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The Sugar Rush

The forgotten story of how ‘White Gold’ built the plantation fantasies of Royal Natal


By Cameron Luke Peters 


“Alas, poor Durbanites, which will you choose,

Which of the dread alternatives refuse,

This is the ultimatum that you shirk,

The awful question - Poverty or Work?”

From ‘The Wayzgooze’ by Roy Campbell


The truth is that Durban was born in Mauritius. It’s important that we get this right considering how many ex-pats are presently celebrating the city’s bicentennial birthday. In my eyes, eThekwini did not start in 1824, when Francis Farewell and Henry Francis Fynn got the first permanent lease on the ‘Englishman’s Inn’ from King Shaka. And neither did it first sprout in 1835, when 35 white traders got together by the Point to set out a town-plan and name it fawningly after the British governor in the Cape (who hardly seemed to notice). And it definitely wasn’t born in May-June 1842 when Dick King rode a horse 600 kilometres through the Wild Coast to Makhanda in just over a week to save the city from becoming Afrikaans



Instead, I’d bet that Durban was born on the 25th of April, 1855, when a whiny settler in Tongaat named J.R. Saunders wrote in to The Natal Mercury (as it was then) to argue that if white farmers didn’t want to work their sugarcane fields themselves, they should just copy Ile de Maurice. The British navy had previously snatched the little Dodo depot from Napoleon back in 1810, and later decided to keep it. After banning old-fashioned slavery (mostly of Malagasy people) through the 1830’s, the British planters quickly replaced it with a more progressive form of the practice. Over the rest of the century, half a million low-caste South Indian labourers were brought to the island on fixed contracts to plant, cut and harvest the crop that came to symbolise the frontier of luxury in modern Europe. The founders of ‘the last outpost of the British Empire’ would soon take copious notes.


I’m sure you vaguely knew some of this already though? Most of the South African diaspora, when asked why there are more Indian people in KZN than anywhere else in the world outside of the subcontinent (or why Gandhi got his start here causing Jan Smuts headaches for decades), can probably answer that they were brought as indentured workers to serve the sugar industry. Most of us banana-boys went on at least one primary-school outing to a cane-field where we got to cut the leaves and suck on the raw stems to taste the unprocessed tang.

My Mum and Dad both grew up in Yellowwood Park and when I visited my Nana there, we’d have to drive past the Huletts terminals which curved like brutalist cathedrals beside Maydon Wharf. But at the same time, there’s something missing in our consciousness. The Western Cape is synonymous with wine and fruit. Johannesburg has been tethered to the price of gold in the public imagination since its founding. But the association between Durban and sugar has grown just a little more ambiguous. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure why.

My best theory is that sugar is a little shameful - in ways that wine and gold, for some reason, are not. The enduring evil embedded in Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil, Fiji and many other hotspots lingers on in our collective memories from a more brazen era of liberal capitalism. The fact that Natal prospered as a hands-on sugar colony well into the 20th-Century reminds me of the nature of Apartheid itself; it was a throwback system - a modernised version of an antique structure of power that only survived elsewhere by being a whole lot more subtle. Today, the issue is that white South Africans are just as much the ‘children of sugarcane’ as Indian-South Africans. We are what we ate. As James Walvin writes a propos the Caribbean: “[This history is] present, of course, in the simple pleasures of a sweet cup of tea or coffee in the humblest of homes. The fruits of slave labour [so] thoroughly permeated the Western world, and [became] so entangled in the social and physical fabric of Western life that it [is] hard even to notice it.”


However, it could have been a totally different ingredient.  The Victorian historian John Robert Seeley famously wrote at the height of the Pax Britannica, “[W]e seem, as it were, to have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” This went doubly for Durban. Still today, historians give different reasons for the British annexing Natal. Some claim they wanted to keep the Voortrekkers landlocked, some that they wanted to protect the Cape Colony and the Zulu people (how ironic) and some that they just liked the look of the place. Regardless, as the New History of South Africa puts it: “[In 1847] Natal [was] colonised on paper before it was colonised on the ground” when two million acres were put on the open market by the Cape Governor willy-nilly, leaving it as a “colony in search of a reason for its existence.” 


