands, and Mozambique.
However, different regions were preponderant at different times. Thus, during
the late 17th century and the early decades of the 18th,
most Cape slaves originated from Madagascar
and India, while those from Indonesia
increased from the 1720s to the 1760s. Mozambique
only became a major source of slaves for the Cape
from the 1770s onwards.
Most of the slaves were brought to the Cape as individuals or in small numbers. The consequence of
this was twofold: one is that the numbers of slaves grew slowly,
the other is that, given the diverse origins of Cape
slaves, and the fact that slaves arrived mostly as individuals, there was
little opportunity for a unified slave culture or feeling of solidarity to
develop. The slave population grew slowly, but from the first decade of the 18th
century, the number of slaves at the Cape slightly outnumbered that of the European
colonists at the Cape (but never by much).
Thus, by the end of VOC rule at the Cape in
1795, there were just under 17 000 slaves in the colony, in comparison with
about 15 500 free burghers. It has been calculated that between 1652 and1808
some 63 000 slaves were imported to the Cape.
VOC slaves
The slave population at the Cape
was divided between two groups, those belonging to the VOC and those in private
ownership. These groups differed in significant respects. Slaves belonging to
the VOC (so-called Company slaves), given the fact that they generally came in groups
and tended mostly to originate from Madagascar
and later Mozambique,
formed a much more homogenous group. This was also aided by the fact that the
majority of them lived in the Slave Lodge in Cape Town. The numbers there fluctuated, but
in general there were between 450 and 600 slaves living in the building at any
given time during the 18th century.
Private slaves
At first VOC slaves far outnumbered those owned
by private individuals, but this soon changed when the number of private slaves
grew rapidly, so much so that by the end of the VOC period in 1795 only 3% of
all Cape slaves belonged to the VOC, the rest
were in private hands. Because of the way in which private slaves landed at the
Cape – normally in small numbers at a time –
it meant that their make-up was much more heterogeneous than that of VOC
slaves. A further division among private slaves was that between urban and
rural slaves. Slaves who worked in urban households generally had greater
freedom of movement and, above all, had more opportunity to meet and interact
with other slaves. It was therefore possible for them to keep up ties and
develop friendships with people who share the same origins and languages (as can
be seen in several cases in Trials of
Slavery). Slaves on farms were generally much more isolated from other
slaves and had fewer opportunities to interact with people of the same
background; while in general they also had much more contact with Khoisan labourers on the farms. Private ownership was not
evenly spread throughout the colony: the greatest concentration of private
slaves were found in Cape Town and the Cape district, then in the agrarian
parts of the south-western Cape, while on the pastoral frontiers (to the north
and east) there were only a very few slaves since these trekboers (pastoralist farmers) relied
much more on Khoisan labour.
An important factor to keep in mind (and one
which explains the different nature of Cape slavery from, e.g., that found in
the Americas),
is the fact that individual slaveholdings remained very small. Only the wealthiest
farmers owned more than 20 slaves, while the majority of them had less than ten
and some as few as one or two. In general, wheat and wine farmers owned more
slaves than those farmers who practised pastoralism.
A major consequence of this fact, coupled with the diverse areas of origins of
imported slaves and the variety of languages they spoke and the cultures they
brought with them, is that a single, distinctive slave culture of the kind
associated with some transatlantic slave societies did not emerge at the Cape. However, over time, as the number of locally-born
slaves in colony increased, there developed some signs of a more distinctive,
locally forged society.
Slave labour
The Cape
economy depended on slave labour. In 1717 the Council of Policy, who ruled the
Cape, debated the issue of whether or not slave labour (rather than use European
servants) should become the norm at the Cape.
The Council decided in favour of slave labour, and from this year onwards the
number of slaves increased drastically.
The life of a slave was dominated by work – as
the Stellenbosch slave who is only known as Jan said
in 1710 after he unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide: ‘I wish to die or to
be sold, because I cannot keep up with working’ (Trials, p. 21). Farm slaves performed a variety of tasks throughout
the year. Farm work was highly seasonal, but farms producing both grain and
wine provided work steadily throughout the year.
Circumstances in Cape Town were very different. There were
variations between slaves who worked entirely as domestic servants and those
who were hired out, as well as some specialised and skilled slaves. Some slaves
had to sell provisions for the profit of their masters (and earn koeligeld), while
those with skills (such as artisans) were often rented out. In general slaves
in the town had greater freedom of movement, were less rigidly controlled and had
more regular opportunity to interact with others and even to make some money
for themselves.
