The Sea Remembers

Charles King

I. Water

In 1735, I would have been standing in the sea. 

The sea has moved. Or perhaps the city has.

It's a cold winter morning, and I'm contemplating how far a scream carries across water.

I have been walking, looking and thinking.

The ocean. The ocean. The ocean.

I walked here, across the city, from the squat Castle of Good Hope, where the sea once reached, its weathered ochre-yellow walls built when this city was little more than a Dutch trading station at the bottom of Africa.

The morning traffic is streaming along the N1, past the back of the concrete and glass Convention Centre, within view of the countless hotels haphazardly standing like dominoes, then the slick office towers of the Foreshore.  All of it sits on reclaimed land. 

Suddenly, on a gust of wind, there’s the reek of diesel from the harbour, and catapulting gulls. Lots of gulls. I find their shrieks and squawks reassuring as they wheel overhead, reminding me that I’m surrounded by ocean.

To my right, the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront and the giraffe-like container cranes. Behind me, Table Mountain is unconcerned with human things, indifferent to history, as if drownings, empires and constitutions are brief inconveniences. 

To my left is the coastline that draws a squiggly but certain line along the edge of Mouille Point, Greenpoint and Sea Point, where people jog and walk their dogs, wearing bright sports gear, earphones and sunglasses in the particularly bright winter light. 

Nearly three centuries ago, waves broke here. Somewhere beyond them was the roadstead of Table Bay.

I stand at the edge of the Foreshore, looking across the bay. The sea remembers a different city.

Beyond the container cranes and anchored ships, Robben Island lies low and smudged against the horizon. On a clear day like today, it seems almost within swimming distance, an illusion created by light and water. A strong swimmer might even imagine attempting it. Most of the prisoners sent there knew better.

That narrow strip of sea carried the weight of exile, punishment and separation. 

Somewhere out there, Blank and Jacobz spent twenty years watching the same mountain that was now at my back.

Twenty years.

I keep returning to that number.

Twenty years of seeing ships arrive and leave.

Twenty years of winter storms crossing the bay.

Twenty years of seeing the mountain from the wrong side of the water.

Twenty years.

Longer than many marriages survive.

Longer than some friendships endure. 

Longer than entire political eras.

The sea separated them from the mainland, from freedom and from whatever lives they might otherwise have lived.

I first encountered Blank and Jacobz while reading about the history of same-sex persecution in southern Africa. At first, they appeared only briefly, almost as a footnote. Two names. A date. A sentence. Then I began reading more closely.

The deeper I dug, the stranger the story became.

Blank was a Khoekhoe prisoner.

Jacobsz was a Dutch sailor.

They were both serving lengthy sentences on Robben Island.

Before the colonial state decided to drown them, they had already spent twenty years together on that island. That fact alone is extraordinary.

Then, in August 1735, the colonial state intervened. The court convicted them of what Roman-Dutch law described as "the abominable and unnatural crime of sodomy."

I have come here because of these two men. Or perhaps because of a question. The two are difficult to separate. The question is simple enough: what happened to Klaas Blank and Rijkhaart Jacobz?

The answer is less straightforward.

II. Two Men and an Archive

History leaves us with remarkably little.

Two names.

A handful of dates.

A criminal charge.

A sentence.

A death.

The rest is water.

Jacobsz arrived first. In 1713, at the age of eighteen, he was charged with sodomy in Batavia, present-day Jakarta. The evidence was insufficient for a death sentence, but not for punishment. The authorities banished him to Robben Island for twenty-five years.

Blank arrived two years later. He had been convicted of stock theft and sentenced to fifty years of hard labour in chains.

Today, Robben Island occupies a central place in South Africa's democratic imagination. Visitors arrive by ferry. Guides recount stories of political resistance. The prison has become a symbol of endurance and eventual liberation.

The island Blank and Jacobz knew was something different. 

They met in a place designed for forgetting.

It was a colonial outpost of punishment.

A place where the Dutch East India Company deposited people it wished to remove from society.

A place surrounded by cold water and distance.

A place where years accumulated.

Twenty years.

I keep returning to that number.

Twenty years together on an island.

Twenty winters.

Twenty summers.

Twenty birthdays.

Twenty years of watching the weather arrive across Table Bay.

Twenty years of seeing ships come and go while remaining behind.

The archive tells us almost nothing about those years.

It does not tell us where they slept.

It does not tell us whether they worked side by side.

It does not tell us what they spoke about.

It does not tell us whether they laughed together.

It does not tell us whether they argued.

It certainly does not tell us whether they loved one another.

The archive has other priorities.

It is interested in administration.

Classification.

Control.

Punishment.

It notices people most clearly when they violate a rule.

That is why so much queer history survives in courtrooms.

For centuries, same-sex desire entered the historical record primarily through moments of accusation and prosecution. The state created documents to punish. Historians inherit those documents and are left trying to glimpse human lives through the narrow opening of criminal proceedings.

