Nearly 40 years ago, when the author lived in Indonesia, a letter to the editor appeared in the country’s most-read weekly news magazine, Tempo, which caught our attention. Written in English, it had been sent by a Capetonian who explained he had in his possession a Qur’an and a ceremonial dagger, a kris. These items had been handed down to him from a long-ago ancestor, a local prince in Ternate, a small island in what is now Indonesia.

The Dutch East India Company, the VOC, had forcibly brought the prince from that island to Cape Town, way back in the early 1700s (well before the more famous Sheik Yusuf and his grave site). This was just after the VOC had consolidated its rule on that island, expelling Portuguese and Spanish competitors and then “pacifying” the local population. Back then, Ternate had been a centre of world pepper production and foreigners and locals alike had hotly contested control of the island and its pepper trees back then.

This particular Qur’an had an inscription on its front-piece, written in old-style Dutch, but using the Arabic script. In the inscription, the writer had described the circumstances of his exile, and now, nearly 300 years later, the present owner had written his letter to an Indonesian magazine in the hope that he could make contact with a descendant of that royal family and gain the chance to repatriate these items – and draw a connection to his own long-lost heritage. Given our own interest in such historical things, I was always hopeful this Capetonian managed, despite everything, to achieve this. But, somehow, I doubt it ever happened. Three hundred and fifty years, the exigencies of exile and slavery, and, then, finally, the vast distance between two continents, all were huge obstacles to such a goal.

Some years later, we returned to South Africa as a family. The author’s wife had always been curious about her family’s own heritage and the connections that went back to many populations and people of ages gone by. There had always been family lore (and references in an old Bible) that referred to the Moravian mission in Genadendal in the Western Cape, a church and school founded in 1738 for the education of the remaining Khoi-san communities in that area. The family names written in that old Bible went back as far as the mid-1800s. But there was a family story that forebears had attended that Moravian Church school very early on – and that one descendant had been expelled for some unnamed misdeed.

Then, on a visit to that part of the Cape Province, we went to the site of the school and church and they had – amazingly – kept almost all the records of attendees, right back to its founding. And there, in the spindly hand of a long-gone school administrator, was the name of a student, the one that family lore insisted had attended that school and eventually been expelled. And it matched the name of the first person written into that old Bible – and the connections from that student reached right back to the end of the 18^th century.

A bit more poking around in the records gave an increasingly clear picture of those early Khoi-san students being ancestral, in part, to her present family. With that bit of history recovered, there were still more questions to ask. There was, for example, a family home and farm in another Cape Province town, Worcester, which was property lost during the removals of the Group Areas Act in mid-20^th century South Africa.

Meanwhile, the author’s own ancestors remain far less documented. There is, however, one picture of a grandfather in a Russian army uniform (courtesy of one of those 25-year, forced enlistments for young men from the Pale of Settlement) from around 1904-5. This is the same man who, when he discovered that he was about to be sent to Siberia and China to fight the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War, absconded from a troop train and headed out for America. But before that moment in history – no records, no hints of further information, not even which town the ancestors had hailed from.

All of these examples help explain why news that Georgetown University is now trying to track down the descendants of nearly 300 slaves has been so extraordinary, attracting much media attention. And it is a story that may have some serious resonances with South Africa’s circumstances as well. These were not just any slaves, after all. These were 272 slaves who had been sold by the Jesuit Order’s very own plantation in southern Maryland, back in 1838, in order to raise sufficient capital to keep what was then Georgetown College solvent. Georgetown eventually became one of America’s most expensive, most difficult universities to gain admittance to. People like Bill and Hillary Clinton got their law degrees there (and the writer had been admitted as well, but couldn’t raise the funds to cover his first year, so he eventually went elsewhere).

Now, it had been clear for some years that two campus buildings bore the names of previous school heads – including the man who concluded the sale – who had been slave owners. These two names were changed late last year under some student pressure over the embarrassment of it all. These were a Father Mulledy, back then the head of Georgetown who had overseen its expansion, and a Father McSherry, who had been in charge of the Jesuits’ Maryland mission, and thus its plantation as well.

