# 12

Augna 25980 (1884)

Slavery didn’t end when it did. Ask Bhagoo’s son. Ask him what the good decent Mr Meikle and his wife did to him. Ask him – if you can find him – what the lash of a riding crop feels like, his feet trussed up to the rafters, his body hanging powerless, face to the floor, unable to escape, wishing that the ropes would break and he would crush his head in the fall. But they let him hang there for over an hour instead, so that his ankles distended and the blood pooled in his head till it was ready to burst. Bhagoo’s son, upside-down, dying of thirst, writhing in agony with each lash. Ask Bhagoo’s son what all of that feels like, at ten years of age, and then pray do tell me, please offer me your version of history, of that neatly cauterised historical date that speaks of your beneficence, your civilisation; of how slavery ended across the empire through the virtue of good church-goers who said no to sugar in their tea.

Ask Bhagoo, how his heart disintegrated, when his child disappeared forever, never to be seen again. That child that he had nursed through fevers, fed with paltry rations, and hoped against hope, would move an inch beyond the existence that his father endured on this strange, new continent so that he could give him a better life. Ask Bhagoo where his appeals for release from his master went, ask him what it means to be powerless, no longer a father, no longer a man, no longer able to endure the tragedies that his existence thrust upon him. Forcing him, beating him into a servility and acquiescence that belied his slow burning rage. Ask Bhagoo what it means to be unable to protect your child when your master and his wife take possession of his young body and determine that he should be punished.

It’s time to reveal a family secret. My great grandfather killed a white man with a half-brick while working on the railroad. We never talk about it. It didn’t sit well with our residency in the Christian middle classes, and with our upward mobility from the railway barracks. Apparently, that white man was filled with hate. He vilified and disparaged men who worked far harder than he did because he felt it was his place to do so. It was as though it was his birth-right to violate them, as though their bodies didn’t break, as though their pores didn’t open under the burden of the great heat and dust of the railways, as though they were beasts of burden, to be whipped until they dropped, until they surrendered to their ends.

So my great grandfather opened up his skull with a half-brick as the rest of them looked on. Yet none of them ever uttered a word of it. They unionised, and organised, and made men of themselves with what little they could.

So my great grandfather was a murderer, yet he is my hero, as he was to my father. He was a hard man with hardened hands, but a great teacher of the strength of the spirit, of the courage it takes to refuse oppression, to claim your humanity through brute force, through direct confrontation. Gandhi defeated the British Empire without firing a single bullet you say, but you know little of how tyrants are defeated. You are merely repeating what you’ve heard said, it does not come from the reality of struggle; from the fire that persecution casts you into, that fire that transforms you, remakes  you, for better or for worse.

And we were remade worse in many ways. There was no limit to the remaking of suffering, to the extent to which man’s cruelty can be continued. As Bhagoo’s son Augna learned, his body was not his, it was not even his fathers. It belonged to a white man and a white woman, and they could do with it what they liked, when they liked. Yet trauma is a strange thing, it makes more of itself. And as a ten year old boy, I found myself threatened with a phrase repeated so often that it had become a casual trope. That phrase so often reiterated as threats to mere  children,

“I’ll hang you up from the rafters and whip you!”

So it came to be that some parents hung up their children up from the rafters and whipped them in service of a discipline that was meted out to slaves. That our parents became our slave-masters before we encountered them in the world. That they came to believe that they were preparing us for the world. That they remade us in the image of slaves, so fearful were they that we would dream of another existence. “Spare the rod and spoil the child!” they regurgitated, echoing a history that they could by then scarcely remember. It is indeed true that history repeats itself, but it is little appreciated what myriad avenues that repetition recurs along.

And as the waters part, after many centuries, this is a moment that we must seize for ourselves, and our own. A moment that necessitates moving inward as much as outward. That it is time to confront ourselves about our complicity with that oppression we claim to want to leave behind. That we trace it through every channel that it manifests, that we call it – and ourselves – to order.

That it is time to challenge our teachers and their teachings, for too long borrowed without reflection for the world they make and remake, and in whose image they make it. That it is time to police the police and remake our prisons. That it is time, above all, to ask our parents why they do our oppressor’s work for them. So that we can break with the chains of history, and remake love within us, and pass that on instead to the children we will bear as we make the world anew. That it is time to reach for a new heaven and a new earth.

So the time has come. The time is now. There is no other time to leave it to. It is time to rise up with the millions of voices and bodies that are mounting as a giant wave across the planet. And yet, I still have to ask you,

“Do you know that it is time?"

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