Sunday, October 20, 2013

Caribbean Nations Seek Reparations for Africans in the Slave System throughout the Americas

Caribbean Nations to Seek Reparations, Putting Price on Damage of Slavery

By STEPHEN CASTLE

Published: October 20, 2013

LONDON — In a 2008 biography he wrote of an antislavery campaigner, Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, described the trade in human beings as an indefensible barbarity, “brutal, mercenary and inhumane from its beginning to its end.” Fourteen Caribbean countries that once sustained that slave economy now want Mr. Hague to put his money where his mouth is.
Spurred by a sense of injustice that has lingered for two centuries, the countries plan to compile an inventory of the lasting damage they believe they suffered and then demand an apology and reparations from the former colonial powers of Britain, France and the Netherlands.

To present their case, they have hired a firm of London lawyers that this year won compensation from Britain for Kenyans who were tortured under British colonial rule in the 1950s.

Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, but its legacy remains. In 2006, Tony Blair, then prime minister, expressed his “deep sorrow” over the slave trade; the Dutch social affairs minister, Lodewijk Asscher, made a similar statement in July.

Britain has already paid compensation over the abolition of the slave trade once — but to slave owners, not their victims. Britain transported more than three million Africans across the Atlantic, and the impact of the trade was vast. Historians estimate that, in the Victorian era, between one-fifth and one-sixth of all wealthy Britons derived at least some of their fortunes from the slave economy.

Yet the issue of apologies — let alone reparations — for the actions of long-dead leaders and generals remains a touchy one all over the globe. Turkey refuses to take particular responsibility for the mass deaths of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire, let alone call the event a genocide, as the French Parliament has done. It was not until 1995 that France’s president at the time, Jacques Chirac, apologized for the crimes against the Jews of the Vichy government. The current French president, François Hollande, conceded last year that France’s treatment of Algeria, its former colony, was “brutal and unfair.” But he did not go so far as to apologize.

His predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, offered an aid and debt-cancellation package to Haiti in 2010 while acknowledging the “wounds of colonization.”

In Britain, in 1997, Mr. Blair described the potato famine in Ireland in the late 1840s as “something that still causes pain as we reflect on it today,” but suffering pain is not the same thing as making a formal apology.

For some, such comments do not go far enough, particularly when some European nations, like postwar Germany, have apologized — the former chancellor Willy Brandt went to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 — and paid reparations for Nazi crimes.

Caribbean nations argue that their brutal past continues, to some extent, to enslave them today.

“Our constant search and struggle for development resources is linked directly to the historical inability of our nations to accumulate wealth from the efforts of our peoples during slavery and colonialism,” said Baldwin Spencer, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, in July this year. Reparations, he said, must be directed toward repairing the damage inflicted by slavery and racism.

Martyn Day, the senior partner at Leigh Day, the London law firm acting for the Caribbean countries, said a case could start next year at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, a tribunal that adjudicates legal disputes among states.

“What happened in the Caribbean and West Africa was so egregious we feel that bringing a case in the I.C.J. would have a decent chance of success,” Mr. Day said. “The fact that you were subjugating a whole class of people in a massively discriminatory way has no parallel,” he added.

Some Caribbean nations have already begun assessing the lasting damage they suffered, ranging from stunted educational and economic opportunities to dietary and health problems, Mr. Day said.

Critics contend that it makes no sense to try to redress wrongs that reach back through the centuries, and that Caribbean countries already receive compensation through development aid.

The legal terrain is not encouraging. Though several American and British companies have apologized for links to slavery, efforts by descendants of 19th-century African-American slaves to seek reparations from corporations in American courts have so far come to little. And, unlike the successful case made in Britain by Kenyans tortured during the Mau Mau uprising, there are no victims of slavery to present in court.

Even that case was disputed initially by a British government worried that it would expose itself to claims from numerous former colonies. And when he agreed to pay compensation, Mr. Hague insisted this was not a precedent.

Mr. Draper’s work traced recipients of compensation and showed they included ancestors of the authors Graham Greene and George Orwell, as well as a very distant relative of Prime Minister David Cameron.

