Silencing Sexual Violence: Slavery in the Dutch Cape Colony, 1652–1795

This paper will explore how historians can investigate sexual relationships under slavery when source material either obscures or fails to mention sexual violence. Focusing on the Dutch Cape Colony (1652–1795), it examines the profound gender imbalances and highly asymmetrical power relations between enslaved women and European settlers that characterised this period. Under Roman-Dutch law, enslaved people were legally prohibited from marrying, and their children inherited their mothers’ unfree status. These structures made enslaved women particularly vulnerable while normalising their sexual exploitation. European travelogues depict enslaved women as promiscuous and willing to engage in sexual relationships with European men. Criminal court records from the Cape offer little correction: they rarely explicitly name sexual violation and contain no cases of enslaved women being raped. Together, these sources obscure coercion and render sexual violation largely invisible. The situation is further complicated by the fact that historiography has long relied on problematic frameworks that portray enslaved women in settler households as being integrated into relationships that offer material benefits, such as manumission. However, in recent years, this perspective has been challenged by feminist and postcolonial interventions. Building on Hershini Bhana Young’s argument that consent was impossible under slavery, this paper provides close analyses of selected excerpts of travelogues and court records to explore how sexual violation is obscured in published and archival material. How can we deal meaningfully and ethically with archival silences around sexual violation? Which methodological strategies can we use to understand societies where sexual violation was structurally unrecorded? The paper will address these questions and suggest preliminary answers for discussion.