AfricaBib 
bibliographic database
| Previous page | New search |
The free AfricaBib App for Android is available here
 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
 WorldCat |
| Title: | Narratives of Infanticide in the Aftermath of Slave Emancipation in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa |
| Author: | Scully, Pamela |
| Year: | 1996 |
| Periodical: | Canadian Journal of African Studies |
| Volume: | 30 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Pages: | 88-105 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | South Africa The Cape |
| Subjects: | abolition of slavery infanticide women Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) History and Exploration Health and Nutrition Women's Issues Historical/Biographical Cultural Roles Women and Their Children slavery |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/486042 |
| Abstract: | In the decade immediately following the final abolition of slavery in the Cape Colony (South Africa) in 1838, a cluster of ostensible infanticide cases occurred in three rural districts near Cape Town. Six women with connections to mission stations in Caledon, Swellendam, and the Cape districts were charged with the crime of infanticide or concealment of birth. In a colonial society emerging from slavery, the mission stations were seen as locales for nurturing a 'respectable' citizenry trained in Christian morality and a Protestant work ethic. However, colonial officials and missionaries differed in their ideas on how to promote respectability and how to accommodate freed people in colonial society. An examination of infanticides on the missions provides an opportunity to consider infanticide as both a site for contestation about the meanings and limits of colonial rule and an important experience for women who were both mothers and workers. Cases involving ex-slave women charged with killing their babies expose, in particular, the many competing notions of sexuality and morality that existed amongst settlers, freed people, missionaries, and colonial officials at the Cape. Yet the noise produced by colonial actors, and the State silenced the experience of the women themselves, and the pain and inequality of women's incorporation into the wage labour market, which constituted an important context for the perpetration of infanticide by women. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in French. |
