INTRODUCTION

Unlike Atlantic slavery, Cape slavery yields very few first-person accounts of slave experience. Whereas Atlantic slavery is described in the spiritual autobiographies and polemics of ex-slaves like Olaudah Equiano, Quobna Ottabah Cugoano and Mary Prince, Cape slavery is only rarely described in the words of the slaves themselves. In the Cape, there are only a couple of surviving examples of letters written by slaves; the official records of the Council of Policy give limited information about slaves (as opposed to their owners); and the annual census records merely list slaves alongside the livestock of the white burghers. By far the richest source for accessing slave experiences at the Cape is the records of the Court of Justice, and historians in the last thirty years have drawn extensively on this archive in order to reconstruct the cultural and social worlds of Cape slaves. Historians have not been alone in returning to the slave testimonies in these court records in order to try and recover the slave experience; novelists and dramatists have also used them in order to try and recreate imaginatively the consciousness of Cape slaves.

It is always reassuring to assume that Literature tells us more about the Human Condition than the prosaic discourses of History and Law. However, in this case, I argue that far from transcending the silences of legal and historical texts in their imaginative recreations of slave consciousness, the literary works on Cape slavery project the anxieties and concerns of their contingent political present(s) onto the pasts of Cape slavery.