Watching the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis reminded me of the poem Strangled in War by Lionel Fogarty. In this poem, he writes “Lashing our bodies… Hunted by man, Haunted by man, Beasted by the pigs.” America is haunted by the vestiges of slavery and “beasted by pigs’’.  

As is well documented, many of the slaves in America are the result of a tumultuous period in history, when millions of Africans were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean. I found myself thinking about this recently when I hosted the latest episode in the series of a reading club I introduced at the University of Johannesburg. A nation that does not read shall be condemned to poverty and oblivion, and the reading club is a way to prevent just that. 

Last week, I read the book Beloved, authored by Nobel Prize Winner Toni Morrison. Beloved is a story that fuses African mysticism and folklore with slavery. The story is about a woman called Sethe, who lived in Cincinnati in house 124 on Bluestone Road. She lived with her daughter, Denver in a house haunted by the ghost of a child that Sethe killed. Sethe had three surviving children, two boys and Denver. Like the famous African American author James Baldwin leaving haunted America in the 40s, her two boys, Howard and Burglar, left 124 in a hurry. They were running away from the demons of the past. 

You may be wondering what is the moral of the story? To understand that, let’s continue with the plot a little further. So, one day, a man called Paul D arrived at 124. Paul D was one of the six slaves in Sweet Home Plantation in Kentucky, including Sethe, the only female, as well as Halle, Paul A, Paul F, and Sixo. When Paul D moved to 124, the ghost disappeared. One day, when Sethe, Denver and Paul D were coming back to 124 from a carnival, they encountered a young lady who called herself Beloved. She could remember things, such as Sethe’s diamonds, and this made Sethe believe that Beloved was the reincarnation of her dead daughter, also called Beloved. She took over the attention of Sethe to the point where Sethe stopped going to work and the household was on the verge of starving.

One day 30, women came to exorcise Beloved. Among them was a white man, Bodwin, who wanted to give Sethe a job. Sethe mistook Bodwin for a man named Schoolteacher and she tried to kill him, but she was restrained.

There is a revolutionary call that has been repeated many times, and in South Africa, it was expressed by the statement “freedom or death, victory is certain”.

Schoolteacher was a cruel slave master from Sweet Home. From there, Sethe was not well until Paul D came back and they looked into the future together. Now, how did Sethe come to 124? Back at Sweet Home, Mr Garner died, leaving the plantation with Mrs Garner. Mrs Garner could not take care of the plantation, and she got her brother in law, Schoolteacher and his two sadistic nephews, to come and run the plantation. 

The two nephews violated Sethe and stole her milk while she was pregnant. At this time, Sethe was married to Halle, whose mother, Baby Suggs, he had bought freedom for by working over the weekends. They had three children whom they had already sent to live with Baby Suggs in 124. Sethe ran away and collapsed out of exhaustion. She was found by Amy Denver, who nursed her back to life and helped her deliver a baby whom she named Denver. Sethe and Denver crossed the Ohio river and joined Baby Suggs in 124.

Twenty-eight days later, Schoolteacher and his crew came to take Sethe and her children back to slavery. She decided to kill all her children, but only managed to kill a baby girl, Beloved with a hacksaw. Schoolteacher left them, and Sethe was taken to jail with Denver. She returned to this haunted house, where 10 years later Baby Suggs died, and 18 years later, Paul D came to live with them. 

Now, here is the moral of the story. One of the questions that arise from this story is on rational choice and its applications regarding whether Sethe should have chosen to kill baby Beloved or condemn her to slavery. Rational choice is about choosing a path that maximises utility. The utility is the total good arising from choices that we make. Is life under slavery better than death? 

There is a revolutionary call that has been repeated many times, and in South Africa, it was expressed by the statement “freedom or death, victory is certain”. Our own Madiba also had to make a choice when he said the idea of freedom is “an ideal for which I am prepared to die”. Steve Biko put it more succinctly when he said, “it is better to die for an idea that will live than to live for an idea that will die”, and therefore freedom is worth dying for because the idea of liberty never dies. Morrison says: “Sethe was right to do it, but it was not the right thing to do.”

The second question that is important in this story of Beloved is the essence of evil and all its manifestations. It usually reduces people to numbers. The number 124 is a representation in the correct order of the three children that survived, and the missing 3 is Beloved, who Sethe killed. That very numbering indicates the humanity that was taken away from the children, irrespective of whether they were in the slavery of Kentucky or the so-called freedom of Ohio or the now so-called freedom of Minneapolis. 

Here in South Africa, have we arranged our past well enough to have a better future? Have we arranged our land issue, that was skewed by the laws such as the 1913 Land Act, sufficiently enough that we can efficiently use our land? Have we arranged our economic past sufficiently enough that we can effectively arrange our economic future? 

This numbering even followed Beloved to her grave. Her headstone was supposed to read “Dearly Beloved”, but the engraver wanted sex per word and Sethe was only prepared to give her body for the “Beloved” part. Even in death, Beloved tested the limits of motherly love. Madiba in jail was given the number 46664. Anne Frank, in the Holocaust, was given a number between A-25060 and A-25271. Her actual number we shall never know as it disappeared with the madness of the Nazi regime. 

Beloved, in its character, represented the value of men compared to women in society. Women were portrayed as fighters in Beloved, as they are in our community. Today, women are the pillars of our communities. We have more absent fathers than absent mothers in our society. In Beloved, the 30 women went to exorcise the ghost of Beloved. Baby Suggs, while enjoying so-called freedom, received her three grandchildren to raise them in the absence of their father. Amy Denver saved both Sethe and Denver, even from the vantage point of being the beneficiary of the fruits of slavery.

On the other hand, men are either portrayed as monsters or as cowards or as people absorbed in their madness. Halle, Sethe’s husband, saw his wife being violated, did nothing and ended up mad. Schoolteacher and his two nephews were sadists that were closer to cruel animals than human beings. Paul D and Sixo tried to escape, and they were caught. Sixo was killed, and Paul D continued to live the life of bondage.

Beloved is about human evil. That evil is coded through evolution in our DNA. That to be human means to continuously challenge and tame our evil inclination. When humans were evolving in the world of the law of the jungle, those who were kind stopped to help the person who was wounded by a lion and in turn, got killed by the same lion. Those who were selfish left a wounded friend and went on to reproduce selfishness into the subsequent generations. 

Beloved is about not forgetting the memories of the past and having difficulty imagining the future. If we do not arrange the memories of our past correctly, we cannot dream of a good future. In this regard, Paul D said to Sethe “me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.” 

Here in South Africa, have we arranged our past well enough to have a better future? Have we arranged our land issue, that was skewed by the laws such as the 1913 Land Act, sufficiently enough that we can efficiently use our land? Have we arranged our economic past sufficiently enough that we can effectively arrange our economic future? 

Unfortunately, the answers to these questions are negative. Let us, therefore, look into our history and use it to chart a better future for all our people. Exorcising the memories of the past and their persistence in the future will be a long road as the people in Minneapolis are seeing. However, we should not give up the fight. DM

Professor Tshilidzi Marwala is the Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Johannesburg. He is the Deputy Chair of the Presidential Commission on the Fourth Industrial Revolution.