What I have talked about thus far is slavery at
the Cape from
the outside, a generalised picture developed by historians looking at a
variety of sources and trying to make sense of the institution of slavery. But is it possible for us today to learn
something of the lives of slaves from the inside,
to look at slaves as agents who – in so far as it was possible within the
limits of their situation – made their own lives, in order words, not merely as
objects who were acted upon?
Sources
The Cape
historian is both lucky and unlucky regarding the sources for the Dutch period
(1652-1795). The VOC, as a merchant company, kept records obsessively and these
have been well preserved. Unfortunately, though, unlike in other colonial
societies (most notably the Americas)
we lack so-called ego documents (with a few exceptions, e.g. the diaries of Adam
Tas and Johanna Duminy) such as diaries, letters and other kinds of
documents written by people in their private capacity. Because slavery ended so
early in South Africa (1834,
as opposed to 1865 in the USA
and the 1880s in some Latin American countries) we do not have the memories of
ex slaves documented by oral historians in the early 20th century as
is the case in the Americas.
Instead, we are informed in detail by the VOC archive about the business and
legal concerns of the Company and the inhabitants of the colonial Cape. While this is the case for the free burghers, the
situation is even worse regarding slaves: slaves were generally illiterate and
we lack documents written by them themselves, with a few noteworthy exceptions.
Two such documents we discovered while working on Trials of Slavery. The first is a letter presented by the slave
Jonas van Manado to his mistress in 1719 in which he
requested her to manumit him, saying that this was promised him by his master
before the latter died. Clearly Jonas thought his case would be aided by some
form of written document, and the language in which it is written reveals much
about how he thought his owner would perceive his status:
Your honourable miss’ obedient slave gives
notice, with all humility and sadness of heart, with the presentation to you of
how he, the suppliant, has served you, since fully ten years ago now, with
faithful service, without complaining to anybody. Consequently he is finally seeking
your with hands clasped and knees bend, praying humbly that it would
please you to look upon him, in keeping with your innate mercifulness, with the
yes of compassion, and to please permit him a letter of freedom. He promises to
serve you with faithful service. (Trials,
pp. 82-83 and illustration following p. 322, text slightly adapted)
This is a very, very rare case of us actually hearing
directly the voice of a slave, albeit via the conventions of the time – dressed
up in a style and language that he thought would appeal to his owner. We do not
know who wrote the letter itself, and the document in the Cape Archives
is clearly a copy, as is attested by the lack of signature and the final
sentence.
Another new discovery we made was this: a
document written in the Bugis script dating from 1786
(Trials, illustration preceding p.
323). This document was obtained by Augustus van de Caab
and his band of fellow-deserters who decided to flee to the interior with the
aim of reaching ‘the land of the Xhosa’. They obtained it from a Muslim cleric
and it seems to have served as sort of talisman to protect them against
possible dangers en route, and from
being captured. Although written in Bugis script, the
bulk of the document is actually in Arabic and contains the names of Muslim
prophets and holy people. (There is another Bugis
letter from 1760 which played an important role in the case of Achilles van de
West Cust and his fellow deserters, cf. Trials, pp. 355-84). Incidentally, the
same case also illustrates just how important written documentation was in the
early Cape. The same gang of deserters also
realised that they needed some kind of justification for their journeying
through the interior, and to this end bribed a 12-year old schoolboy to forge
them a pass, called a padbriefje,
which claimed that the band was sent out on formal business by a butcher to collect
cattle and sheep from him (cf. Trials,
p. 556 and 2nd last illustration preceding p. 323).
Using the records of
the Council of Justice
I wish I could have shown you more such documentation,
but this is about the sum total of documents directly emanating from slaves. For our knowledge about the lives
of Cape slaves we are dependent on the
official VOC records. An important source which has been much utilised by Cape
historians the past few decades is the vast archive of the Council of Justice
at the Cape which has been preserved almost in
its entirety. This archival series comprises some 250 metres of shelf space and
contains just fewer than 3700 volumes, ranging from 100 to well over 1000 pages
each. It naturally contains all the documents relating to judicial activities,
including notarial deeds and wills, but it is the 600
or so volumes in criminal court cases which are so useful to the slave historian.
These records contain the minutes of the court proceedings, the formal
sentences as well as the depositions, statements, confessions and
interrogations which served in individual cases.
