IN The Repeating Island, ANTONIO BENITEZ-ROJO’S MAGNIFICENT book on the Caribbean, he argues persuasively for seeing the Caribbean as not having a center.1 In his words, it is “not a common archipelago, but a meta-archipelago and as meta-archipelago it has the virtue of having neither a boundary nor a center” (Benitez-Rojo 1992, 4). By enumerating an elaborate cultural and geographical inventory for the Caribbean that takes in various times and places, Benitez-Rojo illustrates the degree of the Caribbean’s decenteredness and also supplies us with a way of thinking about islands as crossroads. The point to take from his reflections is that the archipelago’s boundaries are not solely geographical; its identity is inescapably entangled with various other cultural locations that are dialogically and historically connected to it. This helps define the Caribbean’s symbolic capacity for repeating both familiarity and alienation.
While not invoking the same degree of the Caribbean archipelago’s significance in contemporary cultural understanding, Robben Island generates something of its own peculiar symbolic resonance because of the strong association it has had with apartheid oppression and the resistance against it. As Oliver Tambo put it in 1980: “The tragedy of Africa, in racial and political terms is concentrated in the southern tip of the continent—in South Africa, Namibia, and, in a special sense, Robben Island.”2 Richard Marback (2004) has suggested that the island is a special rhetorical space produced by the complex interaction between spatial experience and rhetorical authority deriving from its political associations. Holding up the island as a metanarrative and rhetorical space runs the risk of telescoping its history to coincide firmly with the period when it held apartheid’s famous political prisoners, such as Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathadra, and others. This culturalist and presentist perspective is indeed the one that Marback takes in his article, proceeding as if the “spatial experience” that was born out of the intersection of race and politics was only to be found in that slice of the island’s highly politicized and symbolically charged history. Crucial though this procedure is for the project of postapartheid nation building, such a politicoculturalist approach ultimately serves to obscure a richer and more variegated history, something that has been pointed out repeatedly by historians of the island. For despite serving as a place where criminal and political undesirables were detained from at least the 1650s, it was from the mid-nineteenth century a place where the sick poor, persons with leprosy, and lunatics were also kept. Indeed, the General Infirmary of Robben Island operated as one of the instruments of colonial public-health policy from 1846 to 1931, when the last of its three medical institutions—the hospital for people with leprosy—was closed down. The hospital for the chronically sick had been shut down in 1891, with the lunatic asylum following suit in 1931.
Going against the greater prominence given to the recent history of the island by cultural critics and commentators, I want to suggest a more wide-ranging discussion of the links between various historical moments, but through a focus on the lives of particular disabled persons whose lives were intrinsically related to the history of the island. Rather than dismiss the status of the island’s rhetoricity, I want to intensify it, but in doing so reroute it through the lives of these disabled figures. In other words, I want to take both the totality of its history and the rhetoricity of its space seriously as points for productive cross-fertilization. What happens when we try to read the history and literary representations of the island through a perspective generated from a focus on disability? And what if, in highlighting the island’s associations with various forms of disability we intensify those associations in order to situate the island not as an icon of political struggle but as the place where the social boundaries of embodied otherness (in terms of race, gender, class, and disability) were set out and sometimes contested? As has amply been shown elsewhere, colonial and apartheid ideology stipulated notions of undesirability that were ultimately derived from perceptions of essential difference. In a way, these perceptions were grounded in the corporeality of the body as such. Thus stipulations of undesirability placed in close and volatile proximity ideas of illness, deformity, insanity, and criminality, sometimes interweaving the various terms and leaving none of them entirely stable. The central methodological implication for me here is that it is not enough just to attempt to excavate the fullness of Robben Island’s known history. Rather, that known history has to be inflected to show how much issues of corporeality and embodiment helped to fashion the history and ultimately fed into the logic of apartheid. In the case of Robben Island, what has been “repeated” historically are the denominations of bodily difference and how these have been incorporated into racial and other hierarchies. I am, of course, not the first person to be making the link between bodily difference and the evolution of apartheid ideology.3 However, the specific question of corporeality and embodiment on Robben Island and how the island provided the historical vector for the focalization of these issues has not as yet been fully explored. Without attempting an exhaustive analysis, I want to proffer the present effort as the outline of a research agenda for further debate.
This chapter differs from the previous ones in this book in a number of respects. First, it is more explicitly concerned with a specific place and its long history than any of the previous chapters. It engages with a discipline other than the literary while deploying a literary understanding for the reading of history. This interdisciplinary venture will take off with an analysis of Athol Fugard’s The Island, a text that, though set on Robben Island, is unlike the ones that have been dealt with so far in that it is not concerned with disability as such.4 The issues that are raised in Fugard’s play seem more pertinent to a discussion of citizenship and the political imaginary than of aesthetic nervousness as has been elaborated so far. That being said, it is useful to recall Fugard’s observation that Robben Island has been the most important absent presence in the lives of South Africans: it is real, visibly present in the sea just off Cape Town, and yet until the fall of apartheid was hardly ever spoken about (Vadenbroucke 1985, 126). Because of its political salience as an apartheid prison, it thus became the spectral figuration of the fraught political domain in which South African lives were lived. I propose to use the play as a way of de-centering the essentially political narrative that has dominated representations of Robben Island by focusing on the theme of multiple rehearsals of the self encapsulated in the action of the play and how these provide a different means for thinking about the history of the island. What will emerge from this reading of Fugard’s play is a sense of the island’s heterogeneities, which are at once spatial, rhetorical, ideological, and political. Furthermore, I wish by this recourse to a dramatic performance to help keep in view the materiality of bodies-in-action. This is something that has been raised in an attenuated way in our earlier discussions of Beckett and Soyinka. It is easy in reading a play (as opposed to seeing it performed) or a historical account to think of human beings as disembodied abstractions. A dramatic performance, on the other hand, places us in the presence of material human bodies sighing, losing their temper, falling down, rising up again, wringing their hands in despair, laughing, and invoking a world of reality through gesture and action. A dramatic performance also produces a form of perspectival depth, since we are always meant to recall that the stage is a microcosm of a wider social universe that rings the action unfolding before us. Indeed, with regard to The Island the John and Winston of the play are really John Kani and Winston Ntshona, South African citizens who ran the real risk of being imprisoned should they have transgressed the many laws regarding theater, performance, and race in their country (Wetmore 2002, 197). While there are acute ontological differences between a dramatic performance and a historical account, what I wish to call attention to is the need to imagine the people we read about in the history of the island as persons within a particular universe of action.