Though Parliament abolished the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, the law took years to put into effect. In 1833, Parliament spent £20 million compensating former slave owners — 40 percent of government expenditure that year, according to estimates by Nick Draper of University College, London, who estimates the present-day value at about $21 billion.

But the prospects for a modern-day legal case for reparations by victims are far from clear. Roger O’Keefe, deputy director of theLauterpacht Center for International Law at Cambridge University, said that “there is not the slightest chance that this case will get anywhere,” describing it as “an international legal fantasy.”

He argues that while the Netherlands and Britain have accepted the court’s jurisdiction in advance, Britain excluded disputes relating to events arising before 1974.

“Reparation may be awarded only for what was internationally unlawful when it was done,” Dr. O’Keefe said, “and slavery and the slave trade were not internationally unlawful at the time the colonial powers engaged in them.”

Even lawyers for the Caribbean countries hint that a negotiated settlement, achieved through public and diplomatic pressure, may be their best hope. “We are saying that, ultimately, historical claims have been resolved politically — although I think we will have a good claim in the I.C.J.,” Mr. Day said.

Mr. Hague’s own views add an intriguing dimension. In his biography of Britain’s most famous abolitionist, William Wilberforce, Mr. Hague highlighted many atrocities of slavery, including a case in 1783 involving a slave ship that ran out of drinking water, prompting its captain to throw 133 slaves overboard so he could claim insurance for lost cargo.

In 2007, on the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the trade, Mr. Hague spoke of his deep regret over “an era in which the sale of men, women and children was carried out lawfully on behalf of this country, and on such a vast scale that it became a large and lucrative commercial enterprise.”

But as foreign secretary, Mr. Hague is opposed to compensation. In a statement, his office said that while Britain “condemns slavery” and is committed to eliminating it where it still exists, “we do not see reparations as the answer.”

Black Bird Press News & Review: Marvin X Now available for speaking and reading nationwide

Writer Ishmael Reeds says, "If you want to learn about motivation and inspiration, don't spend all that money going to workshops and seminars, just go stand at 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland, and watch Marvin X at work. He's Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland."

The Fall of the Dollar--De-Dollarization: Dismantling America's Financial-Military Empire

De-Dollarization: Dismantling America’s Financial-Military Empire

June 13, 2009

By Michael

The Yekaterinburg Turning Point
Global Research
The city of Yakaterinburg, Russia’s largest east of the Urals, may become known not only as the death place of the tsars but of American hegemony too – and not only where US U-2 pilot Gary Powers was shot down in 1960, but where the US-centered international financial order was brought to ground.
Challenging America will be the prime focus of extended meetings in Yekaterinburg, Russia (formerly Sverdlovsk) today and tomorrow (June 15-16) for Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The alliance is comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrghyzstan and Uzbekistan, with observer status for Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia. It will be joined on Tuesday by Brazil for trade discussions among the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

The attendees have assured American diplomats that dismantling the US financial and military empire is not their aim. They simply want to discuss mutual aid – but in a way that has no role for the United States, NATO or the US dollar as a vehicle for trade. US diplomats may well ask what this really means, if not a move to make US hegemony obsolete. That is what a multipolar world means, after all. For starters, in 2005 the SCO asked Washington to set a timeline to withdraw from its military bases in Central Asia. Two years later the SCO countries formally aligned themselves with the former CIS republics belonging to the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), established in 2002 as a counterweight to NATO.

Yet the meeting has elicited only a collective yawn from the US and even European press despite its agenda is to replace the global dollar standard with a new financial and military defense system. A Council on Foreign Relations spokesman has said he hardly can imagine that Russia and China can overcome their geopolitical rivalry,1 suggesting that America can use the divide-and-conquer that Britain used so deftly for many centuries in fragmenting foreign opposition to its own empire. But George W. Bush (“I’m a uniter, not a divider”) built on the Clinton administration’s legacy in driving Russia, China and their neighbors to find a common ground when it comes to finding an alternative to the dollar and hence to the US ability to run balance-of-payments deficits ad infinitum.
What may prove to be the last rites of American hegemony began already in April at the G-20 conference, and became even more explicit at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 5, when Mr. Medvedev called for China, Russia and India to “build an increasingly multipolar world order.” What this means in plain English is: We have reached our limit in subsidizing the United States’ military encirclement of Eurasia while also allowing the US to appropriate our exports, companies, stocks and real estate in exchange for paper money of questionable worth.

