‘They still call us drosters’: performing the memory of maroons and slavery with formerly-incarcerated men in Cape Town

ABSTRACT

This paper reflects on The Maroon Project, a series of poetry and performance workshops at the Iziko Slave Lodge Museum with a group of previously-incarcerated ‘Coloured’ men. The project facilitated a process of Spillerian interior intersubjectivity toward a self-authorship that could ‘speak flesh’ by placing the carceral system under scrutiny against the legacies of slavery, positioning participants to engage with the memory of drosters – or runaway slaves. Interview data is poetically transcribed to analyse participants’ experiences of the workshop process and the culminating stage production, Maroon, which performatively blended historical narratives with personal experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Hauntology
• marronage
• hyper-incarceration
• interior-intersubjectivity
• poetic transcription

Acknowedlgements

I thank the men who participated in this project for journeying along this transformative experience, trusting the process and challenging us all in profound ways. I thank Jan Lewin and Jason Jacobs for bringing their immeasurable creative visions, attentive pedagogy and selfless hearts to facilitate an unforgettable performance and exhibition. I thank the Iziko Museums for holding space for this project at the Slave Lodge Museum, with particular gratitude to Nadjwa Damon for her indispensable knowledge and storytelling abilities. I thank Toni Stuart for her important contributions to the group’s writing process. I thank the editors of this special issue of RiDE, Dr. Rand Hazou and Dr. Sarah Woodland, for their generous and superb feedback. I thank the anonymous readers for their perceptive and critical reading of earlier drafts of this paper. I thank Rini Tarafder and Amrapali Chatterjee and my fellow panelists during the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) 2021 Conference for their insights and informative engagement on an earlier version of this paper. And to the maroon ancestors who inspired this work, my infinite gratitude.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In the South African context, this term differs from the homophonous American derogatory word. Here, it refers to a highly particular group of mixed-race communities. I include the inverted apostrophes to acknowledge its historical contestations but capitalise it to underscore ‘Coloured’ agency in defining the racial category on their own terms through processes of creolisation (Erasmus 2001, 2017). The term, furthermore, is in continuous evolution, as evidenced through reimaginings exemplified by respellings such as ‘Khoiloured’ and ‘Xhoiloured’ (Lewin et al. 2019).

2 Research Ethics Approval (Soc2018/22) was approved by the University of Cape Town Department of Sociology and signed consent was provided by all participants to reproduce interview and workshop data. To maintain confidentiality, participants remain anonymous throughout this paper and photographs do not present participant faces.

3 Two examples of poems of mine that I shared include ‘A Prayer to Ek Chuaj’ (Perez 2018) and ‘Seashells’ (Perez 2016).

4 Emancipation Day commemorates the day the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 came into full effect in the Cape, following a four-year period of apprenticeship in which the enslaved remained in positions of forced servitude. Importantly, Emancipation Day is not an official public holiday in South Africa, but remains observed by cultural activists who organise events each year for communities to attend and keep the memory ongoing.

5 Due to the limited scope of this article, I am unable to detail the stories. The following provides brief summaries of the narratives we used in the workshops: (1) September van Bougis, who not only penned the only record written by a slave in the Cape but was sentenced to death for aiding and concealing the identities of a group of seven drosters; (2) a group of 23 runaways who were captured in a battle at the renowned wine farm of Simon van der Stel in the area of Constantia; (3) a droster gang along the Cedarberg mountain range; and (4) the story of Sila van de Kaap who decides to take the life of her child, Baro, in order to protect him from further harm by the slaveowner Jacobus van der Wat and his wife.

6 An exemplary demonstration of Kearney’s (2013) work can be found here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56654/noah-ham-fathers-of-the-year.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Javier Ernesto Perez

Javier Ernesto Perez is a Salvadoran-American poet and PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Cape Town. Javier received his BA in Political Science at Swarthmore College and is also recipient of the Thomas J Watson Fellowship and Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship.