Through this 19th century image, titled 'Dancers', writer Youlendree Appasamy states that one can make an educated guess that the image is of Six-Foot dancers. It accompanies her feature on 'Sugar Mill Barracks', an account of indentured labourers' lives.
The history of Mount Edgecombe, as told from above, is of the Mount Edgecombe Country Club Estate with Gateway and Cornubia Mall looming across the highway. But underneath this footprint of late-stage capitalism lies the history of the sugar estates and the people who worked on them — indentured labourers of South Asian descent, Black migrant labourers from Mpondoland, skilled Mauritian workers, workers racialised as Coloured, and white sugarcane plantation owners and managers.
“At the mill I worked from the bottom up,” he says. “I started as a general labourer when I stopped going to school in standard four [grade six]. I worked as an office messenger —– a tea boy and messenger.” Pillay then worked his way to being assistant manager after a series of clerk positions. He attended school part time to upskill himself. “My father worked at the mill as a bricklayer, and because he did, I was employable in the Sugar Mill. You had that link.
Sugar Mill Barracks runs through the social, economic, cultural and religious aspects of labourers’ lives with fondness. Pillay gives us a fascinating biography of Kistappa Reddiar/Reddy, a prolific temple builder in South Africa, who was indentured to the Mount Edgecombe Sugar Mill. Temple building is both a calling and a practical skill — the divine made tangible through sculpture and brick, forming the networks for worship and working alongside natural features such as snake puttus [pits], old Banyan trees or streams.
Another story told of workers being abused on the mill floor by a white supervisor; the Malayali workers intervened by casting a curse that stopped the machinery from crushing sugar cane. The mill engineers couldn’t tell what the problem was. The white management, already suspicious of Malayali workers because of their affiliations with trickery and witchcraft, deported these workers too.
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