“The artificially maintained unipolar system,” Mr. Medvedev spelled out, is based on “one big centre of consumption, financed by a growing deficit, and thus growing debts, one formerly strong reserve currency, and one dominant system of assessing assets and risks.”2 At the root of the global financial crisis, he concluded, is that the United States makes too little and spends too much. Especially upsetting is its military spending, such as the stepped-up US military aid to Georgia announced just last week, the NATO missile shield in Eastern Europe and the US buildup in the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia.

The sticking point with all these countries is the US ability to print unlimited amounts of dollars. Overspending by US consumers on imports in excess of exports, US buy-outs of foreign companies and real estate, and the dollars that the Pentagon spends abroad all end up in foreign central banks. These agencies then face a hard choice: either to recycle these dollars back to the United States by purchasing US Treasury bills, or to let the “free market” force up their currency relative to the dollar – thereby pricing their exports out of world markets and hence creating domestic unemployment and business insolvency.

When China and other countries recycle their dollar inflows by buying US Treasury bills to “invest” in the United States, this buildup is not really voluntary. It does not reflect faith in the U.S. economy enriching foreign central banks for their savings, or any calculated investment preference, but simply a lack of alternatives. “Free markets” US-style hook countries into a system that forces them to accept dollars without limit. Now they want out.

This means creating a new alternative. Rather than making merely “cosmetic changes as some countries and perhaps the international financial organisations themselves might want,” Mr. Medvedev ended his St. Petersburg speech, “what we need are financial institutions of a completely new type, where particular political issues and motives, and particular countries will not dominate.”

When foreign military spending forced the US balance of payments into deficit and drove the United States off gold in 1971, central banks were left without the traditional asset used to settle payments imbalances. The alternative by default was to invest their subsequent payments inflows in US Treasury bonds, as if these still were “as good as gold.” Central banks now hold $4 trillion of these bonds in their international reserves – land these loans have financed most of the US Government’s domestic budget deficits for over three decades now! Given the fact that about half of US Government discretionary spending is for military operations – including more than 750 foreign military bases and increasingly expensive operations in the oil-producing and transporting countries – the international financial system is organized in a way that finances the Pentagon, along with US buyouts of foreign assets expected to yield much more than the Treasury bonds that foreign central banks hold.

The main political issue confronting the world’s central banks is therefore how to avoid adding yet more dollars to their reserves and thereby financing yet further US deficit spending – including military spending on their borders?

For starters, the six SCO countries and BRIC countries intend to trade in their own currencies so as to get the benefit of mutual credit that the United States until now has monopolized for itself. Toward this end, China has struck bilateral deals with Argentina and Brazil to denominate their trade in renminbi rather than the dollar, sterling or euros,3 and two weeks ago China reached an agreement with Malaysia to denominate trade between the two countries in renminbi.[4] Former Prime Minister Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad explained to me in January that as a Muslim country, Malaysia wants to avoid doing anything that would facilitate US military action against Islamic countries, including Palestine. The nation has too many dollar assets as it is, his colleagues explained. Central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan of the People’s Bank of China wrote an official statement on its website that the goal is now to create a reserve currency “that is disconnected from individual nations.”5 This is the aim of the discussions in Yekaterinburg.