But an ongoing and particularly diligent search into school and church records has unravelled a much darker story of how the Jesuit order, as its premier tertiary institution was facing the possibility of bankruptcy and forced closure, struck a deal with a slave dealer to take hundreds of people, already in chattel slavery, from their homes in Southern Maryland and transport them by ship to Louisiana where their conditions of slavery became yet grimmer still. The sale netted about $3.3-million in today’s dollars and apparently saved the school from bankruptcy. Despite the signed bill of sale agreement’s terms of the sale, slave families were unceremoniously split up and young children were sold off to separate plantation owners. Even the sworn agreement that the slaves, all Catholics, could continue to worship as Catholics and have their future children baptised was abrogated.

As New York Times reporter Rachel Swarns (who has traced Michelle Obama’s family history and served a term as a correspondent in South Africa) has reported the tale, “The human cargo was loaded on ships at a bustling wharf in the nation’s capital, destined for the plantations of the Deep South. Some slaves pleaded for rosaries as they were rounded up, praying for deliverance. But on this day, in the fall of 1838, no one was spared: not the 2-month-old baby and her mother, not the field hands, not the shoemaker and not Cornelius Hawkins, who was about 13 years old when he was forced on-board. Their panic and desperation would be mostly forgotten for more than a century. But this was no ordinary slave sale. The enslaved African-Americans had belonged to the nation’s most prominent Jesuit priests. And they were sold, along with scores of others, to help secure the future of the premier Catholic institution of higher learning at the time, known today as Georgetown University.

“Now, with racial protests roiling college campuses, an unusual collection of Georgetown professors, students, alumni and genealogists is trying to find out what happened to those 272 men, women and children. And they are confronting a particularly wrenching question: What, if anything, is owed to the descendants of slaves who were sold to help ensure the college’s survival?

“More than a dozen universities — including Brown, Columbia, Harvard and the University of Virginia — have publicly recognised their ties to slavery and the slave trade. But the 1838 slave sale organised by the Jesuits, who founded and ran Georgetown, stands out for its sheer size, historians say.”

Back then, the Jesuits’ Rome headquarters initially demurred over the sale, as Rev Jan Roothaan, the head of the Jesuits’ international organisation, wrote to the Georgetown slave sale promoters, “It would be better to suffer financial disaster than suffer the loss of our souls with the sale of the slaves.” Nevertheless, Frs Mulledy and McSherry eventually prevailed. Given the school’s increasingly parlous financial situation, the slaves were sold to Congressman Henry Johnson and Louisiana landowner Jesse Batey. Their bill of sale read, “Thomas F. Mulledy sells to Jesse Beatty and Henry Johnson two hundred and seventy two negroes, to wit,” adding an instalment payment plan and promising discounts if any of the slaves turned out to be less than healthy upon delivery.

Given the uproar over this sale, the next year, Pope Gregory XVI explicitly barred Catholics from engaging in “this traffic in Blacks … no matter what pretext or excuse”. But this papal order had no effect on those already sold, or any other persons held in slavery already.

Ten years later, another Catholic clergyman, Rev James van de Velde, wrote to his church that, of the slaves, “They are all very good people, industrious, faithful, moral, &c. — the character given to them by their owners & their neighbours. But they have scarcely any chance to attend to their religious duties, & the children, several of them not yet baptized, grew up without any religious instruction whatever.”

But his letter ended up with the same Fr Mulledy who had been partially responsible for the sale in the first place, and there is no record of Van de Velde having ever had a response, let alone any change of circumstances for the slaves.

Not surprisingly, Georgetown University, with the documentation from its own archives now public, is struggling with how to make amends – and to whom. Spurred on by student protests over the need to change the buildings’ names and by efforts of an alumnus and practicing Catholic, Richard Cellini, the school is confronting its long-time failure to deal with this poisonous legacy, especially since the names of the slaves who had been sold had been buried in the school’s archives for generations.

