Representing Cape slavery: Literature, law, and history

Abstract

This essay analyses literary texts representing Cape slavery from the 19th century to the present with an eye to how they transform the legal records of Cape slave trials into literary form. The argument is that with few exceptions the literary texts on Cape slavery use the legal and historical sources in order to narrate in mediated form the anxieties and concerns of their own worlds. Applying Georg Lukács's criterion that historical novels should represent the past as a concrete precondition of the present, it is argued that these literary texts ignore or repress the continuities from slavery to capitalism; instead, they represent slavery as the illegitimate and unconnected antithesis of contingent present(s) defined by free labour and democracy.

Keywords:

• Cape
• slavery
• literature
• South Africa
• post‐apartheid

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Kathleen Laishley, Sandy Shell, and Nigel Worden for their help in tracking down many of the literary works on Cape slavery.

Notes

1. For their utilization of the records of the Council of Justice, see the monographs by Ross, Worden and Shell as well as the special issues on Cape slavery of the journals South African Historical Journal (34 [1996]) and Kronos. Journal of Cape History (28 [2002]). Directly focused on the Cape legal records are Heese's Reg, which catalogues and analyses the criminal cases involving slaves, and Worden and Groenwald's Trials, which introduces and re‐publishes a generous sample of slave trials between 1704 and 1795.

2. See Dooling (112–58), the essays in Worden and Crais by Worden (117–44) and Ross (145–67).

3. The plot is based on an actual shipwreck, which was subsequently written up by T. Harington and published by Thomas Tegg in 1808.

4. Kendall anticipates I.D. Du Plessis's sentimental construction of the Cape Malay in the 1940s and 1950s. See Ward and Worden (208).

5. Examples of the sub‐genre include Nan K. Lock's No Wine for the Governor (1946), H. Watkins‐Pitchford's In God's Good Time (1949), Birch L. Bernstein's Tomorrow is Another Day: An Historical Romance of South Africa – 1652 to the Present Day (1951), and Iris Vaughan's O Valiant Hearts (1984). Also of this moment is Madeleine Masson's short story collection The Slave Bell and Other Stories (1946).

6. On the 1808 rebellion, see Worden, “‘Armed’”.

7. On Galant's rebellion, see Van der Spuy.

8. The court judgment on the 1808 rebellion is in G.M. Theal, Records of the Cape Colony. Volume 6. July 1806 to May 1809 (1898) and the slaves’ testimonies are in the Cape Archives Depot, CJ 515 and CJ 516. Documents in Criminal Cases, Oct. 1808. The court judgment of Galant's rebellion is in G.M. Theal, Records of the Cape Colony. Volume 20 (1901), and the slaves’ testimonies are in the Cape Archives Depot, CJ 633: Case 8, and CJ 819: Case 9. Documents in Criminal Cases, Mar. 1825. 879–1505 and 134–252.

9. Two other novels on slavery from the 1980s are Wilma Stockenström's The Expedition to the Baobab Tree (1983), and Mohammed Cassiem D'Arcy's The Golden Kris; Saga of Dein, Slave at the Cape (1988).

10. In addition to the works discussed in this essay, there have been many novels which deal with slavery – Karel Schoeman's Verkenning (1996), Daniel Sleigh's Islands (2002), Therese Benadé's memoir Kites of Good Fortune (2004), Russel Brownlee's Garden of the Plagues (2005), Botlhale Thema's The People of Welgeval (2005); several well‐received plays – the musical Rosa (1996), David Kramer and Taliep Petersen's musical Ghoema (2005), and the play Salaam Stories (2003); one film – John Badenhorst's film Slavery of Love (1999); short stories – Moosa Patel's “Tell‐a‐Tale: The Final Hour of Slamath” (1999), and Wendy Woodward's “A Cape Town Story” (1999); and popular social/family histories – Winnie Rust's Martha: ‘n Verhaal oor Martha Solomons, Countess of Stanford (2004) and Diana Ferrus's Ons komvandaan (2005). There have also been a number of popular histories: Alan Mountain's An Unsung Heritage: Perspectives on Slavery (2004), Jackie Loos's Echoes of Slavery (2004), and R.E. van der Ross's Up from Slavery: Slaves at the Cape, Their Origins, Treatments and Contributions (2005).

11. Pumla Gqola argues persuasively that the coloured characters in The Slave Book exceed colonial and apartheid stereotypes, but that the black characters associated with the African side of Harman's family do not.

12. The historical case concerns Tryntjie of Madagascar. The records (in Dutch) are in Cape Archives Depot, CJ 5. Original Rolls and Minutes (Criminal and Civil); CJ 317. Crimineel Processtukken 1713. 219–406. Heese has re‐published the court sentence for Tryntjie's case in Reg (113–21).

13. A recent British novel which imagines the complexities of collective struggles against slavery and capitalism in Britain and the United States in the 19th century is Richard Bradbury's Riversmeet (2007).

14. On the relationship between Cape slavery, the heritage industry, and post‐apartheid nation building, see Worden, “The Changing”.