In addition to avoiding financing the US buyout of their own industry and the US military encirclement of the globe, China, Russia and other countries no doubt would like to get the same kind of free ride that America has been getting. As matters stand, they see the United States as a lawless nation, financially as well as militarily. How else to characterize a nation that holds out a set of laws for others – on war, debt repayment and treatment of prisoners – but ignores them itself? The United States is now the world’s largest debtor yet has avoided the pain of “structural adjustments” imposed on other debtor economies. US interest-rate and tax reductions in the face of exploding trade and budget deficits are seen as the height of hypocrisy in view of the austerity programs that Washington forces on other countries via the IMF and other Washington vehicles.

The United States tells debtor economies to sell off their public utilities and natural resources, raise their interest rates and increase taxes while gutting their social safety nets to squeeze out money to pay creditors. And at home, Congress blocked China’s CNOOK from buying Unocal on grounds of national security, much as it blocked Dubai from buying US ports and other sovereign wealth funds from buying into key infrastructure. Foreigners are invited to emulate the Japanese purchase of white elephant trophies such as Rockefeller Center, on which investors quickly lost a billion dollars and ended up walking away.

In this respect the US has not really given China and other payments-surplus nations much alternative but to find a way to avoid further dollar buildups. To date, China’s attempts to diversify its dollar holdings beyond Treasury bonds have not proved very successful. For starters, Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs steered its central bank into higher-yielding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities, explaining that these were de facto public obligations. They collapsed in 2008, but at least the US Government took these two mortgage-lending agencies over, formally adding their $5.2 trillion in obligations onto the national debt. In fact, it was largely foreign official investment that prompted the bailout. Imposing a loss for foreign official agencies would have broken the Treasury-bill standard then and there, not only by utterly destroying US credibility but because there simply are too few Government bonds to absorb the dollars being flooded into the world economy by the soaring US balance-of-payments deficits.

Seeking more of an equity position to protect the value of their dollar holdings as the Federal Reserve’s credit bubble drove interest rates down China’s sovereign wealth funds sought to diversify in late 2007. China bought stakes in the well-connected Blackstone equity fund and Morgan Stanley on Wall Street, Barclays in Britain South Africa’s Standard Bank (once affiliated with Chase Manhattan back in the apartheid 1960s) and in the soon-to-collapse Belgian financial conglomerate Fortis. But the US financial sector was collapsing under the weight of its debt pyramiding, and prices for shares plunged for banks and investment firms across the globe.

Foreigners see the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization as Washington surrogates in a financial system backed by American military bases and aircraft carriers encircling the globe. But this military domination is a vestige of an American empire no longer able to rule by economic strength. US military power is muscle-bound, based more on atomic weaponry and long-distance air strikes than on ground operations, which have become too politically unpopular to mount on any large scale.
On the economic front there is no foreseeable way in which the United States can work off the $4 trillion it owes foreign governments, their central banks and the sovereign wealth funds set up to dispose of the global dollar glut. America has become a deadbeat – and indeed, a militarily aggressive one as it seeks to hold onto the unique power it once earned by economic means. The problem is how to constrain its behavior. Yu Yongding, a former Chinese central bank advisor now with China’s Academy of Sciences, suggested that US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner be advised that the United States should “save” first and foremost by cutting back its military budget. “U.S. tax revenue is not likely to increase in the short term because of low economic growth, inflexible expenditures and the cost of ‘fighting two wars.’”6

At present it is foreign savings, not those of Americans that are financing the US budget deficit by buying most Treasury bonds. The effect is taxation without representation for foreign voters as to how the US Government uses their forced savings. It therefore is necessary for financial diplomats to broaden the scope of their policy-making beyond the private-sector marketplace. Exchange rates are determined by many factors besides “consumers wielding credit cards,” the usual euphemism that the US media cite for America’s balance-of-payments deficit. Since the 13th century, war has been a dominating factor in the balance of payments of leading nations – and of their national debts. Government bond financing consists mainly of war debts, as normal peacetime budgets tend to be balanced. This links the war budget directly to the balance of payments and exchange rates.
Foreign nations see themselves stuck with unpayable IOUs – under conditions where, if they move to stop the US free lunch, the dollar will plunge and their dollar holdings will fall in value relative to their own domestic currencies and other currencies. If China’s currency rises by 10% against the dollar, its central bank will show the equivalent of a $200 million loss on its $2 trillion of dollar holdings as denominated in yuan. This explains why, when bond ratings agencies talk of the US Treasury securities losing their AAA rating, they don’t mean that the government cannot simply print the paper dollars to “make good” on these bonds. They mean that dollars will depreciate in international value. And that is just what is now occurring. When Mr. Geithner put on his serious face and told an audience at Peking University in early June that he believed in a “strong dollar” and China’s US investments therefore were safe and sound, he was greeted with derisive laughter.7