Following this recourse to imagining historical figures as men and women in action, I will also be attempting a series of open-ended speculations about what might have been the feelings of three such figures whose freedom was at various times curtailed by virtue of their being placed on Robben Island. This kind of speculation is something that a traditional historian would feel extremely nervous about undertaking. The figures I have in mind are Autshumato (known as Harry by the Europeans) and Krotoa (named Eva), both of whom were associated with the island from the 1650s, and Franz Jacobs, who organized a leper rebellion there in the 1890s. In doing this, I am blatantly reading history as I would read literature—in this case drama—and moving from the one to the other and vice versa. As I stated in Calibrations: Reading for the Social, literary representation is intelligible only as part of a network of reciprocal determinations (Quayson 2003, xxii–xxiv). By this I sought to point out how the extrapolation of reality effects out of the literary-aesthetic domain depend upon the successful assembling of resemblances between its categories and those that appear elsewhere and in apparently unconnected contexts. Jealousy was the concept that I used in the discussion there but there are several such categories with which it might be fruitfully replaced. I now think that the notion of reciprocal determinations is also useful for interpreting the history and rhetoricity of a place such as Robben Island. For it may be argued that the meaning of any element that is invoked in association with its history is not fully comprehensible unless read alongside all the many other meanings that the island has held before and which in the contemporary public context seem to have been subsumed under the pressures of state-making. It is the notion of reciprocal determinations that allows us to invoke a literary text such as Fugard’s The Island in trying to reorient our reading of the relationship of the island to the processes of corporeal differentiation that underpinned much of South Africa’s history. Reading a text such as Fugard’s in terms of the reciprocal determinations that pertain to the history of Robben Island is then an invitation to read the play against the full spectrum of the island’s variegated history. The focalization should work both ways, because once the play is taken as an element within the island’s signifying chain of reciprocal determinations it should also have a bearing on how the other elements of that rhetorical or signifying system are taken to operate. On this reading, no element of the island’s history can remain entirely intact and secure from imaginative reinterpretation.
The Island and the Vicissitudes of Self-Fashioning
Readers of Athol Fugard’s The Island will recall the point toward the end of scene 1 when John mimes a telephone conversation with one of his old friends on the mainland. Both he and Winston have returned to their cell after a hard day’s work on the lime quarry undertaking the pointless task of filling in and emptying out a wheelbarrow onto each other’s mound of sand. Though we cannot tell what exactly is being said on the other side of the line, we are able to piece together bits and pieces from John’s end of the conversation: he asks about his friends and tells his interlocutor about their hard life in the Robben Island prison and the difficulties they are having with Hodoshe, the blatantly sadistic prison warden. He finally asks for a message to be passed on to his wife, Princess. Winston sneaks in a request for a message to be passed on to his own wife too, but by that point in the telephone conversation the two friends are less than enthusiastic about carrying on the charade. The stage directions state that “the mention of his wife guillotines Winston’s excitement and fun. After a few seconds of silence, he crawls back heavily to his bed and lies down. A similar shift in mood takes place in John” (206). Even though the word “guillotine” signals decapitation, the fact that it is coupled with a description of John’s “crawling back heavily” suggests that it also has resonances of emotional dismemberment and disablement. It is interesting to note, however, that the force of the word “guillotine” comes from reading the stage direction, whereas in performance the actor’s rendering of the effect of the conversation upon him would return us to the level of his body and its gestures. Thus even though in reading the stage directions the word might be taken as operating at the level of metaphor, we have to visualize the sudden deflation of the two characters’ egos and the return of their bodies to the harsh realities of incarceration. The mental and the physical are overlaid upon each other, and the moral issue of the loss of freedom and how one must act with regard to that loss is translated unto the bodies of the characters on stage.
There are several things that have been suggested by this point in the play and that are more or less encapsulated in the telephone conversation itself and the two men’s gestural reactions to it. First is the obvious point about their nostalgia for freedom. But their nostalgia is not just for freedom, but for freedom as it is connected to their past as freedom fighters. In other words, the nostalgia is for a particular form of freedom, which is ultimately defined by their being political beings first and foremost. Second is that the telephone conversation is only one point in the various modalities of the taking on of roles that is also at the heart of the play. For as will be recalled, they are rehearsing their parts in a special production of Sophocles’s Antigone, in which Winston will play Antigone and John, Creon. Getting Winston to believe in the efficacy of the suspension of disbelief is only one part of John’s troubles in trying to persuade his cell-mate to rehearse his lines; what is more pressing is the fact that Winston is going to have to dress in drag and perform the role of a woman, something that elicits a strongly negative reaction from him. By the time of the telephone conversation, the two men have gone through a series of adopted roles, most of which have no bearing on the Antigone play they are rehearsing for. The phone conversation is but the final and most dramatic of these adopted roles in the first part of the play.
Overarching the thematic of nostalgia for freedom and the rehearsal of various roles is something of much greater significance for the overall dynamic of oppression and resistance that is revealed in the play. This is the thematic of what, following Giorgio Agamben, we may refer to as bare life, the life of he who can be killed but not sacrificed. As Agamben points out in Homo Sacer (1998), the biological life of those situated on the periphery of the political order is precisely that which defines that order in the first place. It is the instantiation of the exception that allows the invocation of sovereignty; the excluded example helps to define that which is included. Thus the exception is the limit case that folds into itself both the logic of the dominant order and its definition of what is exclusionary to that logic. For Agamben, the bare biological life of the subject is the precise instantiation of the logic of the political system, since that biological life is meaningless outside the discourse of the polity itself (he turns to Aristotle and the Greeks to explore this point). What should be of interest to us here, however, is not solely his discussion of the bare life of the homo sacer, since, as he acknowledges it, the research agenda he pursues has already been laid out by Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, but the example he gives of the concentration camp as one of the foci for understanding the rule of the exception. He defines the camp not “as a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past (even if still verifiable) but in some way as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living” (166). Agamben speculates on the genesis of camps, suggesting they might be traced to the 1896 Spanish effort in Cuba to suppress local insurrection or to the camps into which the English herded the Boers at the end of the nineteenth century. Both these are instances of states of emergency linked to colonial wars that then engulf the entire civilian population. However, as will be shown later in the discussion of both Krotoa and Franz Jacobs, Robben Island was at various points in its history an articulation of a “state of emergency” and was routinely used as a place to which socially and politically anomalous types were kept separate from normal society and used to define the exception.5
Returning to Fugard’s play, we see that the bare life of John and Winston is defined across a range of practices of the self that they perfect in their incarceration, some of which we have seen in their adoption and rehearsal of roles. Their “nakedness” as prisoners is rehearsed before the imaginary audiences of their wives, comrades, and other political interlocutors on the mainland. It is this that gives the telephone conversation such poignancy and significance, for their naked identities are worked out both between themselves and in the anticipation of the reactions of various imagined and real others. This seems like an obvious point, yet since the gamut of other depicted characters outside of John and Winston is strictly evoked via the reminiscences and projections of the two characters on stage, the idiom of the drama becomes one of the refraction of anticipations. It is these anticipations that worry Winston. He can tell exactly how the other prisoners will respond to him as Antigone. It is for John to persuade him that beyond the laughter that he will provoke there will also be a space for listening and that it is this that he must wait for in enacting the role of that classical female rebel.
Commentators have noted that Fugard draws on a tradition that can be traced back to Beckett. Certainly, the intensity of the relationship between the two prisoners is evocative of the world of Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, which as we saw in chapter 3 shares with other Beckett works the dialogism of an implied interlocutor. The Island shares with Waiting for Godot the themes of anticipation and waiting, since John is later in the play informed that his ten-year sentence has been commuted to three, leaving him with a mere three months of incarceration to bear. This in itself becomes the occasion for the two prisoners to rehearse the various situations that they imagine would be pertinent to John’s arrival home among his family and comrades. One significant dramaturgical difference between Beckett’s and Fugard’s play, however, is that in Waiting for Godot the two tramps do not enact multiple identities. Even though they imagine different situations, Estragon and Vladimir do not alter their essential personalities to match these situations. They are not characters rehearsing the identities of other characters in different scenarios. The situations that they invoke flow directly from their (vaguely) remembered pasts and the future they anticipate in waiting for Godot. The only radically different situation to theirs is provided when Lucky and Pozzo enter the play, where the responses of the two tramps to the fresh pair provide different trajectories for interpreting their own condition. In Fugard’s play, on the other hand, John and Winston proliferate scenarios and the responses that they might adduce in anticipation of putative interlocutors. This makes the play a medium of heterogeneous mediations of the self, since the effect of the proliferation of scenarios and the rehearsals attendant upon those scenarios is (a) to multiply other interlocutory selves and (b) to engender new modes of address in relation to such interlocutory others. I would like to suggest that it is this medium of heterogeneities that gives the play its insightful and radical edge and not the enactment of the trial of Antigone that all things seem to lead up to and that in fact closes the action.
