Jan Plat

Jan Plat was one of a group of |Xam prisoners at the Breakwater Prison in Cape Town in the 1860s and ’70s arrested for stock theft or attacks on farmers (whose expansion into their territory was robbing the |Xam and other tribes of their means of survival).

Jan Plat, convict number 7880, had been arrested because according to him he had ‘killed a sheep for hunger’. Bleek and Lloyd interviewed several of these prisoners for their archival and linguistic project. Skotnes’s etching of 1993 was included in a portfolio of prints based on their archive. Her work on this archive would culminate in the publication, in 2007, of the book Claim to the Country. 

Artwork courtesy of South 32 Collection.