The bulk of the accused in criminal cases were
slaves (as opposed to the civil cases which largely deal with court cases
between free burghers). Now you may well asked why documents about the various
crimes that slaves committed – desertion, theft, arson, assault, murder and so
on – could be useful beyond the mere chronicling of those crimes. Naturally,
these cases are not representative of all slaves at the Cape,
only those who somehow broke the law. That is certainly true on a superficial
level, and would be the case if we take these documents at face value and only
look at the obvious facts regarding the crime committed. But a major aim of Trials of Slavery was to show to our
readers that these documents can be used much more broadly by someone who is
prepared to read carefully and with some sympathy. In between the gruesome
details of crime and punishment is revealed a wealth of information regarding
the living circumstances of slaves, the types of jobs they performed, their
interaction with others; and even smaller details like the sort of language
they spoke, the type of bedding they had, the sort of clothes they wore and how
they adorned themselves. Most of our knowledge regarding these matters has been
derived from the careful study of court records.
But these matters I’ve just mentioned still
consider the slave from the outside, as an object. Is it possible in the court
records to discern something of the slave as a thinking,
feeling and acting individual – as
someone who had motives and reason and emotions and acted on them? Naturally,
by asking this question I am also indicating that it is indeed possible, as I
shall show you in a moment.
But before doing so, first a word or
two about the problems inherent in using court records. These documents were produced under
highly unusual circumstances. They deal with crimes (or suspected crimes), not
everyday events, and are thus not the equivalent of diaries or correspondence.
In addition, the statements and depositions were given by accused people or
witnesses who wanted to emphasise their innocence. And of course the documents
did not come into being through the volition of the slaves, but rather through
the legal apparatus of the VOC. The clerks and legal officers who drew up these
documents were hardly neutral observers, and we should keep in mind just how
intimidating the situation must have been for most slaves. The actual nature of
the documents are also such that they preclude direct access to what the slave
said: statements were usually given in Dutch – a foreign language for most
slaves – or, if in another language, it was directly interpreted with only the
Dutch version being written up. Only in some cases are there interrogations
which record more directly the answers of a slave. Ultimately the court records
are documents written about slaves
for very specific reasons (trying to prove the guilt of some accused), and they
should never be seen as documents produced by
slaves. Yet, they are still the only real source of access to the experiences
of slaves and although the original voice of the slave is muffled through the
layers of its transmission, the sympathetic and patient reader can still
discern it.
So what can we learn about the inner life of
slaves and its expression in the court records? Truth be told, is that in the
majority of cases we cannot discern the motivation of slaves for their actions
as recorded in the records. Thus, in 1786, the landdrost
of Swellendam sent a letter to the Council of Justice
in Cape Town informing it of the suicide of a slave woman, Sara, who first
threw her four children into a river and then hurled herself into it (Trials,
pp. 566-69). All of them drowned except the oldest child. This is the sum total
of what we know about the life of Sara – that she was a slave with four
children who reached a point of such intense desperation that she had to end
all of their lives. In this case the voice of Sara remains silent forever.
Just how different the aims of the Council of
Justice were from the interests of the modern historian, is revealed by the
remarkable case of Reijnier van Madagascar (Trials, pp. 263-70). In about 1729 or 30
we meet Reijnier who was by that stage about 40 years
old and well respected by the other slaves (who told him that he had helped ‘building
up’ the farm through his hard work). However, his fellow slaves also taunted
him because he did not complain about the fact that his mistress daily
maltreated his daughter, Sabina, who worked in the house. One day, after
particularly bad behaviour by his owners towards Sabina, Reijnier
cracked and ‘out of dejection and grief’ (as he said during his trial) stabbed
his owner with a knife. He afterwards fled (and this is what makes this case so
extraordinary) to the mountains around Franschhoek
where he remained for some 20 years claiming never to have spoken to a single
person during all that time until he was accidentally captured by a farmer. The
members of the Council of Justice were only interested in the detail of the
crime and thus we cannot know what it must have been like for Reijnier to have lived alone in the mountains for two
decades, what thoughts went through his mind and if he missed his wife and
daughter. This is the wonder and the drawback of using the Council of Justice
documents: they allow us an intensely vivid glimpse of complex lives – like
lightning which momentarily lit up a landscape very clearly – only to disappear
back into darkness just when we want to look closer.