Anticipation of a rise in China’s exchange rate provides an incentive for speculators to seek to borrow in dollars to buy renminbi and benefit from the appreciation. For China, the problem is that this speculative inflow would become a self-fulfilling prophecy by forcing up its currency. So the problem of international reserves is inherently linked to that of capital controls. Why should China see its profitable companies sold for yet more freely-created US dollars, which the central bank must use to buy low-yielding US Treasury bills or lose yet further money on Wall Street?

To avoid this quandary it is necessary to reverse the philosophy of open capital markets that the world has held ever since Bretton Woods in 1944. On the occasion of Mr. Geithner’s visit to China, “Zhou Xiaochuan, minister of the Peoples Bank of China, the country’s central bank, said pointedly that this was the first time since the semiannual talks began in 2006 that China needed to learn from American mistakes as well as its successes” when it came to deregulating capital markets and dismantling controls.8

An era therefore is coming to an end. In the face of continued US overspending, de-dollarization threatens to force countries to return to the kind of dual exchange rates common between World Wars I and II: one exchange rate for commodity trade, another for capital movements and investments, at least from dollar-area economies.

Even without capital controls, the nations meeting at Yekaterinburg are taking steps to avoid being the unwilling recipients of yet more dollars. Seeing that US global hegemony cannot continue without spending power that they themselves supply, governments are attempting to hasten what Chalmers Johnson has called “the sorrows of empire” in his book by that name – the bankruptcy of the US financial-military world order. If China, Russia and their non-aligned allies have their way, the United States will no longer live off the savings of others (in the form of its own recycled dollars) nor have the money for unlimited military expenditures and adventures.
US officials wanted to attend the Yekaterinburg meeting as observers. They were told No. It is a word that Americans will hear much more in the future.

Notes
1 Andrew Scheineson, “The Shanghai Cooperation Organization,” Council on Foreign Relations,
Updated: March 24, 2009: “While some experts say the organization has emerged as a powerful anti-U.S. bulwark in Central Asia, others believe frictions between its two largest members, Russia and China, effectively preclude a strong, unified SCO.”
2 Kremlin.ru, June 5, 2009, in Johnson’s Russia List, June 8, 2009, #8.
3 Jamil Anderlini and Javier Blas, “China reveals big rise in gold reserves,” Financial Times, April 24, 2009. See also “Chinese political advisors propose making yuan an int’l currency.” Beijing, March 7, 2009 (Xinhua). “The key to financial reform is to make the yuan an international currency, said [Peter Kwong Ching] Woo [chairman of the Hong Kong-based Wharf (Holdings) Limited] in a speech to the Second Session of the 11th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the country’s top political advisory body. That means using the Chinese currency to settle international trade payments …”
4 Shai Oster, “Malaysia, China Consider Ending Trade in Dollars,” Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2009.
5 Jonathan Wheatley, “Brazil and China in plan to axe dollar,” Financial Times, May 19, 2009.
6 “Another Dollar Crisis inevitable unless U.S. starts Saving – China central bank adviser. Global Crisis ‘Inevitable’ Unless U.S. Starts Saving, Yu Says,” Bloomberg News, June 1, 2009. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&sid=aCV0pFcAFyZw&refer=asia
7 Kathrin Hille, “Lesson in friendship draws blushes,” Financial Times, June 2, 2009.
8 Steven R. Weisman, “U.S. Tells China Subprime Woes Are No Reason to Keep Markets Closed,” The New York Times, June 18, 2008.