The trial of Antigone in The Island is a major interpretative telescoping of what happens in Sophocles’ play. In the Sophoclean Antigone, there is no trial in any straightforward sense of the word. What there is is a major clash between Antigone and Creon and a lengthy debate about the rights of the family as opposed to those of the city. Recall, at any rate, that Creon is Antigone’s uncle on her mother’s side and that she is betrothed to Haemon, his son, and things become somewhat more complicated than in Fugard’s rendition. In telescoping the meaning of Antigone into the relative rights of the state versus those of the citizen, Fugard is drawing inspiration from a tradition of interpreting the play that can be traced at least to Hegel. In his own account, Hegel was to note that the essential form of a tragedy depended on certain inescapable collisions, but that these collisions were not necessarily the collisions of directly opposed ethical conceptions of the citizen, but rather conceptions that essentially participated of one another. Thus, writing about the mutual entanglement of the oikos (familial) principle with the polis (political) principle in Greek tragedy, he suggests that “the opposition…is that of the body politic, the opposition, that is, between ethical life in its social universality and the family as the natural ground of moral relations” (Hegel 1998, 39; italics added). The dialectical interplay that Hegel stipulates is between a form of social universality, essentially an abstraction, and a natural ground of moral relations that must perforce be concrete and immanent within the microcosm of interpersonal relations (i.e., the family). We must qualify Hegel’s terms slightly in order to account for a different kind of dialectical pairing, particularly so as the ethics of a social universality in a place like South Africa were seriously called into question because of the uneven political domain within which such a universality might have been articulated. In other words, social universality cannot be taken for granted under conditions of oppression; the social universal is itself a ground for contestation and struggle.6 And since the domain of interpersonal relationships both offers the grounds for working through morality and is itself produced by the essential logic that dominates any system, that domain then takes on a coloration from the problematic social universal that is being shaped under the impress of unfreedom.
To recapitulate our discussion so far: The Island allows us to (a) keep in the foreground of our minds the materiality of bodies-in-action, (b) focus upon the multiple rehearsals of the self that take place against a horizon of anticipations, (c) perceive the essential lineaments of the struggle between social universality and the interpersonal and familial grounds for the elaboration of morality, and (d) keep in view the oscillating relationship between the depicted foreground of the action and the wider social and political background that frames the action. All these are in varying ways pertinent to our discussion of the lives of Autshumato, Krotoa, and Franz Jacobs, to whom we will turn after the next section.
Heterogeneous Histories
One significant way in which the history of Robben Island may be reread is in the manner in which it provided multiple refractions of social relations unfolding on the mainland. Harriet Deacon (2003, 154–155) sees the history of the island as thoroughly entangled with that of the expanding colonial frontier of the Cape itself:
One can map the expansion of the colonial frontier in South Africa by tracing the origins of political prisoners who were sent to Robben Island.…Robben Island was used to police internal boundaries on which rested the power and safety of the colonial state: employer-employee and master-slave relations, political activity, criminality, white poverty, infectivity and unreason. Internal boundaries could be seen as new frontiers of control.
We find here echoes of Benitez-Rojo’s claim about the decentered nature of the Caribbean islands, except that in the case of Robben Island its apparent decenteredness was intimately connected to the policing of political and social boundaries on the mainland. Such boundaries were tied to internal distinctions among the Europeans themselves and between whites and blacks, but in such a way that the encounter and contact between the two races led to a constant need to police all boundaries, internal and external, geographic and symbolic. Robben Island became the site upon which these boundaries were mapped out both through the in-carceration/medicalization/segregation of human subjects and the specific spatial locations of the different institutions that were placed on it. Shifting social inflections were attributed to all the material and symbolic vectors on the island and had an effect on how people on the mainland (both white and black) viewed those on the island and vice versa. Earlier in the same piece, Deacon refers to the island as the “mother node” of colonialism, since it was a safe haven from which colonists established and defended their interests on the subcontinent itself. The term “mother node” has more potential than just signifying a geographical toehold from which various colonists launched themselves onto the subcontinent. According to Deacon’s own account and those of other Robben Island historians, three discourses remained pertinent to its history from the very beginning. Briefly put, these discourses were those to do with labor (work), the carceral economy (prison and the process of losing one’s freedom or having it somewhat curtailed in spite of one’s wishes to the contrary), and the value of the island as a last line of defense for the Cape. Not to be ignored also was the discourse of disability. In practice, the discourses of labor and of the carceral economy were always entangled and mutually reinforcing, since the variant populations that found themselves on the island were often there not out of their own volition; they also had to work hard in an often difficult and isolated environment. Indeed, we may even argue that there is no phase of the island’s history when matters of work and imprisonment were not at the forefront of everyone’s minds. In the lives of the historical figures we shall be looking at, it is instructive to speculate on what effect the shifting and policing of boundaries had on their subjectivities and their sense of embodiment. Some of this is to be found tangentially in the documents that were written about them, such as in court and hospital records, the journals of colonial officials, parliamentary and newspaper reports, and in the reflections of missionaries over the years about the various disabled groups on the island.
But first, a brief history of the island itself. Robben Island is a “low lying lozenge of rock and sand, guarding the entrance to Table Bay” (Deacon 1996a, 1). It is generally accepted to have been unpopulated at the time Bartolomeu Diaz arrived there in 1488 on one of his trips in search of routes to the East Indies. For two hundred years after that, it served as a refreshment station for sailors, being rich in seals and penguins and having a good supply of fresh water as well as a natural harbor. With the arrival of the Dutch East India Company (DEIC) at the Cape in 1652, new uses were soon defined and progressively implemented for Robben Island.
The layout of buildings reveals the spatialization of difference and how this was imposed upon the landscape of the island itself. The earliest dwellings were situated on the northeastern end of the island in 1654, to control the sandy anchorage and beach at that point. However, this part of the island has also repeatedly been associated with imprisonment. The Dutch prison was established just behind the beach in 1657 and was also designed to house staff and slaves as close as possible to the predominantly male black and white prisoners who found themselves on the island. The first apartheid prison, dating from 1960, was also located close to this landing place. Contrastively, the highest point on the island, which lies to the south, was associated with the security of the island from the period of the DEIC in the 1650s. The most significant structures there were the prison village, which grew incrementally with the addition of a church, a parsonage, and class-differentiated housing in the 1840s, and the lighthouse, dating from 1863. With the establishment of the medical institutions for lepers, lunatics, and the chronically sick, from 1846 the south buildings were recycled, placing all the medical institutions within the perimeter of the village. Crucially, however, as Deacon (2003) shows, over the next century the village itself was shaped “symbolically and physically” as a “whites-only domestic space.” By the turn of the twentieth century, asylum staff were assessed for “whiteness,” with applicants deemed too black being sent back home to the mainland (Deacon 2003, 157). The spatial differentiations on the island continued in the late nineteenth century, with the relocation of the leprosy patients to just outside the village perimeter, the boundary between the leprosy hospital and the village being called “Boundary Road,” which the lepers were not allowed to cross. This followed the heightened fears of leprosy contagion in the 1890s.
