Approaching Asia through the Figure of the Slave in Rayda Jacob’s The Slave Book

This essay studies how literary representations of the historical links between Asia and South Africa created through Indian Ocean slavery are produced through the use of the colonial archive in fiction as a way of positioning and expressing the author as descendant, both in a literal sense and in the figurative meaning as inheritor of the legacy of slavery. I focus primarily on The Slave Book (1998) by Rayda Jacobs and briefly look at how the theme of ancestry is approached in two very different later novels, Kites of Good Fortune (2004) by Therese Benadé and Unconfessed (2006) by Yvette Christiansë. I argue that in their search for the figure of the slave, the authors both challenge and utilize ideas of the archive as a site of the original and the real as well as perceived notions of family and ancestry. The approach taken in this article follows work by Gabeba Baderoon, Meg Samuelson, and Pumla Gqola on slavery in South African literature, Isabel Hofmeyr on Oceanic paradigms, and Ann Laura Stoler on the function of the archive. I place the texts within a context of historical studies of Cape slavery and find that they are formed by the intellectual traditions of the Indian Ocean World as well as the generative function of the colonial archive.