Black Bird Press News & Review: The parents of Marvin X, Marian M. and Owendell Jackmon, I

Black Bird Press News & Review: The parents of Marvin X, Marian M. and Owendell Jackmon, I

Of course, the classic statement by Marvin X about his father is the playwright's greatest play Flowers for the Trashman, produced by the Drama Department at San Francisco State University, circa 1964. The play appears in the anthology Black Fire, edited by Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka, 1968, also in the forthcoming reader SOS--Calling All Black People, edited by Sonia Sanchez, John Bracey and James Smethurst, UMASS Press, 2014.

Flowers for the Trashman will be performed at the Black Arts Movement Conference, University of California, Merced, March 1-2, 2014.

The American Slave System: Slaves Catchers, Slave Resisters by History Channel

Aside from Herbert Aptheker's classic American Negro Slave Revolts, this History Channel's story of Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters is the most powerful narrative of how Africans resisted every day of the 400 years in the American slave system. --Marvin X, Editor Black Bird Press News & Review

Special Presentation: Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters
For nearly three hundred years, the labor system in the United States was dependent upon holding human beings in bondage and forcing them to work against their will. This system was kept afloat not by the willingness of slaves, but by constant policing and violent enforcement of slave codes and laws. Countless regulations were created to counter the daily resistance and organizing efforts of slaves determined to achieve freedom in any way possible, and militias were established to further police them. Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters is a gripping account of the rebellions, runaways, and secret patterns of communications slaves used to break free, and the violent methods their owners used to try to quell rebellion and escape.

Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters captures the drama of the Stono Rebellion of 1739. During this uprising in South Carolina, slaves drew upon African battle techniques, striking fear into the hearts of plantation owners throughout the South as they attempted to break free from slavery forever. In response, harsher laws limiting the movement of slaves were put in place throughout the South. Militias and slave patrols became commonplace, often using extreme violence and intimidation to thwart unruly slaves.
What emerges from this in-depth two hour program is a portrait of a slave society constantly on the brink of disorder. Highly acclaimed scholars of slavery offer an analysis of how studying slave resistance reveals the contradictions inherent in a democratic republic in which some human beings were held as property. As slaves flocked over to British lines during the American Revolution, their unceasing drive toward freedom once again came into stark clarity. Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters follows the story of slavery through the nineteenth century as the nation was pushed into full-scale Civil War. Educators and their students will find that this program provides an informative, insightful, and often shocking view of the violence the slave system provoked at every turn.

12 Years a Slave--another look at the American Slave System

The film 12 Years a Slave, British director Steve McQueen’s antebellum Southern drama, sets a new standard in realistically depicting American slavery. With slavery at the heart of the paradox – the United States’ existence was founded on the principle of liberty – a mainstream film that depicts that bleak part of history is exceptional.

For that reason alone, 12 Years A Slave is probably the film event of the year, but worthiness in itself can be deadly – even if it does win Academy Awards. Fortunately, 12 Years a Slave is also exceptional as a film. Far from the push-button catharsis offered by most Hollywood redemption tales, the work is sober and deliberate, a mix of visceral intensity and artful design.

In contrast, most of the current cycle of historical civil rights movies, including Django Unchained,The Help and Lee Daniels’ The Butler, look as though they were made for and by children (the exception being Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln).

McQueen’s previous two art-house successes – the Irish prison drama Hunger (2008) and the sex-addiction film Shame (2011) – both starring Michael Fassbender, were dispassionate portraits of men in different kinds of hell. McQueen’s new film is painted on a larger canvas, using popular stars (Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch and Brad Pitt) who earned screams from behind the cordon at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, where the film won the People’s Choice Award. Yet its portrait of Solomon Northrup, a free black man living in New York in the 1840s who was kidnapped and sold into slavery, is another chronicle of wretchedness.