As has already been noted, the history of Robben Island is inextricable from happenings in Cape Town. Apart from the Dutch, the early settlers on the Cape were Germans, Poles, Flemish, French, and Portuguese. Slaves were also brought in from East Africa, India, Ceylon, and the Malay archipelago, with several of those from the Malay archipelago being political exiles and historic figures in their own right. However, among the early Dutch themselves there was a mix of company workers from the higher echelons of society and others of somewhat shadier backgrounds, who had been either coerced or had found themselves unhappily having to work for the DEIC. According to de Villiers (1971), many of such men had been sentenced for petty crimes in their motherland and sent to work for the company at the Cape.7 Indeed, many accounts found in the journal of van Riebeeck, the first Dutch governor of the DEIC, had to do with stemming the tide of drunkenness and criminality among the settlers. A mutinous demand for food by soldiers of the company in the 1680s led to the arrest of the four ringleaders and sentences of hanging, flogging, or being placed in irons for twenty-five years of hard labor. The four men were invited to draw lots on who should live and who should die. In another incident, a free woman who with her servants stole and slaughtered two cows was sentenced to be tied to a post with a halter round her neck and the hides of the two cows upon her head. She was furthermore flogged and branded (de Villiers 1971, 27). These apparent infractions and the punishments that were visited upon the unfortunate people who committed them defined an ethos of extreme volatility and violence, particularly as the disciplinary regime among the Europeans was designed to instill order so as to make the settlers a stronger group in dealing with the Khoikhoi, whom they depended upon for trade and sustenance but who were also perceived as posing a constant threat. The threat of imminent attack was always on the minds of the settlers and fed directly into the disciplinary regimes imposed upon them. An executioner was even appointed by the company, with handsome pay for meting out various kinds of punishments for different offenses (de Villiers 1971, 27). In this early process of creating a disciplined society among the settlers, company workers were soon being banished to Robben Island for all manner of infractions. The association of convicts with the Cape and, by later extension, Robben Island had already been made much earlier by the English. In 1611, an idea had been mooted by Thomas Aldworth, a member of the English East India Company, for the transport of one hundred convicts a year to the Cape to establish a colony. A much lower number was transported in 1615, but the experiment was discontinued when the English realized that neither the terrain nor the Khoikhoi were hospitable to the convicts (Penn 1996, 11–12).
A figure who encapsulated both the shifting social boundaries internal to the settlers as well as the problematic relationship between them and the Khoikhoi was Autshumato, otherwise known as Harry. Autshumato was the “leader” of a group of Khoikhoi lacking cattle herds and who lived close to the Table Bay area. They were Goringhauqua, but were known to the Europeans as Strandlopers or Watermen. The English had taken Autshumato to the East Indies in 1631, where he learned English and was returned to act as their agent and translator in southern Africa.8 At his own request, Autshumato asked to be sent to Robben Island with some of his followers and for subsequent years he spent varied lengths of residence there. Nigel Penn (1996) suggests that this request was partly to gain security from the hostile Peninsular Khoikhoi and also as a means of controlling the extensive resources of penguins and seals on the island. Autshumato was important to European sailors because he could monitor all the ships entering the bay and light signal fires to notify those wishing to forward or receive letters. He was at once highly regarded and much feared by both the English and later the Dutch. Indeed, the first explicit Dutch meditation on the possibility of using Robben Island as a place for political convicts is found in the journal of van Riebeeck in November 1652, barely six months after he had arrived to set up a settlement for the DEIC:
We are half afraid that the aforesaid Harry—being very much attached to the Saldanhars nowadays whereas formerly they used to be his enemies—instead of acting in our favor, may be brewing mischief.…If he is brewing mischief, it would not be inconceivable for him with his wife and children, together with all the Watermen, to be taken to Robben Island with sweet words and left there, so that we might trade more peaceably and satisfactorily with the natives of Saldanha, who appear to be a good type of people. About all this time will show us more.9
Autshumato drifted in and out of favor with the Europeans over the course of the nearly twelve years that he acted as an interpreter for them. It is not clear whether van Riebeeck was aware that Autshumato had himself used Robben Island as his base some years previously, so that banishing him there was not necessarily going to be a punishment as such. What is evident from this journal entry, however, is the idea of the curtailing of his freedom, such that even if Autshumato had felt comfortable being on Robben Island with his followers previously, now it was going to be a place not of freedom but of interdiction. Also noteworthy is the subtle rhetoric of potential enemies and friends, which then institutes the requirement of clarity of action from people such as Autshumato. He is thought to be “brewing mischief,” which could mean anything from not interpreting properly to actively undermining settler interests for his own profit. An opposition is set up in van Riebeeck’s mind between Autshumato and the natives of Saldanha, who appear to be a “good type of people,” that is, cattle-rearing natives they could do business with and who would not give them too much trouble. In the long term, van Riebeeck was proved to have been overly sanguine in his calculation of the cooperation of the cattle-rearing Khoikhoi, since Autshumato played settler and local Khoikhoi against each other to his own advantage. He was first and foremost a pragmatist; some would even say a politician. This brings to mind the case of Wangrin, another colorful character in local-settler relations from French Senegal. As Amadou Hampaté Bâ shows in The Fortunes of Wangrin (1999), Wangrin was a very astute and manipulative player within the French colonial bureaucratic apparatus from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. He was an interpreter who, due to his indispensable role in mediating the contact between his people and the French colonial bureaucrats in Senegal, was able to play one against the other to his own profit. He was a masterful colonized Machiavel and, read against other better known Africans in the service of colonial bureaucracies, provides an interesting perspective on the ambiguities of the formation of the colonized administrative elite. Like Wangrin, Autshumato might be argued to be materializing the behavior of the trickster figure of African folktales, with practical consequences for both the settlers and the local Khoikhoi. The shifting scales of power and authority upon the social environment triggered by the coming of the Europeans must have struck him forcefully. He was partially assimilated to their worldview by virtue of having been taken to the East Indies and taught to speak English. And yet he must also have been always conscious of the fact that he was “white but not quite,” to cite Homi Bhabha’s felicitous formulation, someone who raised anxiety among both the natives and the Europeans precisely because of his status of insider/outsider to both camps. His self-fashioning or the rehearsal of his various selves was transposed onto a shifting set of social relationships in which his place was liminal and often fraught with danger.
Krotoa’s Nervous Conditions
The shifting fortunes and positions of Autshumato touched on other people, both European and native, with the most poignantly significant being that of Krotoa, or Eva to the Dutch. Krotoa had extensive kinship ties with several Khoikhoi groups. Autshumato was her uncle, who, as we know, was one of the Goringhauqua. She had another uncle from among the Chainouqua, a mother with the Goringhauqua, and another “mother” with the Cochoqua. In addition, her sister, who was formerly the wife of Goeboer, the Chainouqua chief, was seized in war and became the most important wife of the Cochoqua chief Oedasoa, who was himself a very significant person in the life of Krotoa and the affairs of the Dutch (Elphick 1985, 106–107). Most of these groups were cattle herders and at various times entered into trade relations with the Dutch. Like Autshumato, Krotoa’s significance to the settlers derived mainly from her role as interpreter. She learned to speak Dutch fluently and was also proficient in Portuguese. As Elphick (1985, 103–104) notes, the Dutch relied on their early native interpreters “not only for translations, but also for geographic and ethnographic information and for advice on the making of policies relating to the Khoikhoi.” The place of the interpreter was thus overdetermined by the often contradictory political needs of different factions. In her case, as we shall see shortly, she had to mediate among various competing factions, sometimes attempting to further particular local interests as opposed to others, but at all times, it seems, trying to protect the interests of the settlers above all others.
