The history of enslavement as it was practiced in the United States has been, and continues to be, extensively studied. Additional information comes to light regarding the immediate experience of those who were enslaved, of their strategies of endurance and resistance, the tragedies of families separated, of hopes for freedom endlessly deferred. Ongoing scholarly debate contextualizes this information and challenges previously-held attitudes. The evasions and rationalizations of the enslavers, the forthright embrace of white supremacy on the part of some, the squirming and special pleading on the part of others (such as some among the Founding Generation1) has also received its share of attention. Less familiar to many Americans, however, is the experience of enslavement in other places.
In my life as an actor I have found performance to be a deep and compelling education in history as lived human experience. It’s one thing to read about the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses; it’s another thing to pick up a two-handed broadsword and learn to wield it. Acting is, in essence, a process of trying on another subjectivity: what would it be like to be this person? To live their life, to see the world through their eyes? My experience as a member of the ensemble this autumn in Verdict: Slave Trials at the Cape of Good Hope provided one of the most intense experiences I have ever had as a performer. This performance was a staged reading of materials selected and arranged by Professor Grant Parker, consisting of 18th-century trial documents from the Dutch Cape Colony (later to become South Africa when colonization there was taken over by Great Britain), in which slaveholders brought enslaved people to trial for a variety of infractions, some of them serious crimes that would have required legal action in any jurisdiction (a few cases of homicide, a case of domestic sexual abuse), whereas other cases represented no more than the ruthless imposition of a white-supremacist power structure. And even in those cases where serious crimes were committed, the penalties imposed involved spectacles of barbarity that cannot but shock the conscience of an audience now.
The material was selected and arranged by Professor Grant Parker, who holds a joint appointment in the Department of African and African-American Studies and Classics, and was directed by Emeritus Professor Rush Rehm, of Theatre and Performance Studies. The performance took place on October 27th, at Toyon Hall (where Prof. Parker and Marie-Louise Catsalis, a Lecturer in Music, are Resident Fellows). Ms. Catsalis also worked in the production as stage manager and assistant to the director. The production was part of Prof. Parker’s public humanities initiative, Archive to Narrative.
The performance was austere in its simplicity: nine performers in plain black clothing, sitting in a row upstage, with four music-stands in a row downstage. Each performer in turn would place a black binder on the stand and read from it (though in fact we ended up memorizing many parts of the text, to minimize glances down at the page). Acting as such was approached gingerly; we were after all not presenting any of the alleged crimes themselves but rather the testimony offered afterwards in court. But as anyone who has watched Law and Order can attest, a courtroom can itself be a highly dramatic place.
As it turned out, what performers discovered to be one of the most challenging elements of the production was learning an Afrikaner accent. Accents have been a particular fascination of mine most of my life, and a yearning to acquire a different kind of voice from the plain mid-American of my upbringing sparked my initial interest in theatre when I was nine years old. Afrikaner has long been a kind of holy-grail accent for me, far more challenging than Scots or Irish or Welsh or Carolina or faux-French. Afrikaner is derived from Dutch and is sharply distinct from the Anglophone South African accent, which to an American ear sounds quite similar to Australian.
Speaking for myself (but I would not be at all surprised if my fellow performers had a similar experience), it came as something of a relief to have this issue of acting technique to focus on, especially inasmuch as the parts I performed all gave voice to abusive and casually racist colonists. I found myself falling back on my experiences performing works by Bertolt Brecht, in which the actor is encouraged to maintain a certain distance from the immediate emotional reality of a character's situation. What counted was not my character’s backstory (the method actor’s bedrock: the troubled childhood, the conflicted conscience or whatever); we were there to tell a story, and the brutality my character represented provided the juridical backdrop for the situation as a whole. In effect, I was the velociraptor, snapping my teeth at the main characters, the enslaved defendants in the dock.
This was an exercise in narrative; we all represented people with stories to tell. In some testimony the storyteller is eager to provide as much information as possible; in other cases it has to be dragged from witnesses and defendants. As Prof. Parker observes in the notes he wrote for the performance program:
‘Remembering’ in this sense has a highly personal dimension, even as such individual testimony contributes to a more generalized sense of collective memory, which emphasizes instead a shared frame of reference.
Each individual story contributed to the gradually-assembled picture of a massively dehumanizing judicial apparatus, a nightmare out of the first chapter of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (which recounts in terrifying detail the execution of a man who attempted to assassinate the King of France). Justice was not entirely absent from these proceedings, however: in a couple of the cases we presented, the complaint was brought by an enslaved person against an enslaver, cataloguing the abuses to which they had been subjected. In one case, the slaveholder I performed was found guilty of abusive conduct and was banished from the colony altogether, as the court pronounced:
We find the defendant guilty of maltreating a slave. We sentence you to pay the costs of the Court, and then to be sent from here to the Fatherland, back to the Netherlands, as soon as possible. You are a useless subject here.
Of the cases in which I performed, one of the most striking was the one that concluded the program. This was a trial in which the enslaved defendant was accused of nothing more serious than simply talking back to the slaveholder. My character was haranguing the defendant to go to bed, inasmuch as we had to be up early to get started with the ploughing of the fields. The defendant replied that all would be well, that he would be up at the appointed time, that the work would get done. My character immediately flew into a rage, appalled that an enslaved person would dare to talk back in such a manner. The court took my character’s side:
Slaves may not confront their owners, and they must never talk back to them. Offenses like these must not go unpunished in a country where justice rules. Slaves with a loose tongue must be dealt with severely, to set an example and deter would-be malefactors.
The defendant was then sentenced to be beaten severely and then sent to serve twenty-five years at hard labor on Robben Island, the prison where two hundred years later, Nelson Mandela was held by the Apartheid regime in South Africa.The shocking disparity between the trivial nature of the so-called offense and the harshness of the punishment impressed upon me the unrelenting dehumanization that characterized this system.
All in all, this was without question one of the most harrowing and at the same time one of the most rewarding performance projects in which I have ever taken part. I would like to thank Professors Parker and Rehm, and Ms. Catsalis for giving me the opportunity.
[1] See Annette Gordon-Reed, “Jefferson Divided,” The New York Review of Books, 12/18/2025