The first reason - the first ‘white gold’ - was ivory, with a pretty constant stream of elephant tusks flowing out of Port Natal. But one after another, different settlers gambled fortunes on different crops. For a while, cotton looked like the ticket, even inspiring a Jewish entrepreneur named Jonas Bergtheil to ship hundreds of Hanoverian peasants to Pinetown to start a plantation called New Germany. But the books wouldn’t balance. Others tried pistachios, turmeric, ginger, arrowroot, indigo and pawpaw from Brazil. Nothing would take. What about coffee, surely? Many of the beautiful art deco blocks and Edwardian mansions on the Berea (where I grew up) are indeed built on the site of former coffee plantations, originally sewn with beans brought from Mauritius. By the 1870’s these farms were exporting 500 tons a year! But the crop was doomed by the Tobacco mosaic virus and would take a century to recover. Sugar it would have to be. 



Another Jewish settler, the famous friend and chronicler of King Shaka, Nathanael Isaacs, had already noticed in the 1820’s that a local variety of cane called iMpha grew like weeds and that the denizens of Zululand loved to chew on it. But the father of African sugar as we know it is a completely forgotten person: Edmund Morewood. (Some sources call him ‘Edward’). He was a well-liked customs official who jumped on the cotton rush and became the manager of a company farm near Umdloti. Many of his neighbours were expat Mauritians who missed their old tenures and dreamed of recreating the douce vie in La Mercy. As T.V. Bulpin narrates: “[I]n September 1847 the Durban firm of Messrs Milner Brothers, who maintained a trade with Mauritius, made a trial importation of a cargo of seeds and shoots of various Mauritian and Reunion Island crops. Included in the cargo were 40,000 tops of an inferior variety of sugar cane, known as Mauritian Red Cane” which were auctioned off to dozens of gamblers. The next year, a wonderfully-named Mauritian, Ephraim Frederick Rathbone, arrived to inspect the payout. 

He soon struck up a collegial friendship with Morewood and convinced him to convince his company to give up five acres of land to grow these cane tops. The company, ultimately, was not impressed. Morewood soon left their employ and asked the colonial government to grant him farmland with which to continue his experiment. They gave him exactly the land he didn’t want, near Tongaat. In response, he named his farm ‘Compensation’. Here he frittered away nearly all his life savings and designed and built a water-driven sugar mill by hand from scratch. 

His eventual output was tiny, but it was the first good crop in the entire country. As Bulpin writes, “[t]his success set many hearts beating at a faster rate. [...] Innumerable visitors journeyed up the north coast to the [farm], to view the beginnings of Natal’s sugar industry.” Ironically, this did not help Morewood at all: he was a messy, reclusive genius who could hardly afford to host anyone, and when, in 1852, he failed to raise enough capital or convince speculators to dig for coal on his estate, he was forced to sell everything and leave. In a great twist of fate, his memory was only saved by his unworthy heirs. In 1948, the Hulett family uncovered the ruins of his mill and built a memorial garden to him decorated with indigenous plants and a small millpond. All that is left of Morewood’s work today is a “foundation of crude, sun-dried bricks.”



For the rest of the settlers, however, it was off to the races. There were endless obstacles to hitting paydirt - just as Durban itself was an unlikely metropolis built on mangrove swamps. Transport infrastructure was still non-existent. Floods drowned several early plantations (including one where the Springfield Value Centre is today). And, naturally, most settlers expected their ‘subject natives’ to leave their ‘locations’ and snap up work opportunities to help their sugar crops compete on the international market. When the Truro docked in the bay on the 16th of November 1860, carrying the first 341 South African Indians from present-day Chennai, the settler community is said to have greeted them with apprehension and relief. The former stemmed from their frustration that a whole new group of “exotic” subjects needed to be introduced to the colony to seal the enterprise. But the latter came from the fact that no-one doubted the formula was complete. Natal would work. Indians had been the missing link in the assembly-line and now the returns would start to stack.


