Death stalks the canefields
By Youlendree Appasamy
[note: I wrote this in December 2018, a long time ago now. I feel self-conscious about a piece I wrote in the past being published now — the words seem a bit rusty and dated. In any case, buy Kajal Magazine Vol.3 to get this and more writing by diaspora mense]
As we drove down South Africa’s R102 from Phoenix back to Verulam, we passed by a horrible accident on the oncoming lane — a lone police car and a paramedic already on scene, their red and blue lights flashing out into the night. My aunt, her fiancé, and I were coming back from the KFC drive-thru and as we passed by the smashed up vehicle. Her fiancé lamented the fact that many serious accidents happened on this road, at this exact intersection. My aunt launched into a story about a local boy who was celebrating his 21st birthday, just a few weeks prior to my stay in Verulam.
“They were drinking and all, and walking around the streets making noise — him and his friends. And you know sugarcane trucks come past here on their way to the plantations and this boy, he took cane from the truck when it stopped at this intersection,” she said, and pointed at the malfunctioning traffic lights as we whizzed by.
I was puzzled as to how this was news, or how this could lead to an accident, because people take sugarcane from the trucks all the time — it’s a sweet on-the-go snack, especially in areas surrounded by sugarcane plantations, as Verulam is. But then, according to her, the boy’s clothes snagged onto the truck and as the driver pulled off, the boy was pulled along with him. He passed away from his injuries that same evening.
Kwa-Zulu Natal is South Africa’s sugar center, with industry giants like Tongaat-Huletts and Illovo Sugar based in the province. As you drive through Kwa-Zulu Natal, the seemingly endless rolling hills of sugarcane whisper tauntingly. These industries were built on the backs of African and Indian laborers.
Indian laborers — the coolies — were shipped in under the system of indenture. As European appetites for sugar expanded, so did the audacity of colonial agents. Although slavery was abolished by the British Empire in 1833, other systems of forced or coerced labor were instated. The sugar industry was too precious to collapse. Journeys of indenture, where Indians from across the country were either kidnapped, forced onto, or willingly boarded ships, took people to Fiji, the Caribbean, Mauritius, and South Africa. In the 1800s, two British colonists, James Renault Saunders and George Robinson, in Natal (as the colony was known then), realized how profitable sugarcane farming in the colonies was after witnessing the indenture system on Mauritius. After settlers petitioned for Indian indentured laborers to work in the burgeoning sugar industry, the first ships with indentured peoples docked in 1860.
The shipments of indentured laborers were interspersed with Indians who came of their own volition to trade in South Africa, often setting up shops for goods laborers couldn’t find in South Africa. This group of immigrants — Passenger Indians — further added to the diversity of South Asian peoples in South Africa. Besides the different language groups, there was a mixture of Muslim, Hindu, and Christian Indians, as well as a mixture of castes.
Indentured workers in South Africa didn’t only work in sugarcane plantations, some worked on fruit and dairy farms, and some helped to build the Natal-Transvaal railway. But all were known as coolies. They faced cruel and exacting punishment from plantation masters, headsmen, and the colonial government. In colonial records from the Coolie Protector, the Coolie and Wragg Commissions into the treatment of indentured laborers, the death rate in sugarcane plantations was a cause of concern for the British.
Fatima Meer wrote on the Coolie Commission’s findings into the treatment of indentured labourers, “Ramsamy, caught out of bounds, was tied to the rafters and lashed with a sjambok and then jailed for desertion. Illama gave birth in the fields while working because her employer would not release her, and a little girl of 16 was found dying of anemia on the roadside because she had not been examined on her arrival at Durban before being sent off 50 miles, to her place of employment. The Coolie Commission of 1872 found that on many estates no medical care was provided, wages were withheld, and illegal flogging was common.”
And the colonial archive only reports on some of the violence endured and experienced on plantations — the rest is hidden in the kala pani, the black waters that carried the shiploads of indentured labourers to South Africa.
Working the land became profitable for the ex-indentured to do, if they survived the five or more years of indenture. The colonial government gave them a choice: stay on in South Africa with a plot of land for subsistence farming, or go back to India. The land, which the Empire had stolen from the local African population, seemed to be a better bet for most ex-indentured peoples. On an economic level, the demand for cheap fresh produce, goods, and wage labor in the growing city of Durban were aspirational reasons for staying. On a more intimate level, many ex-indentured peoples had already begun the process of “naturalizing.” Families in India were lost, deliberately cut off or forgotten, as families in South Africa were born. The future, for many ex-indentured, lay here.
Today, many of Kwa-Zulu Natal’s Indian areas remain surrounded by sugarcane. This is a product of colonial laws and apartheid Group Areas Act. In the early 1900s, Afrikaner General, Jan Smuts, decreed that Indians in Natal had to stay there as movement across provinces was restricted, and in 1950, the Group Areas act forced black and brown communities to the peripheries of the city. But in and amongst the macropolitics of displacement, ex-indentured peoples also chose to live, farm, and work in areas close to plantations they were formerly indentured to — whether that be because of a plot of land that was allocated to them once their tenure was done, or because they had family and a religious community in those areas.
