Spending a large part of my formative years in Umzinto and Braemar, sugar – growing, burning, cutting, transport, processing – was part of my everyday life. It had brought indentured workers from India to Africa, and brought migrant workers from Pondoland into the cane fields.

Sugar, once grown by slaves, had devastated countless lives and continued to exploit the most vulnerable. But it also gave us life. Many families had worked for the plantations and mills for generations.

I recall, in grade 10, the accounting teacher telling us, “You need to work like a slave to live like a king.” As a working-class kid, residing in a village among the poor, I found his statement simplistic and untrue.

On my long early morning walk to the school bus stop, I would often pause to watch men, young and old, working as cane cutters. They worked from dawn to dusk. They worked like slaves.

There was no way they would ever live like kings. As a child of indenture born into a working-class family, I’d often imagine my forebears to have been hard working. They were not slaves in the way that African people had been slaves in the new world. But they worked under a brutal regime of forced labour, one with its origins of slavery and set up to replace slavery after emancipation.

They worked to serve the white master, their lives crushed so others could be rich.

They were the “wretched of the Earth”. Many of their descendants, along with others such as the migrant workers from Pondoland, continued to labour to make others rich, to labour without their own lives progressing. It was clear to me, from a young age, that hard work meant something completely different to the middle classes.

For the middle classes hard work revolves mainly around studying really hard so they can enter the business and professional classes. Their work is rewarded. They move on and up.

They are clear about their stake in society. They have no interest in overthrowing society, since that would compromise their personal accumulation.

However those who have their roots in the experiences of the poor need to also be clear about their stake in society. They need to be clear about how they contribute to reshaping the world in the interests of those on the margins. Even if we have been able to progress we must never forget where we come from, and all those who remain on the margins, who continue to be the working poor or, increasingly, the unemployed.

The structural violence of poverty and inequality, and the recycling of poverty is real. It is clear that those who escape poverty are the exceptions to the sociological norm.

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All of this came flooding back this week as I thought about Tongaat Hulett going into voluntary business rescue. The sugar plantations have a bloody history but they also give life to many. The crisis in the industry will have a devastating impact on many children of indenture and the thousands of others who rely on the sugar cane industry for their survival. Their hard work, the hard work of generations, has not paid off.

Whole towns and villages – many already reeling from the ANC’s contempt for the people it governs, the riots and then the floods – will now continue their decline at a much more rapid pace. There are close to 20 towns where most people rely on Tongaat Hulett for their livelihoods.

The majority of the sugar cane growers, around 12,000, are small-scale farmers. These are not the descendants of the old sugar barons who once ruled Natal with brutish authority. These are ordinary people working hard to try to make a better life for the next generation.

Many descendants of the old sugar barons are now wealthy professionals in Australia, the US and elsewhere. Those who are left, those whose work over generations has left them poor, face a frightening future, a future of insecurity, anxiety and, most likely, lives lived out in the clutches of poverty. DM168

This first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R25.