What survives is often less a portrait than a silhouette.

In August 1735, the colonial state turned its attention towards Blank and Jacobz once again.

The details of the accusation are preserved more clearly than the nature of the relationship itself. The court convicted them of sodomy. The sentence was death. The governor approved the judgment on 18 August. The following morning, they were taken aboard a vessel lying in Table Bay's roadstead.

Then the historical record grows thin.

We know they were drowned. We do not know precisely how.

We know they died in the bay. We do not know exactly where.

We know the state considered the punishment important enough to record. We do not know what the men said to one another as they approached the end.

I find the imbalance difficult to ignore.

The archive preserves authority more carefully than intimacy. It remembers governors better than prisoners. It remembers laws better than lives.

Standing beside Table Bay almost three centuries later, I realise that what draws me to Blank and Jacobz is not certainty but absence.

The story survives in what is missing. 

Had the court clerk been more curious about human beings than criminal acts, perhaps we would know more.

Had someone written a diary.

Had someone kept a letter.

Had someone bothered to ask different questions.

Instead, we are left with fragments.

Two men.

Twenty years.

A ship.

A sentence.

A winter morning.

And a silence large enough to cross centuries.

III. How Empire Learned to Police Desire

The story of Blank and Jacobz did not begin on Robben Island. Nor did it end in Table Bay.

To understand why two men could be drowned for sodomy in 1735, it is necessary to look beyond the Cape and towards the wider ocean.

The Dutch East India Company was one of the most powerful commercial enterprises the world had ever seen. Its ships moved constantly between Europe, Africa and Asia. They carried spices, textiles, silver, timber and human beings. They also carried ideas.

Among those ideas were legal systems.

Moral codes.

Definitions of acceptable behaviour.

Judgments about which bodies belonged and which did not.

The Cape was never an isolated settlement at the edge of Africa. It was part of a vast maritime network stretching from Amsterdam to Batavia, from Ceylon to the Cape of Good Hope. The same routes that transported goods and wealth also transported laws.

One of those laws was the prohibition of sodomy.

Roman-Dutch law treated sexual acts between men as a grave offence against both religion and society. Punishments could be severe. Across Europe and its colonies, authorities used imprisonment, banishment, torture and execution to enforce moral conformity.

Blank and Jacobz found themselves caught within that legal world.

Yet there is an irony here.

Today, politicians in various parts of Africa frequently describe homosexuality as foreign, Western and un-African. The argument is familiar. Same-sex desire is presented as an imported idea threatening indigenous values and cultural traditions.

History tells a more complicated story.

Scholars such as Marc Epprecht, Neville Hoad and Sylvia Tamale have demonstrated that many African societies possessed diverse understandings of gender and sexuality long before European colonisation. These histories were not uniform. Nor were they always tolerant. But they reveal a continent far more complex than modern political slogans allow.

Colonial administrators often responded to this complexity by imposing their own moral frameworks.

Difference became deviance.

Variation became criminality.

The law transformed intimate acts into offences against the state.

The consequences proved remarkably durable.

When colonial rule ended across much of Africa during the twentieth century, many colonial-era legal codes remained in place. New governments inherited old statutes. In some cases, those laws were retained out of administrative convenience. In others, they became useful political tools.

Over time, a remarkable reversal occurred.

Laws introduced by colonial powers began to be defended as expressions of national culture.

Colonial morality was repackaged as tradition.

The language changed. The legislation often remained.

This is one of the great paradoxes of the modern history of sexuality in Africa.

The legal logic that condemned Blank and Jacobz did not disappear with the Dutch East India Company. It survived empire itself.

It crossed centuries.

It adapted.

It found new homes.

Today, its echoes can still be heard in contemporary debates about sexuality, citizenship and belonging across the continent.

The vessel that carried Blank and Jacobz towards their deaths sailed only a short distance into Table Bay.

The ideas that placed them aboard it travelled much further.

IV. The Long Wake

The past has a habit of refusing to remain in the past.

Three centuries separate Blank and Jacobz from contemporary Africa. Empires have risen and fallen. Colonial administrations have vanished. Independence movements have redrawn maps and rewritten constitutions. Yet some of the ideas that condemned two men in Table Bay remain surprisingly resilient.

The forms have changed.

The impulse has not.

In Uganda, legislation introduced in 2023 allows for the death penalty in certain cases of what the law terms "aggravated homosexuality." The law has attracted widespread international criticism and renewed global attention to the vulnerability of LGBTQ+ people across parts of Africa.

In northern Nigeria, courts operating under Sharia criminal codes have, on occasion, imposed death sentences by stoning for homosexual conduct. Although such sentences are rarely carried out, their existence continues to shape public debate, fear and visibility.

The circumstances differ profoundly from those of eighteenth-century Cape Town.

The political contexts are different.

The religious contexts are different.

The legal frameworks are different.

