BOOK REVIEW | Bitter brutality suffered by Children of Sugarcane

It can be hard to recognise the real consequences of unfamiliar forms of violence. Would it even occur to many of us to dare apply the concept of violence to curricula content we are (not) taught at school and at tertiary institutions? It isn’t part of our public vocabulary, let alone our public discourse, to pay close and serious attention to the violence of knowledge-erasure. Some might brand you a maverick or a radical or an activist (wrongly imagining themselves to be dissing you) if you talk of history syllabi that are forms of epistemic (knowledge-related) violence.

And yet there are millions of South Africans who have gigantic gaps in our knowledge about the true total sets of facts related to colonialism and apartheid. At school we were fed a propagandistic diet of lies and half-truths about empire, narratives that rendered colonial powers and the colonial pawns and generals executing the accompanying colonial visions of conquest, as seafaring adventurers who just innocently happened upon Africa. These lies about the innocent intentions of the “adventurers” were complemented by further lies about how barren and unoccupied large parts of our region were, and when people were encountered by these colonialists, they had to be rendered infantile or half-human even to make a case for subjugation. Indeed, these psychological profiles of the half-human specimen were intended to have two upshots at least: first, they aimed to justify a moral hierarchy with colonial masters at the apex of a structure of humanity and, second, they allowed colonialists to even pretend they were being magnanimous, in fact, to devote their precious energies to civilising the beastly subjects of empire.

But if you do not encounter counter-narratives to these grand lies, you can journey through your school career with a foundation of falsehoods about your society. The psychosocial effects of being forced to swallow such painful lies about your community are hard to appreciate fully. Suffice to say movements such as Black Consciousness, for example, become historically necessary in part because black people are not only materially brutalised by colonialism and apartheid but also psychologically, and that psychological dimension finds expression through methods such as curricula that reinforce narratives about the inferiority of black people.

One of the most impressive achievements of Children of Sugarcane by Joanne Joseph is that it forces the reader to reckon with the gaps in our public knowledge of the experiences of indentured labourers. The beautifully crafted novel tells the story of Shanti, who ran away from a complex and often harsh family life in an Indian village, hoping to encounter her proverbial fortune in Port Natal. The truth, of course, is that stories told about life on the plantations were romanticised accounts of violent daily realities. But Shanti was willing to take her chances to forgo the life her parents were choreographing for her in India.

But hers turns out not to be a linear story of overcoming, of adventure akin to what we were taught in apartheid-era history books about the sense of adventure that motivated the British to travel the globe. The ship with Indian labourers has hardly left for South Africa when the sustained and multiple forms of colonial violence become commonplace. British men, with the help of some Indian men working for them, beat up the labourers, trample on their human rights with no sense of shame or fear of consequence (there is none), and it quickly becomes apparent that the labourers are not regarded as entitled to the moral rights that today we would articulate as flowing inherently from the mere fact that one is human. This is why bodies can be thrown into the ocean, women can be raped on the plantations and physical force applied with so much violence that labourers can die without it causing political or moral consternation.

Joseph can be enormously proud of the aesthetic achievements of this novel. It is hard to believe that this work of historical fiction is her debut novel because it is so effortless a work of art that one must assume an experienced hand to have had the skill to avoid being too literal or didactic. The novel is excellent because of her patience and authorial control. It is one of those books that readers with different levels of literacy can enjoy because it can, for example, be read quickly as a compelling story with twists and turns or be paused over every other page, and also be used to teach the multiple literary and historical themes that are skilfully presented in the work.

One of these themes relates to the depth of colonial violence. Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of my favourite essayists and thinkers of my generation. In fact, I am pretty sure I have a crush on him just on account of his intellect. In a lot of his writing, including in his brilliant book Between the World and Me, Coates reinscribes into the public space a necessary reminder of how white supremacists viewed black bodies when slaves arrived in America. Slaves were not seen as human. They are seen as things, mere inputs in the making of the American economy, aimed at enriching white people. But meditate on the depth and nature of this violence. It means a black body is in the same category as stones and soil and concrete and garden implements. You, black body, are simply a tool, and nothing more complex than that. Tools cannot have human rights. Tools cannot even be treated badly. No moral entitlements flow from the status of being a thing.

Some of Shanti’s experiences, tragically, show us how many farmers in Port Natal treated labourers as things. They saw them as their possessions. They literally had ownership over their labourers. You can do whatever you want with the things that you own. That is a description of colonialism you do not routinely encounter in our curricula. We shy away from the fullest and most honest depiction of the nature and scope of colonial violence. Many of us fail to grasp intergenerational injustice because we have a glib view of how easy it is to distance ourselves from centuries of colonialism and apartheid. Children of Sugarcane usefully exposes the enormity of our historical burden. Casually asserting the need for black South Africans to “get over the past” is at best a revelation of profound ignorance and at worst a callous understanding of why the adoption of a democratic constitution didn’t wipe out structural injustices.

Indeed, the colonial system tightened its grip over colonialism’s victims by ensuring that the political system and the legal system were in step with the colonial narrative. Shanti, and others, could not look to the legal system for protection because the law was used to reinforce the abuse of colonial power rather than to constrain it morally. Towards the end of the novel, there is a build-up to a powerful cadence in which the formal authority of a wicked legal system clashes with moral considerations. This, too, is a subtlety that a hasty reader might gloss over. Law and morality do not always coincide. Yet, we are taught to routinely respect the law. But when a legal system is jurisprudentially wicked, what ought we to do? The framing of this question in the novel is crisp, and important. It urges us to revisit assumptions about the moral authority of penal codes, especially during colonialism and apartheid.

Ultimately, it is an inspirational novel despite the chronicling of hard truths about our past. It inspires because Shanti is brave, courageous and sophisticated beyond racist tropes about Indian women, and she has emotional depth and range that prove how impotent colonialism ultimately is when confronted by our will to live, and our determination to have our agency respected.