'12 Years a Slave', a powerful film on the horrors of slavery

Slavery is an evil that should befall none.

Solomon Northup, outstandingly played by Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave, says so in the film that premiered in Kenya on Friday, January 24, at Nairobi's Fox Cineplex Sarit Centre.

Northup expresses this sentiment for he experiences the system: he was a free man but then becomes a slave before regaining his liberty.

He is kidnapped from Saratoga Springs, New York, shipped to New Orleans, then sold into slavery. And for the better part of the Steve McQueen-directed production set in 19th Century America, Northup isn’t referred to as "Solomon" but "Platt" – an identity of an escapee slave from Georgia.

Before the abduction, Northup was a free man. He was a carpenter who lived with his wife and their two children. But his gift of playing the fiddle cost him his freedom as he accepted an offer from two men who wanted him to perform for two weeks in Washington, DC. Their plan was to instead make him a slave.

In New Orleans, Northup is bought by a plantation owner, William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) for whom he is an obedient servant. Ford is a kind master, but also working on the plantation is John Tibeats (Paul Dano), a racist carpenter who dislikes Northup and is violent towards him.

Northup fights back after an altercation, but there remains tension between them; something that leads to Tibeats attempting to lynch Northup. So to help the slave, Ford sells Northup to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), a sadistic man who has his slaves lashed if they don’t pick 90kg of cotton every day.

As much as Northup and a few other slaves can’t manage reach that target, a young girl by the name Patsey, exceptionally played by Lupita Nyong’o, does – 226kg each day and is praised by Epps for her outstanding cotton-picking ability.

Yet Epps takes advantage of her by sexually abusing her. Patsey has to bear this as well as jealousy from Epp’s wife until she cannot any more. She even asks Northup to take her life; something he refuses to do.

INHUMANITY

Watching 12 Years a Slave, which is based on Northup’s experiences, provides an understanding of the inhumanity black people went through as slaves – a topic covered equally well in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad.

They were sold like animals and treated worse than them in this highly emotive film.

One of the most powerful scenes in Steve McQueen’s film has to be the one where Patsey is whipped because she had been missing for about two hours as other slaves were washing their clothes in a river. She faces down. Her wrists are tied to stakes in the ground. So are her ankles. That Northup, a fellow slave, did part of the whipping (at Epps’ command) makes it even more distressing.

This scene is reminiscent of one in Glory in which Denzel Washington, who won an Academy Award for his supporting role as Private Silas Trip, an ex-slave in the film, gets whipped for going absent without leave from camp while a Union Army soldier during the American Civil War.

In the twelfth year of his torment – time is not explicitly accounted for in the film though – Northup regains his freedom after he meets a Canadian carpenter and abolitionist, Bass (Brad Pitt) whom Northup tells his story and asks to inform his - Northup's - friends in New York of his situation.

Bass, although reluctant at first, does as requested. Later, Cephas Parker, a white man and a supplier of general goods from New York, comes and frees Northup as a defiant Epps and saddened Patsey watch.

For Northup, even though he is accused of being an uncle tom who luxuriates in his master’s favour by fellow slave Eliza (Adepero Oduye), a hope of liberty is something he does not give up. He declares he is simply surviving by offering his talents to his master, and he will “keep up hardy until freedom is opportune”.

He does survive and, in 1853, publishes the book 12 Years a Slave, which gave us this powerful story that openly portrays the tribulations of slavery. (READ: Is fact worth more than fiction in Oscars race?)