Unconfessed | General Fiction

Yvette Christiansë

They called her Sila van den Kaap, slave woman of Jacobus Stephanus Van der Wat of Plettenberg Bay. They called her murderer, and demanded that she explain her terrible violence. In response, she uttered one strange, powerful word, and shut her mouth to them. Soon after, on 30 April, 1823, she was condemned to death, but then the English, having recently wrested authority from the Dutch settlers, changed her sentence to a lengthy term on Robben Island.

Sila spends her days in the prison quarry, breaking stones for Cape Town’s streets and walls. She remembers the day her childhood in Mozambique had ended, when slave catchers came “whipping the air and the ground and we were like deer whipped into the smaller and smaller circle of our fear.” She remembers her masters, especially Oumiesies, who granted Sila her freedom in her will. And she remembers how Theron, Oumiesies’s son, destroyed the will and with it Sila’s life.

Slavery as it existed in Africa has seldom been portrayed – and never with such texture, detail, and authentic emotion. Inspired by actual 18th-century court records, Unconfessed is a breathtaking literary tour de force.