Crimes of Passion
One set of cases which do as a rule provide us
more details about and greater insight into the lived reality, emotional lives
and motives of slaves deal with so-called crimes of passion. In the final part
of this lecture I’d like to draw your attention to some of these cases in Trials of Slavery. Crimes of passion
normally involved a jilted male lover who took revenge on his former lover or
her new lover. These cases are often very violent, borne out of an intense
feeling of unhappiness and frustration. This is the result of the deleterious
effect the institution of slavery had on interpersonal relationships. Slaves
could not legally get married until 1823 and, being the possessions of their
owners, those in informal relationships could easily be separated through sale
(which was also the case with other family members). Yet this situation did not
prevent slaves falling in love with one another and starting long-term
monogamous relationships, often with families. Like everyone else, slaves also
had emotional lives. In fact, it strikes me as highly plausible that their
emotional lives could have been more intense due to the very insecurity which ruled
the life of a slave: in a situation where you have no control over your fate,
time and work, having a loving relationship with another human being must have
been like an oasis in a desert. The intense feelings and jealousy which are
revealed in these cases were of course aggravated by the fact that slave women
formed only a tiny percentage of the slaves population (by 1795 only 30% of the
population consisted of females, and this after decades of creolisation),
and that consequently there was much competition for their attention among male
slaves, something which no doubt increased the anxiety of their lovers.
In 1755 there lived in a house in Cape Town a number of
slaves whose owners had just died in the smallpox epidemic which ravaged the
city during that year, looking after the children and possessions of their late
owners while the estate was being wound up (Trials,
pp. 323-30). Januarij van Boegies
(45 years of age) and Clara van Macassar (who came
from the same part of the world on the island of Sulawesi) had had a
relationship for a number of years and had several children. When Januarij entered the house one afternoon, he found Clara
and the cook together whereupon he (Januarij later
testified) ‘driven by the jealousy of love, asked the said Clara what this
slave [the cook], against whom he for a considerable time had conceived a
certain jealousy, had to do with her, to which she answered: “Nothing at all”’.
Januarij went away grumbling, saying as he left (according
to Clara), ‘you have a soul and I have a soul.’ According to Januarij, he was so provoked by this that he went outside to
pick up a piece of wood. However, he became (in his own words), ‘senseless and
mindless because of anger’ and instead fetched his parrang – a type of Indonesian
sword – in order to take revenge upon Clara and her putative paramour. Clara
and the cook managed to escape, though not without being wounded. Januarij fled onto Table Mountain
but was apprehended some days later when he came back to get provisions. This
incident of jealousy, and an intense sense of
insecurity going wrong, led to Januarij’s being
hanged ‘for the murderous wounding’ of Clara. Of significance here is Januarij’s statement about his and Clara’s soul – one of
only two tantalising references in the records that I know of to slaves’
conception of their souls.
A similar case, also set in Cape Town, occurred in 1729 and concerned Jephta van Batavia, a slave of a tavern keeper (Trials, pp. 115-19). According to the
court records, Jeptha had had a long-term
relationship with Maria and one morning, after getting drunk on his master’s
wares, called upon her and asked: ‘“Why are you hurting me”, meaning with this
[so says the court record] that she was having a relationship or has had carnal
knowledge with someone other than him.’ They then sat together on the staircase
where he held her. After a while, Maria extricated herself from him and went to
the kitchen, whereupon Jeptha stabbed her with his
knife. She fled into the front part of the house where her owner and a friend
were sitting, with Jeptha pursuing her. Upon seeing
the wounded Maria and the murderous Jeptha, the owner
cried out to him: ‘Jeptha, what are you doing, do you
realise that you have wounded Maria, and do you know what the consequences will
be?’ To this he answered in a rage: ‘Masque
raadbraaken, I shall kill her, I shall devour her
heart, I want my death.’ With this furious cry we
clearly hear the voice of Jeptha: his anger and
frustration, but also his awareness of his position as a slave, expressed in
his own unique language
– he is well aware that if a slave killed another human being, he could expect
a cruel and gruesome death. In the event, since Maria was only lightly wounded,
Jeptha was sentenced to ‘only’ ten years of hard
labour on Robben
Island.
