Displaced Forgetting. Sri Lankan Migrants in the Cape Colony

After 1700 Sri Lanka was fully integrated in the commercial web transferring goods and people between the nodes of the Dutch East India Company across Africa and Asia. Forceful displacement of humans on Dutch initiative fundamentally changed the demographics of specific coastal areas around the Indian Ocean. The Cape Colony was their preferred destination to send convicts and exiles, and sell the enslaved at a profit. In the eighteenth century South Asia was the main source of slaves brought to the Cape. Yet the collective memories of these links between South Asia and the Cape are faint. 

This project uses colonial sources from four archives on three continents to explore processes of forgetting, consciously motivated, externally induced or seamless, through which forced migrants from South Asia became local at the Cape. This project analyzes the procedures of submerging, forgetting and/or erasing that allowed freed slaves and their families from South Asia in general and Sri Lanka in particular to become local in multi-ethnic Cape Town. Offsetting pathways to forgetting in coastal colonial Sri Lanka with those of the (quasi)settler Cape Colony, the connected comparison of these transimperial spaces will reveal (un-)common roles of slave ancestries in processes of community- and self-making across the Indian Ocean.

This research is part of a broader collaboration between Radboud and Leiden Universities under the umbrella of the NWO OC-project 'Forgotten Lineages. Afterlives of Dutch Slavery in the Indian Ocean World' led by PI prof. dr. Nira Wickramasinghe. Together with two Leiden PhD students Pouwel van Schooten and Sanayi Marcelline dr. Dries Lyna explores the paths through which generations of the formally enslaved and their descendants gradually forgot their past of enslavement under Dutch and British imperial rule, and became local subjects. Its central question is why and how forgetting rather than memory became the basis of belonging and selfhood. This project is a rooted study of the hidden afterlives of Dutch slavery in these Indian Ocean territories across generations, in which processes of identity, group and community formation became entangled with forgotten slave ancestries under layered colonialism.

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