Krotoa was brought to live with the van Riebeecks in April 1652, when they first came to settle at the Cape.10 She was brought up in their household, taught their language and lifestyle, and trained in Christian ways. She was increasingly relied upon as an interpreter, the other two being Autshumato and Doman, a person from another ethnic group that had been taken to Batavia to be trained by the Dutch. The writer of van Riebeeck’s journal always cast aspersion on the two men’s command of the European languages (English for Autshumato and Dutch for Doman), and it is evident that Krotoa’s facility in Dutch was much prized by the settlers. However, it did not take long for her to get into trouble with both Autshumato and Doman; in the case of the latter, the enmity was mutual and unrelenting, since Doman did everything to undermine the settlers’ authority and knowledge of the local terrain. The entry for August 22, 1958, gives us a good hint of the intensity of the hatred between the two:
Doman, the interpreter, who is a rascal, tries to thwart the Hon. Company in everything and is thrice as bad and harmful as Harry ever was throughout his life, as we discover daily, and as Eva testifies. She states openly that he is the chief opponent of the Hon. Company; he calls her a lickspittle, or flatterer, and makes her odious among her own people by saying that she speaks more in favour of the Dutch than the Hottentots. When she comes to interpret, he calls out: “See, there comes the advocate of the Dutch; she will tell her people some stories and lies and will finally betray them all,” and anything which will serve to make her odious to them.11
This enmity appears to have come from many causes, but not to be dismissed perhaps is the fact that Doman may have been trying to bully her because she was in his eyes a mere girl and enjoying too much status by being so close to the van Riebeeck household.
On September 23, 1658, Krotoa left the fort on a trip to the interior. This has been interpreted variously. For Malherbe (1990, 23), she may have left out of frustration for not being able to intercede in her uncle Autshumato’s final banishment to Robben Island earlier in the year. Elphick (1985, 107), on the other hand, suggests that, having reached puberty at age fifteen or sixteen, she may have been returning to her relatives to undergo the ceremony prescribed for every Khoikhoi girl of her age. What is not clear is why the van Riebeeck’s allowed such a prized interpreter to leave for a ceremonial practice they are not likely to have either understood or approved of. Whatever the reasons for her departure, this trip proved to be a turning point in Krotoa’s life. She first went to visit her mother, where she suffered the unhappy incident of being robbed and beaten up, apparently without her mother coming to her aid. After this she left to visit her sister, who was by now married to Oedasoa, the Cochoqua chief. Krotoa made a great impression on them and was reputed to have effected the cure of her sister from a bad fever with days and nights of prayer. She also sought to persuade Oedasoa to visit the fort and begin trading with the settlers. Things took a dramatic turn later during her stay, when Oedasoa was badly injured by a lion. Krotoa held herself responsible for the accident. Oedasoa and his men had been hunting for wild horses and trying to shoot elephants for their tusks on Krotoa’s “repeated exhortations.” The horses were of more use to the Europeans than to the Khoikhoi.12
Her uncle’s accident had a great effect on her, for she subsequently returned to the colony on December 30, expressing the wish to “learn more of our religion.” This was apparently on the suggestion of her brother-inlaw and her sister, who had both learned so much through her that “they could feel in their hearts that what she told them of God and His service was true.”13 Krotoa subsequently moved regularly between the fort and the interior, but the fort became her main abode and place of residence in the following years.
The events that were to lead to the first Dutch-Khoikhoi War of 1658– 1659 had been taking shape earlier. In February 1658, the DEIC released a number of their employees from their contracts so they could become free settlers at the Cape. These freeburghers were to raise livestock and hence relieve the company of its reliance on trade with the cattle-rearing Khoikhoi. They were also to grow crops that would hopefully free the colony from its dependence on Batavian rice (Elphick 1985, 220). It quickly became apparent to the Khoikhoi and particularly to Doman, who was at pains to find means of resisting the Europeans’ encroachments, that access to pastureland and water was going to be a very serious issue with the institution of the new policy. Doman broke away from the colony and formed a militia that attacked the fort. The immediate trigger for the war, however, was the settlers’ seizure of some Khoikhoi as hostages in June 1658 in retaliation for the theft of some of the colony’s herd; the hostage-taking policy appears to have been suggested or at least endorsed by Krotoa. At the same time, during the war, she sought to establish an alliance between Oedasoa and the Dutch, partly as a way of strengthening the hand of his Khoikhoi ethnic faction against the others that had been dealing with the settlers. The later part of 1659 found her moving regularly between the fort and Oedasoa’s encampment, which had been set up not far from the fort. Neither side seemed entirely to trust her; at any rate, despite every sign of an alliance being made, Oedasoa vacillated and at the last moment refused to join forces with the Dutch against the other Khoikhoi.14 The Dutch thought Krotoa contradicted herself extremely badly in several respects regarding Oedasoa’s intentions and clearly suspected her of some underhanded dealings.
If Krotoa’s unfortunate adventures among her sister and brother-inlaws’ people and her status as interpreter during the war hinted at a trajectory of reversal in her life at the fort, her marriage in 1664 to Pieter van Meerhoff marked a decisive downward turn in her fortunes from which she was not to recover.15 Her marriage was preceded by a number of events that could only have caused her much distress. Her sister died in July 1660, and in May 1662, the van Riebeecks left the colony after ten years at its head. Their last act before leaving was to have her baptized into the Dutch Reformed Church, giving her the name Eva. Though the baptism must have been a welcome coming-to-fullness of the religiosity she had exhibited hitherto, it cannot also be denied that the loss of the van Riebeecks, who had treated her as one of their own and indeed often protected her against the skepticism of both the Europeans and the natives, must have been a dire blow. At any rate, the new commander, Zacharias Wargenaer, took a colder attitude toward her. She was married to Pieter in April 1664, a marriage contracted partly for political reasons, as Wargenaer calculated that her marriage to one of them might fortify the alliance between the Dutch and her people, and partly, it appears, to accommodate the two children she had had in 1663 by the Europeans. The journal is silent on who the father(s) might have been, the only hint being that the children may have been by sailors who often came ashore at the Cape.16 Pieter was a young and highly valued surgeon. However, his value to the company did not prevent them from placing him at a distance from the colony due to his marriage to a black girl. He was sent off to Robben Island along with Jan Wouterssen, the first Postholder, who also happens to have married a black girl. Conditions on the island were very harsh, and more importantly, Krotoa, by being sent off with her husband, had been effectively separated from the social and political center of the colony. She took to heavy drinking and once alarmed her husband by passing out and knocking her head badly on the ground. She was sent to the mainland for treatment and subsequently went back and forth between the island and the colony. Matters were not helped when her husband joined a slave-hunting expedition heading for Madagascar in June 1666. Eighteen months later, word returned that he had been killed by the people he was trying to enslave.