As their story has been more widely told in recent years, I will not repeat it here as a white writer (though I’m sure I’ll dive in for a future article). Let me just quote the masters, Ashwin Desai & Goolam Vahed: “The city of Durban was built on racist exclusions and cynical, acquisitive incorporations by British settlers. [...] Indians were hounded and herded into distinct locations, close enough to be of service before dawn, but out of sight when not at work. [...] And yet, somehow defying colonial and apartheid spatial planning, [their world] endured, if not in the heart, certainly in the liver of Durban’s city grid.” Their role on the farms cannot be doubted. According to Eric Rosenthal, by “1875 the entire [sugar] yield of Natal was 10,157 tons. For 1892 it was only 15,552 tons, and even in 1902, 26,300 tons. By the time of Union [1910] it had climbed, after many setbacks, to 82,000 tons. Not until 1914 was the six-figure mark for the first time passed [...] Today [1963] it is well over a million.” Only 9% of KZN Indians were still working in the sugar industry then, but so many had already given their lives to it with scarce recognition.



Amongst the luckiest of the white settlers, these exponential results built a small leisure society of entitlement and obliviousness that was both centuries past its time and would take a hundred years to penetrate. Still today, we speak of the ‘Old Durban Families’ (always capitalised) and organise civic campaigns around the notion of ‘Saving Our Berea’. But this familiarity blinds us to the weirdness of the situation. Apart from maybe the Newlands brewing industry, South Africa has never otherwise given birth to such an ancien regime. Its aristocratic founders, however, boasted of their small beginnings. Liege Hulett was once a chemist’s assistant from Sheffield who struggled for years to maintain profits on a tea-farm that he named Kearsney. William Pearce, the man behind Illovo, came to reflect on his early endeavours in the style of Ayn Rand: “I had to be manager, sugar boiler, a bit of an engineer and field overseer and, having served five years in a wagonmaking and blacksmith shop, I was able to do all my own repairs to wagons both in woodwork and blacksmithing.” And Marshall Campbell, the doyen of Mount Edgecombe, lost and had to remake his fortune twice thanks to bank failures - at least according to his nephew, Roy. 


Two things, of course, can be true at once. We can respect the sugar entrepreneurs for their enterprise, their hardiness, their visions of what South Africa could be in the global market (just as we can begrudgingly respect the Oppenheimers and Ruperts), but we really cannot deny that their privileges were built on a foundation of guaranteed labour and cheap land that today’s capitalists must surely envy in the depths of their numb hearts. The proof of this legacy is what remains of it today.



 Tongaat-Huletts’ reputation has, of course, soured into all-out corruption. And Durban itself often feels like a Dickensian house, full of Miss Havishams. ‘Durban Gothic’ has recently become a literary genre in itself. In her new book The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil, the wonderful novelist Shubnum Khan imagines the soul of the city as an immortal djinn trapped in a decaying mansion overlooking the Golden Mile. My friend Sven Axelrad reimagines it in his Buried Treasure as ‘Vivo’, a humid netherworld where the dead can’t stay dead as so few can afford to be buried. And Claire Robertson, in her overlooked Under Glass, reimagines the roots of our home in the 1850’s: “The sugar business is just the merest surface of the place, some necessary office that the people and the land must co-operate in but does not touch on the essential nature of either. Even scraped of its native sod, lilies and ancient trees, and furred over with a uniform waving green pelt [...] it is itself, down to the moisture of the soil. [...] For all of her misgivings about ownership or the lack, there is already a partnership.” I hope it won’t always be a bitter one. 

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