Sugarcane features widely in the cultural imagination of the descendants of indentured peoples, in the recipes, in the stories we tell of ourselves. Chorahi, the sugarcane herb, is often used in “herb” curries in Durban households. The herbs were cultivated between the rows of sugarcane by indentured women, and when cooked, have a gritty texture. Canecutters, a restaurant in Durban, references indentured peoples in their name and celebrates the Durban culinary invention of the bunny chow. This meal consists of either a quarter or half loaf of white bread hollowed out and filled with mutton, beans, or chicken curry. Stories about the origin of the bunny are murky — some say it came about during apartheid because Black and brown people weren’t allowed to be served in restaurants and restaurateurs didn’t want to lose customers. Others say it comes from indenture times where the laborers needed a convenient meal to take on the go. The “bunny” of “bunnychow” came from India — a simplification of the word “bhania”, according to Zuleikha Mayat, activist and author of the household staple recipe book Indian Delights.
“I came to Durban in 1947 and the bunny chow was already being sold. The merchant class of India are known as bhania. I am guessing the word came from bhania into bunny chow. Others will tell you differently,” she told BBC.
And if you grew up in Kwa-Zulu Natal, you can’t forget the story of Bushknife Bobby, a boogeyman who stalks the cane fields with a bloody panga, looking for naughty children to punish. Panga Man, the regional version of this tale in Verulam, was a story told to my father and his siblings by their older cousins. Panga Man wasn’t a man per se, but a shadowy half-human, half-wolf creature who lived in the canefields and would chop an unruly child’s legs and arms off if they stayed out too late, didn’t finish their food, or talked back to their parents. It was a teasing way older children scared younger ones, and particularly successful if you lived close enough to the plantation to see the tips of the cane swaying in the wind.
Like Bushknife Bobby and Panga Man, diabetes moves silently, sometimes undetected until it’s too late. Unlike these cruel creations, diabetes kills without a moral conscience. Diabetes mellitus is often referred to as “sugar’ in South African Indian households. Diabetes features prominently in kitchen chats whenever I go to Verulam — “How’s your bp and sugar, khanna?” is often asked. According to 2018 statistics, of the 3.5 million people affected by diabetes in South Africa, 11–13 percent are from the Indian origin racial category, making us the group with the highest prevalence.
Although conflating diabetes to “sugar” is a popular mistake, there are various risk factors at play. One risk factor that Diabetes South Africa notes is “being of Indian descent.” In health researcher Yackoob Kassim’s 2007 study on diabetes mellitus in South African Indians, he notes that the prevalence of diabetes in white people, another high-risk group, develops ten years later than in people of Indian descent. But most trouble is in the genes. Due to the high plasma insulin levels, or insulin intolerance in people of Indian origin in South Africa, many people are pre-diabetic and show symptoms of diabetes at earlier stages. Diet is also a factor, as South African Indian diets are usually high in polyunsaturated fats and low in energy intake.
However, South African Indians are part of a larger, diasporic health issue. Kassim and many others cite that migrant South Asian populations around the world are at higher risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease because of genetic predispositions towards these diseases that Indian people do not have.
As Ranjiv Mohabir, a descendant of indenture in the Caribbean writes, “To me, chronically ill with diabetes — me get sugah — the greatest irony is that my ancestors were contracted to cultivate sugar on another people’s indigenous land for the British and their Empire, and what we are left with is diabetes — a disease that disproportionately affects South Asians and other people of color, making it so we cannot eat sugar, or that sugar imbalance will eventually kill us.”
In Mauritius, Dr. Neerunjun Gopee reiterates these points. “Perhaps the cruelest irony of the indentured labor saga, which was geared to the production of sugar, is that sugar is now considered to be the number one enemy of health,”he writes.
The health issues of our ancestors may well become our own. Indentureship, arguably the cornerstone of a Kwa-Zulu Natal specific South African Indian identity, is still felt psychically in the population. The legacies of indenture manifest on the cellular level too. In a recently released mortality report from Statistics South Africa, the leading cause of death in Indian/Asian and Coloured populations is diabetes mellitus. Inheriting unwellness and being unable to access the resources to get better has deadly consequences.
Diabetes is termed a “lifestyle disease.” But I wonder what it means when traumas are carried in the insulin-resistant blood? Sugarcane plantations and its violent legacies continue to be felt in the nooks and crannies of our bodies. Displacement affects our health on fundamental levels. And whether we call it “intergenerational trauma,” “genetic predisposition,” or both — the social reality is that death still stalks the sugarcane fields. A taste for sugar compounds to potentially deadly effect, but sometimes death is direct, like taking sugarcane from a truck. Even though the days of labouring on sugarcane fields are ‘behind’ us, we sometimes snag on the rough edges of history.