Krotoa was allowed to return to the fort, but it did not take long for her to get into trouble there. Her behavior was considered deeply embarrassing to the settlers. She was once so drunk that she swore interminably while sitting at the commander’s table. She was severely reprimanded and threatened with the removal of her children if she did not mend her ways. After the incident at the commander’s table Krotoa ran away, leaving her children behind. On another occasion, she was found sitting naked on a sand dune at the beach with a pipe in her mouth. As hopes of getting her cured of her ailment receded, she was banished to the island in September 1668.17 She died in 1674 at the age of thirty-one, or, as the journal entry put it: “finally she quenched the fire of her sensuality by death…affording a manifest example that nature, however closely and firmly muzzled by imprinted principles, nevertheless at its own time triumphing over all precepts, again rushes back to its inborn qualities.”18 We will have more to say on this blatantly racist linking of the native to animals in a moment.
Elphick and Shell (1979, 184) suggest that in the early period of Dutch settlement, a number of processes took place that served to progressively erode the boundaries between the Khoikhoi and the Dutch. These included (1) the incorporation of the Khoikhoi into the European-dominated society as wage laborers subject to Dutch law; (2) the conversion of slaves and free blacks to Christianity or Islam; (3) miscegenation and intermarriage among groups; (4) the manumission of slaves and the consequent emergence of an important group, the free blacks; and (5) cultural exchanges among groups. A number of things emerging from the account of Krotoa’s life suggest that she was in many ways placed at the interstices of these various processes, particularly the dimensions noted in Elphick and Shell’s categories 1, 2, 3, and 5. We must note, however, the degree to which Krotoa’s sense of “family” must have been thoroughly split between the mores and sentiments of her adopted family of the van Riebeecks and that of the Khoikhoi she clearly identified with, making the question of her “assimilation” to European culture highly problematic. All historians who write about her have noted her strong attachment to Autshumato, unreliable though he appeared to be in the eyes of the Europeans. When he was finally banished to Robben Island, she sought an occasion to visit him there. The seas were so rough that their boat lost direction and did not touch the island for another twenty-four hours. Krotoa was so seasick that the others thought she was going to die, “but she recovered completely when the sea calmed down.”19 We have already noted how shaken she was when Oedasoa, her brother-in-law, was bitten by the lion. She did everything she could to persuade the Dutch to enter into dealings with him and was a constant emissary between the two parties. And she clearly also had very strong bonds with her sister. Krotoa’s joy knew no bounds when she had the opportunity of being reunited with her sister during her embassies between Oedasoa and the Dutch. It is reported that on the first occasion she was practically speechless with elation: “At the first meeting of these two women joy prevented Eva from addressing the other, and for the same reason she was unable to serve as interpreter for our people. She perpetually had her arm round the shoulder of her sister, Oedasoa’s wife, a sign that they had great pleasure in each other’s company. Eventually she was able to talk.”20
Recalling Hegel’s proposition about the family as furnishing the primary ground on which moral relations are established, we can speculate that these attachments to dual notions of “family” must have posed some confusion in Krotoa’s mind. Having been brought up in the language of the Dutch and living so intimately with them, she could not have missed their real opinion of the Khoikhoi, her people. Throughout the journals, there are countless references to the suspicions that the settlers had about the natives. They were described as scheming, dirty, hungry (especially the Standlopers), and full of mischief. And the early freeburghers expressed their deep-seated hatred for the natives with whom they now openly had to vie for pastureland and water resources. At the same time, it was also clear to her that the European settlers provided a not inconsiderable cache of what Pierre Bourdieu (1991) refers to as symbolic capital. Many of Autshumato’s machinations and the internecine plottings and counterplottings of the various cow-herding tribes on how to augment their standing with the Europeans proved beyond a doubt how useful it was to be associated with the settlers. And since she already had the special privilege of their language and direct access to the van Riebeeck household, she sensed how important the white family was to her own standing. This familial duality must have affected her sense of self in ways that can only be guessed at. How must she have felt knowing that she was treated as exceptional while all around her her people were being described as mischievous and uncivilized?
Her growing religiosity was also another crucial yet divisive part of her sense of identity. As we saw from the journal entry discussing her death, her Christianity was no insulation from the settler perception that as a native she was close to a bestial and irredeemable nature. This discourse of irredeemableness no doubt became stronger on the departure of the van Riebeecks. But it would be hard to imagine that she did not face such racist taunts from time to time at the hands of some of the company workers when they were drunk or particularly fearful of what it meant to have a native such as her so close to them. Her Christianity gave her no absolute protection. Her tragic demise could be partially related to the psychological schisms that her Christian/native self gave her, especially when she began to fall out of favor with the more powerful of the settler community; it did not help either that her new husband took off on several expeditions into the interior, leaving her bereft on the island. Her effective banishment to Robben Island, first with her husband and, after his death, on her own, was proof positive of the perception of her irredeemabilty and her peripheralization in the eyes of the settlers. In 1671, Sara, another girl who had spent most of her life among the Europeans as a servant and a concubine, committed suicide at the age of twenty-four. And a Khoikhoi man baptized as Frederick Adolf and taken to Holland in 1707 led a life on his return that was deemed so immoral that he was banished to spend the rest of his life on Robben Island (Elphick 1985, 203). Clearly, the early Khoikhoi converts who found themselves in the service of the Dutch suffered immense psychological pressures. We would not be wrong in speculating that Krotoa must have suffered a nervous breakdown over the course of her life, something for which she had no recourse and probably no one to turn to for help; her severe alcoholism from about 1664 onward is a sign of her desperation.
Some historians have speculated on whether Krotoa had sexual relations with either van Riebeeck or with one of the other settlers prior to her marriage to Pieter, the idea being that there must have been a practice of concubinage that she could not have escaped. For Yvette Abrahams (1996), Krotoa personifies the widespread rape of black women by the white settlers, whereas Julia C. Wells (1998) proposes that van Riebeeck may have had intimate relations with her, particularly as there is evidence that he admired the physicality of native women. Her marriage to Pieter was then part of a highly complicated set of symbolic exchanges in which Pieter won out by virtue of his having had a four-year relationship with her and sharing some of her own impulses toward advancing settler interests among the local populations. All these speculations must remain at the level of tantalizing possibilities. What is also evident, however, is the way in which the records try to separate the issue of her maternality from that of her sexuality and then blur her sense of agency in negotiating her various roles. The issue of who she had her first two children by or indeed how many children she had in all is never quite clear. Furthermore, with the coming of Wargenaer she is repeatedly referred to as a “vixen” and a “prostitute,” references that did not feature in the van Riebeeck journals. In other words, her fall from political grace appears to have coincided with the increasingly negative and sometimes quite virulent references to her sexuality. These references were designed to emphasize her physicality (as a hypersexual woman, therefore requiring management and control) against her intellectualism (in her role as interpreter, upon whom they depended heavily).
We must pause for a moment on the reference to her sitting naked on the beach with a pipe in her mouth. For the “nakedness” of her body had many connotations. From the journal entry of January 12, 1656, we are informed that Eva (Krotoa), who is “clad in clothes, has lived some time in the Commander’s house, where she has learned some Dutch.”21 This was one of the earliest references to her in the documents. However, as Malherbe (1990, 8) points out, the reference to her being clad in clothes was highly significant, since it was an important index of her status in Dutch eyes. Subsequently, on her trips away from the fort she was to stop at the edge of the settlement and change from her European clothes into native skins. On one occasion when she reached the edge of the fort, she dressed up in hides and sent her old clothes back home to the van Riebeecks, with the assurance that “she would in the meantime not forget the Lord God, Whom she had learnt to know in the Commander’s house.”22 The evocation of her religiosity at the precise moment when she was donning the outward signs of her native affiliation must have been designed to assuage any doubts that the Dutch may have had about her allegiance to their cause. However, it is also evident that the question of clothing marked a not insignificant threshold for her. Thus when she strips naked and puts a pipe in her mouth to sit alone at the beach it is a clear sign of her rebellion against being garbed in the signifiers of either Westernization or nativeness. In this, she was, even if problematically, claiming her naked body as her own. And yet, at the same time her nakedness at the beach should be taken as a sign of her distressed mental state. The sea was a particularly poignant reminder of the ebb and flow of the relationships (sexual and otherwise) she had established with the sailors that came to the Cape. Since these sailors were there only for short durations, her relationships were of necessity ephemeral ones. But how are we to know if she did not actually fall in love with one of these sailors and desire to go to the mother country that had brought forth the van Riebeecks? What conversations did she have with the sailors? What shores did she question them about? What stories of mishap and adventure did they regale her with? What yearnings did she express to them? And what, in the end, passed through her mind as she sat naked on the beach with a pipe in her mouth?