Cellini, an IT company CEO, hired a stable of genealogists to track down the further records of the slaves, and their descendants. Says Cellini, “This is not a disembodied group of people who are nameless and faceless. These are real people with real names and real descendants.” Late last year, one of the genealogists cracked the code and traced the lineage of a 13-year old slave, Cornelius Hawkins, until his death – but that gets us ahead of the story.

Celline’s effort connected with the work of one of the school’s historians, Adam Rothman, and a group of students who were also tracing records and people. This has revealed a world in which deeply religious priests made their slaves become Catholics for the sake of their souls, but whipped them whenever they ran away from the plantation or shirked their work.

Eventually, the trail of Cornelius Hawkins was traced, 13 years after his initial sale to the Louisiana plantation owner, as he was sold and then resold yet again – and again. Then, post-Civil War and the end of slavery, he was found in the 1870 national census documents, listed as a free man with a family. Like so many other slave and ex-slave heritages, the paper record might have ended there, save for a religious faith that led him to renew his wedding vows to be recorded in church records half a decade after his first appearance in census documents.

And succeeding records of family births and deaths eventually led the genealogists to retired Baton Rouge, Louisiana news anchor, Maxine Crump. When she was contacted, she told the genealogist team about her own family memories of hearing about her great-great-grandfather, Cornelius “Neely” Hawkins. All of this eventually allowed Crump to lead researchers to a grave close to her own home, where the dates clicked precisely with what the researchers had already found out. In the Catholic cemetery of Maringouin Parish [county], the gravestone for Neely Hawkins, who had passed away on 16 April 1902, was still in place.

Going forward, as Swarns notes, “Mr. Cellini, whose genealogists have already traced more than 200 of the slaves from Maryland to Louisiana, believes there may be thousands of living descendants. He has contacted a few, including Patricia Bayonne-Johnson, president of the Eastern Washington Genealogical Society in Spokane [Washington state], who is helping to track the Jesuit slaves with her group. (Ms Bayonne-Johnson discovered her connection through an earlier effort by the university to publish records online about the Jesuit plantations.)”

Now, of course, the question being asked of Georgetown University is what, exactly, they are going to do about this dreadful piece of history they own. Will they establish scholarships for the descendants of these slaves; will they build a suitable memorial to the almost unspeakable event that saved the school from collapse? As historian Adam Rothman says, “It’s hard to know what could possibly reconcile a history like this. What can you do to make amends?”

And, already, the unravelling of the first skeins of this saga speak to much larger questions about restitution and reparations, let alone the proper acknowledgement of the deeper history of internationally respected institutions. This would be true whether it is Georgetown University under discussion, or any other such place – in America, in Britain, in Europe – or in South Africa. Is it enough to offer a profuse apology and then rename a building or two – or even to develop a scholarship fund to compensate in some way the future generations of those sold by the school into bondage in Louisiana nearly 175 years ago?

Consider the fact that eventually, after nearly half a century, enough pressure was finally brought to bear on the US federal government that it finally provided significant dollar payments to victims of the incarceration of Japanese-American citizens and permanent residents throughout World War II – and records were in place to identify everyone who should have been compensated. Similarly, there was the German reparations programme, paid to identifiable Jewish victims (or their surviving family members), as a result of the Holocaust – although property was never properly restored. (Or in more localised terms, what about that house and land lost by the author’s wife’s family so many years ago?)

But then what of the larger notion of reparations to be paid in some form to an entire race or ethnicity of people who had been held in bondage or who had suffered acute deprivation and harsh, institutional discrimination by direct government policy and societal views – even if most of the names are lost to history? How would entire populations be compensated for such travails (as in the case of so many South Africans), especially when the current number of descendants is numbered in the millions?

Is a formal acknowledgement of these crimes sufficient, or will land, shares of stock or money eventually be the answer? And who will judge when redress for those iniquities is finally at an end? And will everyone be able to agree? Georgetown’s troubles – and what that university decides to do next – now may well feed much stronger calls globally for adequate redress to those who suffered. DM

Photo: Burning of a Village in Africa, and Capture of its Inhabitants (p.12, February 1859, XVI)