If Hunger was theatre of cruelty and Shame a contemporary opera, 12 Years a Slave is, like its source material, raw melodrama. The book, written by Northrup in 1853 with white co-author David Wilson and published a year after the century’s bestselling novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was intended to fuel abolitionist outrage at slavery. Yet while the film owes a debt to an effective, polemical tear-jerker, it’s framed with the cool detachment of McQueen, the Turner Prize-winning contemporary gallery artist. And screenwriter John Ridley (U-Turn, Three Kings) drafts a careful reconstruction of Northup’s testimony; the literary dialogue is often transferred directly from page to screen.

“Your story – it is an amazing one, and in no good way,” says Northrup’s eventual rescuer, a Canadian carpenter called Sam Bass (Pitt). While these people were closer to the King James Bible than we are today, the dialogue has the ring of writerly artifice. The director and screenwriter have chosen to replicate that instead of trying to make it more accessible or realistic.

McQueen has compared the 12 Years narrative to the fairy tale of Pinocchio, who was abducted into a strange and dangerous world. Some scenes of sun shining through giant sycamore trees in the Louisiana swamp, or of fields of sugar cane or cotton, suggest Terrence Malick’s nature images in The New World. Throughout, there is an emphasis on looking, often in long takes, and at times we’re witnessing torture that we’d rather not watch.

An early image in the film, echoed in later sequences, consists of a group of slaves in work clothes, standing in a field and staring warily at the camera. The shot suggests an anthropology textbook, or one of those 19th-century slave portraits. After the first long stare, we cut to a white overseer in front of a wall of tall reeds, instructing the slaves on how to harvest sugar cane.

The first flashback to Solomon’s early life as a free man seems like a hallucination. Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) appears in three-piece suit and top hat, walking the streets of Saratoga, N.Y., with his wife and family, greeting fellow townspeople. His background is briefly sketched. We know he’s a fiddler (also a farmer and handyman in real life) whose wife is going away to cook for a family for three weeks. On the village green one day, he is introduced to two strangers, somewhat absurd fancy talkers who say they work with the circus, and they offer him highly paid employment playing music for them, if he will just follow them to Washington.

After a journey and a night of drinking with his new companions, he awakes in a basement in chains. Solomon travels for the first years in bondage. After being taken on a boat to the Louisiana slave market, he is renamed Platt by a slave dealer (Paul Giamatti) and sold to the kindly and religious Ford (Cumberbatch). At first, he does not always hide his outrage well, losing his temper with a petty, sadistic overseer (Paul Dano) and turning the lash on him. He is barely saved from a lynching. To save his life, Ford sells Solomon to another owner, Edwin Epps (Fassbender), a man who prides himself on his ability to break strong-willed slaves.

Much of the remainder of the film is a psychological wrestling match between Solomon and Epps. At first, Epps seems like a stock villain (like Simon Legree, the cruel master in Uncle Tom’s Cabin), but Fassbender makes him into a more complex character. The script draws out the twisted dance of the master-slave relationship. Epps is alcoholic, violent and impulsive, but not entirely one-dimensional. He and his wife (Sarah Paulson) are caught in a bitter marriage, and their dependence on slave help seems to have made them infantile themselves. The central issue of the marriage is that Epps is sexually fixated on Solomon’s friend, a slave named Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), who suffers as much from Epps’ attention as from her mistress’s jealous hatred.

In the film’s most graphic scene, Epps, partly to appease his wife and in a rage at his own confused emotions, has the young woman stripped, tied and whipped so violently a mist of blood forms each time the lash strikes. For comparable violence, you’d have to go to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. McQueen is partial to images that suggest religious iconography, so the parallel doesn’t seem entirely accidental. Audiences may reasonably ask why they should be shown such excruciating simulated torture; the director clearly thought the scene was important for those audiences to witness.

Solomon, meanwhile, is ingenious, patient and desperately determined, and he’s also our primary witness here. If there’s a coldness to McQueen’s gaze on suffering, Ejiofor, a British actor of Nigerian descent who previously starred in Kinky Boots and in Dirty Pretty Things, uses his wide, sad eyes and formal manner to maintain an empathetic, human connection. In a film where we are forced to confront that which is barely credible, Ejiofor’s performance provides a powerful countertone of understatement.