Recall, finally, the category of disability as inarticulable tragic insight that we elaborated in chapter 2 in relation to tragic figures such as Cassandra, Io, Ophelia, Baby Suggs, and others. Like these literary figures, Krotoa suffered a nervous condition that was symptomatic of the fact that she bore an inexpressible tragic knowledge. We cannot tell whether she managed to express this to those closest to her. What, for example, must she have told her children about herself and the circumstances of her living with the Europeans? What we do know is that her alcoholism and later nervous breakdown marked the downward spiral of a highly intelligent and active woman. Since she never speaks in her own voice in the colonial records, all we can retrieve are the traces that other people leave about her. Yet even from these traces we can piece together the gradual ebbing of her vitality, her growing solitude, and what must have been her terrifying loss of standing both among the Europeans and her own people.23
A larger question presents itself if we resituate Krotoa in relation to The Island and John and Winston’s rehearsals of multiple selves: what were some of the selves that Krotoa sought to rehearse in her short but highly eventful life? She was first and foremost an interpreter between two cultures, one of which was clearly intent on dominating the other. The selves she rehearsed depended on her judgment as to what was more pressing for her identity, and this was by no means either straightforward or predictable. She rehearsed the roles of interpreter, servant, wife, lover, mother, and ambassador. Also, as someone who was celebrated for her ethnographic knowledge of the local landscape and its people, she acted as a translator of the depths behind the visible. The elusive ethnographic knowledge she shared with the Dutch was only partially an ethnography; it was also the map of the shifting scales of her self-understanding as they were encapsulated in the knowledge she had about her own people. Krotoa was clearly a lonely woman, but one caught in the interstices of a colonial world whose social boundaries were in a state of flux and for whom the historical moment provided an excess of cultural signification. From the point of view of the Europeans, she presented an anomalous and confusing category. She represented the structure of simultaneous attraction and repulsion for them. Thus, as we saw a moment ago, a veritable discourse of wildness and unruliness was projected onto her body as a means of policing it. The settlers had worries about social reproduction both in terms of the reproduction of family structures as well as the reproduction of social relations. Thus, for them someone like Krotoa presented a confusing category for social reproduction in the new realm: she was a veritable slave yet a baptized Christian, a Christian yet a chronic alcoholic, married to one of them yet apparently promiscuous, acculturated in European ways yet also reflecting the behavioral patterns of the less savory European characters on the settlement. She swore in public and threw up, often walked out on her two children, and exposed her nakedness to the elements. Krotoa then may be taken as representing the tragic intersection of gender, race, mental illness, and unruly “otherness” that would be manifested in different dimensions and scales throughout the later history of Robben Island. She is historic in that sense.
Racial Segregation and the Leper Rebellion of 1892
The history of racial segregation in South Africa is full and complicated, with the nineteenth century providing the highpoint of the process. Intra- and interinstitutional segregation in Cape Town became increasingly racialized after 1890 (Deacon 1996b). From the 1900s, racialized metaphors of illness and health concerns came together to produce medical legislation that in its turn was used to justify segregation. As Baines (1990, 77) put it: “In the colonial context, the social metaphor of disease became a particularly effective means of maintaining political pressure for Africans to be kept away from white residential areas.” Thus, by the late nineteenth century public health legislation was used to encourage and later justify stricter residential segregation in a number of colonial towns (Deacon 1996b, 289). The intersection of race with disease was intensified by the public health discourse of contagion, which, depending as it did on the discovery of bacteria as the transmitters of disease in the 1870s, led to the European stance that black culture and social life explained the etiology of most diseases.24 Leprosy, in particular, was definitively linked to uncleanliness, and uncleanliness in its turn to black habits and lifestyles. After 1883, the fears about the dangers of contracting leprosy from the urban small trader or black farm servant were increasingly rife among Europeans, and the black migrant or urban immigrant was cited as the origin of the germ. In an 1896 book entitled Handbook on Leprosy, Samuel Impey, doctor at the Robben Island leper hospital, attributed the spread of leprosy entirely to various black groups, the most prominent of them being the “Bushman” (Deacon 1994, 61–62).
On the founding of the General Infirmary on Robben Island in 1846, racial segregation was established for the chronically sick, the lepers, and the insane patients that found themselves there. The infirmary was originally set up as a custodial institution for the unemployable sick poor by John Montagu, colonial secretary at the Cape in the 1840s. However, his push for the infirmary sought to encompass other categories of people as well. His original proposal was to make use of the “free” labor that able-bodied convicts could provide. This would involve evacuating the mainland prisons and the old Somerset Hospital of lunatics and the chronic sick. All these groups were to be sent to Robben Island and placed in the old convict buildings there. Montagu set up a special Medical Board to ratify his scheme in its totality. The fusion of the discourse of labor with that of illness and incarceration had important implications for how the lepers were viewed and in turn viewed themselves. Most of the lepers sent to the infirmary in the early years were from older leper hospitals such as Hemel-en-Aarde and Sunday’s River. Several of them were in the final stages of their illness and all but three of those from Hemel-en-Aarde had died or left by 1861. The total number transported to the island in 1846 was fifty-four, with the number remaining consistently below one hundred until 1892, when it rose to 413. By 1915, the number of lepers on the island had risen to 613 (Deacon 1994, 66). Crucially, in the first few years the gaps caused by early deaths or discharge were filled predominantly by farm laborers through the request of magistrates and district surgeons. Indeed, as late as 1887 lepers were discharged from Robben Island on the basis of being time-expired convicts. In this sense, as Deacon (1994, 67) suggests, “prior institutionalization was an advantage, as the term of the legal prison sentence took legal priority over the term of the disease.” In other words, there was an overlap within official attitudes toward persons with leprosy and convicts, with the capacity to work being the supervening category for both. Race played a part in the institutional attitudes to the lepers, lunatics, and sick poor on the island in as far as it determined their specific geographical location in the various wards vis-à-vis the white and wealthier patients (most of the black patients were poor), and also in the type of diet that was given to the different categories of patients there (Deacon 1996b; 2001).
