Shackles of slavery

When I first saw the posters advertising the film 12 Years a Slave, I thought someone had plagiarised the story of one of my relationships. OK, not really! I actually made a note to myself to avoid what would be a sad film. The poster proudly pronounced to the world that it was about the cruelty of Southern Americans to blacks. Some of the previews said it was the first of its kind but I can recall several, even recent films that portray precisely that.

Now 12 Years has won several prizes including the Oscar for the best film of the year. The director, Steve McQueen, a black Brit, has been received and congratulated by British Prime Minister David Cameron (something that Tony Blair didn’t bother to do for British citizen V.S. Naipaul when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature!)

The suffering of blacks under slavery is a popular Hollywood theme and resonates with its audiences, be they black descendants of slaves, more recent immigrants struggling to share the American dream or white liberals who even today side with Abraham Lincoln.
Hollywood is universally seen as being on the side of the gods when exposing the evils of slavery here is a nation confessing in narrative the cardinal sin of its history.

Some years ago now I worked as a commissioning editor for UK’s Channel 4 TV. The channel bought the rights to the Booker Prize-winning novel Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth and in setting out to make this film about a Liverpool merchant and the slave trade had to find co-producers to cover the large budget that period films require.

Market logic pointed to Hollywood and yes, some Hollywood producers with due deference to the theme and no doubt to the Booker prize status, expressed an interest. The script was written and a meeting of the producers called. The Hollywoodwallahs gingerly pronounced their satisfaction with the script but went on say that there were a few minor changes they would require. They were asked what these were.
They said, as tactfully as they could that the script depicted black Africans capturing other black men, women and children and selling them to the white slave traders. This wouldn’t go down well with the American public. Nor would they participate or distribute a film that showed any such thing.

There was some puzzlement round the table. The Channel 4 editors on the project and Channel 4’s boss at the time pointed out that Unsworth’s novel was based on firm historical research and if that was the truth that was what the script would show. No, said the Americans (these negotiators, by the way, were all white) they couldn’t have that.

A major part of the script would have to be changed, regardless of Unsworth’s feelings about tampering with or misrepresenting his narrative. They couldn’t participate in the project if this didn’t happen. Channel 4’s chief executive, as a matter of literary and historical principle, told them where their objections should be rightly stuffed. Hollywood left the table and the project. Channel 4 went it alone.

The Hollywoodwallahs were right. It didn’t have great box office returns in the US of A because it told the truth. Now a producer gives me a book called White Gold by Giles Milton and asks me if I can turn this historical narrative into a convincing screenplay inspired by it. Why does this producer want to do it?
“Because,” he says, “it deals with a subject that will startle and subdue.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“White slavery,” he says
“Prostitution?” I ask, “Done to death.”
“Don’t be primitive,” he says. “This is the dog’s bollocks, bossy! Real slavery. One million slaves taken by the North Africans in the 18th century.

Only they are white! Britons, Spaniards, Danes, Frenchmen and other Europeans who were captured at sea by the Barbary corsairs, sold into slavery to the Sultans of North Africa, brutalised by their principally black guards and slave-drivers and put to work building palaces and roads in Morocco, Libya and Mauritania. The women were forcibly converted to Islam and enlisted in the harems of the Sultans.”

Remembering Channel 4’s experience with Hollywood I say there may be a problem about raising funds for a film which treats whites as victims and Arabs and blacks as slave-owners.
“Just read the book, think shock value,” he says.

I’ve started to read it and find that it’s based on sound research but am still sceptical about the world being ready for such a truth.
My scepticism is informed by another experience I had some years ago. The black Marxist philosopher, Trinidadian born C.L.R. James, who died in 1989, lived for a few months in my house in the 80s. People from all over the world, black and white, would come to visit him, some just for darshan and some to interview him or seek his opinion.

On one occasion three American black academics turned up. They wanted to talk about slavery.
“It was all very sad,” said CLR, “but I have shed my tears over all that. Let me tell you what was important about slavery. In the productive capacity of the world it forced the Europeans to build bigger ships.”

His visitors were not pleased. They fell silent, drank the claret I was dishing out and soon left. I suppose 12 Years has been released in India and the chappateratti, gleaning from the Internet that it won an Oscar are flocking to see it and talk about the great American injustice at their dinner parties. The irony of the exhibition of such a film in India is that some of the appreciators of this film fail to see that there are in India today millions of people, some in their childhood and infancy, still subject to bonded labour and modern slavery.