Yet the underlying question remains strangely familiar: Who has the authority to decide which forms of love, intimacy and desire are legitimate?

For centuries, states have claimed that authority.

Sometimes in the name of religion.

Sometimes in the name of morality.

Sometimes in the name of public order.

Sometimes in the name of culture.

The justification changes. The power remains.

This is why the story of Blank and Jacobz continues to matter. Not because their experience was identical to those of contemporary LGBTQ+ Africans. History rarely repeats itself so neatly. Rather, their story illuminates a longer struggle over belonging and exclusion, visibility and silence, memory and erasure.

It reminds us that persecution often presents itself as common sense.

As tradition.

As the natural order of things.

Only later do societies recognise the violence hidden within such certainties.

Standing beside Table Bay, I am struck by how often the language surrounding sexuality returns to ideas of foreignness.

Homosexuality is foreign.

Un-African.

Imported.

Western.

The accusation appears repeatedly across political speeches, newspaper columns and public debates. Yet the historical record suggests something more complicated.

Many of the laws used to criminalise same-sex intimacy across Africa arrived through colonial rule. They travelled aboard ships from Europe. They entered legal codes through imperial administration. They remained long after the empires themselves disappeared.

Ironically, the same colonial systems that sought to regulate African societies are now sometimes invoked as guardians of African authenticity.

Perhaps that is why Blank and Jacobz feel unexpectedly contemporary. Not because their world resembles ours. But because the questions surrounding their lives remain unresolved.

Who gets remembered?

Who gets forgotten?

Whose humanity is recognised?

Whose relationships are allowed to exist openly?

And who decides?

The answers continue to ripple outward.

Like a stone thrown into water.

Like a ship's wake crossing a bay long after the vessel itself has disappeared from view.

V. The Sea Remembers

I return to Table Bay.

The ferries still cross to Robben Island.

Cargo ships still wait offshore.

The wind still arrives hard from the south-west, carrying the smell of salt and kelp across the harbour. Tourists photograph the mountain. Joggers move along the promenade. Office workers hurry between buildings erected on land that did not exist when Blank and Jacobz were alive.

The city has changed beyond recognition. The Dutch East India Company is gone. The colonial settlement has become a modern metropolis. The shoreline itself has moved.

Yet some things remain stubbornly familiar.

The desire of states to regulate intimacy.

The impulse to decide which loves are legitimate and which are not.

The conviction that punishment can preserve a moral order.

I find myself looking out towards the water and thinking about what history remembers. More accurately, what it chooses to remember.

The names of governors survive.

The names of judges survive.

The names of laws survive.

The names of ships survive.

The people who stood before them often survive only as fragments.

A sentence.

A charge.

A punishment.

A date.

The archive tells me that on the morning of 19 August 1735, two men were taken aboard a vessel lying in the roadstead and drowned in Table Bay.

It records the machinery of authority with impressive efficiency.

What it struggles to record is the human story.

Were Blank and Jacobz lovers? Friends? Companions shaped by two decades of exile?

Did they watch the same sunsets from Robben Island?

Did they imagine surviving their sentences?

Did they know, as they crossed the bay for the final time, what awaited them?

The archive offers no answers. Its silence is as revealing as its detail. Somewhere beneath the waters of Table Bay, the final facts disappeared.

The precise location.

The final conversation.

The last glance.

The mechanics of death.

The sea kept those things for itself.

Perhaps that is why this story continues to exert such a pull on the imagination. Not because it can be fully recovered. But because it cannot.

There is a temptation, when writing history, to search for certainty. To believe that enough research will eventually illuminate every shadow.

Yet some lives reach us only in fragments. Some stories survive only as echoes. The task is not always to solve them. Sometimes it is simply to acknowledge what has been lost.

The sea offers no verdict.

It keeps its distance from certainty.

It does not explain.

It does not justify.

It receives what is thrown into it and carries on.

Three centuries later, the water continues to move across Table Bay as it did on that winter morning in 1735.

Ships arrive.

Ships depart.

The city expands.

The waves erase footprints as quickly as they appear. And every now and then, the past washes ashore.

Not as a complete story.

Not as a lesson.

Not even as an answer.

But as a question.

A question about memory.

A question about power.

A question about whose humanity is preserved and whose disappears beneath the surface.

Standing on the edge of the bay, I realise that I cannot know exactly what existed between Blank and Jacobz.

The archive will not allow it.

The sea will not surrender it.

What remains is the knowledge that two men lived, suffered and died here, and that the state considered their punishment worthy of preservation while their humanity was allowed to drift away.

The sea remembers differently.

And perhaps that is why I keep returning to the water.

Sources:

The story of Klaas Blank and Rijkhaart Jacobz survives only in fragments. This essay draws on colonial court records, historical scholarship on the Cape Colony and Robben Island, and the work of scholars including Marc Epprecht, Neville Hoad and Sylvia Tamale on sexuality, law and colonialism in Africa.