The 1891 Leprosy Repression Act and the Amendment Act of 1894 effectively removed all civil rights from persons with leprosy. They were no longer allowed to leave the island, vote, kiss or otherwise touch their visitors, or prosecute adulterous wives under existing colonial law. In the eyes of the law they were “as good as being dead” (Deacon 1994, 70). It is within this ethos of putative incarceration that the first leper rebellion on the island took place. This was spearheaded by Franz Jacobs, who had been admitted to the leper hospital in 1887. A “colored Afrikaner,” he was a well-educated Dutch Reformed Church member and teacher and also acted as a catechist for the lepers in general. Jacobs had originally opted to go to the infirmary of his own volition, stating that he did so because he thought that if he separated from his family his wife would have a better chance of finding work. His was a pragmatic response to the social stigma that attended families with lepers. At first, Jacobs and the other leprosy patients were able to visit the mainland, but following the Leprosy Repression Act these were cancelled. Toward the end of 1892, Jacobs led a group of black male lepers to protest their treatment on the island. He wrote letters to the Cape government, the attorney general, and the Queen of England, complaining that they had been banished from society and treated like common prisoners. He complained that he himself had been incarcerated on the island for five years and eleven months, and that before the Act of 1891 had been allowed to visit his wife, five stepchildren, and two children in Woodstock on the mainland. He argued on behalf of the lepers that they had been collectively “left on the Island as people who were dead” and protested the differential treatment that was meted out to black and white lepers. They were forced to work to get tobacco rations, their food was poorly prepared, and their clothing was inadequate. Jacobs made the specific argument to the Queen that since she had freed the slaves in 1834, she should also be able to free the lepers in 1892. He pointed out that they were British subjects but did not enjoy the requisite freedoms pertaining to this status.25
When no positive response from the authorities was forthcoming, Jacobs then began a campaign of disobedience and noncooperation, threatening in a letter that if their demands were not met there would be “war and riot” on the island. The lepers threatened to break into the female wards and also to attack the village and rape the women there.26 Whereas Jacobs invoked the discourse of rights within what might be seen as a much larger idiom of human rights for the lepers through unorthodox means, the authorities were at pains to represent him as someone whose mental capacity was suspect. In other words, that Jacobs was really insane and that his requests were driven by a sense of ego over-aggrandizement. Governor and High Commissioner Henry Loch wrote in a letter to Lord Marquis stating among other things:
Jacobs, who is said to incite discontent…wanted, when removed to the Hospital in CT, to be sent back to RI, where he said he was more comfortable, and would behave well, and when it became necessary a second time to bring him to CT, he expressed a preference for it. This, and the style of his letters to the Queen, support the opinion that he is not quite sane. A religious lunatic probably. No need to publish these papers as “this question” has not attracted public attention in this country [i.e., England].27
Jacobs’ claim that the lepers were being treated worse than convicts was dismissed by the authorities as nothing but a “figurative expression.” Samuel Impey, who as we recall was the island doctor at the time, was of a much darker opinion, stating:
Franz Jacobs…is a ring-leader amongst them and instead of being pampered deserves the cells. He now demands amongst other things the following, viz., Cruet Stands, Finger Glasses, Table Napkins and delicacies of all kinds. Yesterday they rose against the nurses and refused to have their wounds dressed by them, and if the nurses had not very wisely desisted from attempting to dress their wounds, there would have been bloodshed as they threatened to strike them with crutches.28
Impey asked for a contingent of armed constables for the protection of hospital employees. He was worried that the lepers might join with convicts on the island to overpower the convict guards and cause mayhem. After a period of seclusion from the other lepers, Jacobs was later to recant his accusation. Following the leper agitation, several government delegations visited the island to ascertain things for themselves, with a group of members of Parliament visiting in July 1893 and publishing a report favorable to the viewpoint of the lepers. The colonial government made improvements to the hospital food, issued free passes to visitors, and brought in a Dutch Reformed Minister for them. Jacobs himself was removed to the Somerset Hospital on the mainland to be placed under close surveillance, and although he returned to Robben Island briefly in 1893, he died later that year.
Sally Swartz (1999) has argued in relation to the retrieval of women’s psychiatric records in colonial South Africa that the inherent discursive shape of such records militates against the historian’s understanding of such women as unique individuals. Patient case histories frequently followed the same trajectories and made no concession to the differences among individual patients; they were considered as cases, not persons. We might suggest that it is not just women who suffered this form of obliteration from the colonial record. Any person designated as ill, whether physically or mentally, was immediately inserted into a particular discourse that entailed the institution of a curative regime. These regimes were not just “scientific.” They were often reflections of beliefs in particular disease etiologies, limited medical knowledge, and cultural (read racial, class, or even gendered) stereotypes that themselves fed back into the medical discourse and helped to shape the “case” in question. Thus when we read the ways in which the official discourse interpreted Franz Jacobs’ rebelliousness as a sign not of moral indignation but of madness, we must note that his leprosy was being globally extended to encompass the workings of his mind. As disability scholars have frequently argued, such globalization is a typical social response to disability, in this case exacerbated by being produced within a particularly situated colonial discourse that sought to dismiss and pathologize the entire rebellion. However, in the case of Jacobs it is also clear that the authorities had to contend with someone whose sense of self had been formed by his religious education as well as his understanding of wider historical processes by which he could interpret both his own position and that of the Europeans. His recourse to the language of abolitionism pointed to the fact that he was making a larger moral appeal, in which the lepers’ unsatisfactory conditions might be seen as analogous to other kinds of struggles that had successfully marshaled popular moral indignation against acknowledged evil practices.
Referring again to John and Winston in Fugard’s The Island, we should speculate on what selves Franz Jacobs was rehearsing at the interface between the collectivity of lepers, on the one hand, and the colonial authorities, on the other. His leprosy was to him no grounds for being treated less well than his white fellow lepers. More significantly, his ailment was suspended in his mind by virtue of his appeal to his sexuality and familial impulses (he wanted to see his wife and family first and foremost). The appeal to these impulses served to normalize him, for the implication carried in it was that he was like any of his more fortunate and presumably enlightened European interlocutors. And yet we cannot ignore the fact also that Jacobs oscillated between claiming his rights as a human being and threatening to deploy methods and instruments that could only be said to detract from the humanity of others (the threat to rape the village women, for example). Certainly, by the time he “recanted” his accusations to the authorities he had rehearsed a broad spectrum of subject and agential positions: agitator/spokesman, claimant of right to dignity/threat to the dignity of others, British citizen/colonial subject, bondman/free. Unfortunately, it is the nature and intensity of these oscillations as they were worked out in the mind of someone like Franz Jacobs that we will never be able to retrieve from the archival record. What we can retrieve is the fact that he was bold enough to launch an attack at an offensive piece of legislation that sought to shackle him and others with all the means at his disposal, limited and problematic though they turned out to be.
From the wider perspective of this study, what is perhaps most pertinent is the degree to which the lives of people like Autshumato, Krotoa, and Jacobs in their relationships to Robben Island helps to expose the overall discourses and practices by which the exception was established as a means of delimiting the boundaries of normality. All three instances serve to show that in the delimitation of boundaries several vectors of identity were brought into volatile proximity. Race and the social tensions that developed around it in the encounters with colonialism was just one of them. Also significant were the representations and later contestations of the intersections of illness and disability (both mental and physical), sexuality, and embodiment. As this brief discussion of Robben Island’s history has sought to show, it is the body itself in its naked corporeality that is at the heart of social and political nervousness in real life. To read the history of Robben Island rhetorically through the lives of the three historical characters we have encountered is to point out a fruitful way in which literary and historical analysis may intersect to illuminate the ways in which reality subtends the literary-aesthetic domain and the ways in which the literary-aesthetic field refracts reality. Ultimately, my hope is to have provided a means by which to awaken our consciousness to the general question of justice, one that in the final instance cannot be divorced from the bodies we occupy and whose variant forms are to be seen around us in the world of persons with disability.