A final crime of passion I’d like to point out
deals with Anthonij van Goa
and is a very tragic expression of the impossible situation in which slaves
found themselves with their loved ones (Trials,
pp. 83-96). Anthonij lived on a farm in the Stellenbosch district where he had had a relationship with
a woman slave called Jannetie, to whom the record
refers to as his ‘concubine’ but whom Anthonij
proudly called in his interrogation ‘my own wife’. But he was sold by his owner
to someone who lived in the Tygerberg area. Some
months after his transfer there, he ran away to visit his beloved. Upon seeing
her, he seriously wounded her because (as he states in his interrogation in a
mixture of the first and third person): ‘The woman had sworn I will never take
another man for as long as you live, yet when he saw she was lying with another
man, then my heart ached, I then pushed away the [other] slave and I stabbed
her with a knife in the abdomen.’ With his heart aching, Anthonij
ran away but was pursued. When his capturers came close, he tried to commit
suicide but was unsuccessful. He later confessed that it was his intention to
kill Jannetie because she had ‘forgotten’ him and shad
tarted a relationship with another, and that he had
wanted to kill himself because of fear for the punishment that he would
receive. Although the prosecutor called for the death sentence, it seems as if
the Council of Justice was sympathetic to his cause since he was ‘only’
whipped, branded and put into chains and returned to his owner with very little
possibility of ever seeing Jannetie again.
These cases of crimes of passion are not
extremely common and of course by no means should they be seen as normative:
only a very small number of slaves attacked and assaulted their spurned lovers.
But they are immensely valuable to the historian since they allow us vivid and
direct insight into the lived reality of slaves – to the dreadful circumstances
of their situation (which often contributed to, if not caused, the break-up of
the relationships), to their intensely felt emotions, which usually get
expressed in their own words in the records, and to their motives for the
actions they perform. They allow us to see slaves as human beings with a full range
of emotions and desires who took charge of their own destiny and tried –
unfortunately with dreadful consequences (hence the reason for the documents
being in the Council of Justice archives) – to change it. Although they are
exceptional cases, they are immensely insightful and revealing of the desperate
situation in which some human beings found themselves at the Cape
some 200-300 years ago.
I want to end today with a final case which,
although not a crime of passion, most loudly gives voice to the inhumane nature
of slavery at the Cape and well illustrates
just how hard it must have been for formerly free human beings to adjust to the
life of being a slave. Of all the slave cases I know, this one about the
emotional crisis that Cupido van Mallabaar
suffered in 1739 best expresses the iniquities of a slave’s situation in his
own words (Trials, pp. 162-69).
Cupido had come from India in his
mid-20s and had ended up on a farm in Drakenstein (Paarl). One night when his owner was away and he was alone
home with his mistress, Maria Klaasz, and her child,
he went into a room and returned with a musket. Upon asking him what he wanted
to do with it, he answered Maria: ‘I do not want to shoot you but myself.’ She
begged him to put it down, which he did, but he ordered her to go with her
child to the front of the house. When they got there, he took his knife and
held it against his own throat, asking Maria if she wanted to see him slit his
throat. She earnestly enquired why he wanted to do this and what was wrong with
him, to which Cupido simply
replied: ‘So much.’ After saying this, he took off his jacket and shirt (which
was long) and, pointing to his leather trousers, said to Maria: ‘I am not used
to wearing trousers like these, I have already worked two or three years here,
and I do not see the baas buying more
slaves or nonje
buying a slave woman for me, baas and
nonje may
talk and laugh very well.’ In this sentence Cupido
encapsulated everything that was unbearable about his situation: the forceful
removal from his own culture and the difficulties of adapting to a new culture
and situation; the hard work he had to do on his own; the lack of company and a
meaningful relationship, and the scorn of his owners. The events of the night
when Cupido finally cracked continued with him
vacillating between killing himself and killing his mistress. At a certain
point he told Maria: ‘It would be better if I murder you, your husband and your
child, and that I flay you open like flecked fish, and then do me as well.’
Luckily Maria managed to defuse the situation and she could flee and get help. Cupido twice tried to commit suicide before being finally
captured.
A slave wounding and threatening to kill his
owner was considered an atrocity by the Council of Justice, who granted Cupido his death wish by sentencing him ‘to be broken alive
from the bottom up, without the coup de grâce, to remain lying thus on the cross until
he has given up the ghost.’ One can say much about how revealing this case is,
but I think the message of the horrors of slavery at the Cape are sufficiently
well expressed by the actions and words of the unfortunate Cupido
himself.
University of Johannesburg
ggroenewald@uj.ac.za