Agency
by
An enslaved woman brought to the Cape of Good Hope by Dutch slavers, Tryntjie of Madagascar (b. 1688) only appears in the archival records as a result of her criminal conviction. Sentenced to death for several charges—including the attempted poisoning of her enslaver, Elizabeth Lingelbach, and adultery with her enslaver’s husband, Willem Menssink—she was publicly executed, her body left hanging from a forked post. The question of who Tryntjie was, her desires, her motivations, and her fears, marks a seething absence in the archive. Reading her archival remains, scholars and students are left only with an impression of her criminalized agency, a distorted fragment that casts a long shadow into the present. Tryntjie’s long-term “adultery” with Menssink—or, more likely, the slave owner’s sexual enjoyment of his property—poses a crisis to current vocabularies of agency. Traditional notions of volition, choice, free will, and independent agential actors collapse when confronted by such systems of subjugation. How can scholars who struggle to account for different frames of historical interpretation explain Tryntjie’s years of sexual liaisons with Menssink? Was she a victim of the enslaver’s sexual predatory acts? An agent negotiating her relationship with him to her benefit? Was Menssink her rapist or her...
This essay may be found on page 19 of the printed volume.