Ghost towns: The mills in Tongaat, Maidstone and Felixton have fallen silent. Photo: Delwyn Verasamy
Sugar was never just a crop in KwaZulu-Natal. It was an empire, an economy and for thousands of indentured labourers who arrived in 1860, it was a destiny.
A single crop grown over swathes of hectares of rolling green hills was the life force of the Indian and Zulu-speaking communities.
For more than a century-and-a-half, this shimmering grass transformed the Natal coastline into a corridor of green gold, enriching colonial barons and anchoring the livelihoods of generations of South Africans.
Today, that world is collapsing — and with it, the fragile ecosystem of towns, farms and families built around the industry.
A crop built on sweat and suffering
The sugar story begins with the 1860 indentured labourers — men, women and children who crossed the kala pani (big waters) with nothing but hope and a five- to ten-year contract.
They worked from dawn to dusk under harsh master–servant conditions, bent over the fields beneath the searing African sun. Their semi-slave labour laid the foundations of an industry that would reshape the province’s economy and enrich the British elite who controlled it.
From this suffering emerged a community of 1.4 million South Africans of Indian origin — a people who built families, businesses and cultural, arts and sporting institutions that today form an integral part of KwaZulu-Natal’s identity.
The majority still reside in the Group Areas Act gulags and ghettos of Phoenix and Chatsworth — poor, jobless, hopeless and disillusioned.
Sugar was the crucible in which this community was forged, a single crop that dominated the garden province’s socio-economy for decades.
Yet 165 years later, the empire built on their sweat is in ruins. There is no statue on the sea front where the semi-slaves disembarked on 16 November 1860 from SS Truro. The first batch of intrepid working-class pioneers were followed by hundreds of ships until 1910 — ferrying almost 200 000 people, including traders, artisans and religious figures.
The fall of a titan
Tongaat Hulett, once the pride of the sugar belt and a 134-year-old industrial icon, has collapsed under the weight of mismanagement, scandal and shifting global markets.
What was once South Africa’s most trusted agro-industrial giant has unravelled into a R12 billion corporate implosion.
The business rescue practitioners were blunt: the downfall was rooted in “historic accounting irregularities, financial misstatements and governance failures that destroyed roughly R12 billion in shareholder value”. A massive fraud scandal — still unprosecuted — triggered a chain reaction. Banks withdrew support. Suppliers demanded cash upfront. Investors fled. By the time the crisis peaked, Tongaat owed lenders R6 billion, forcing the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) to inject R900 million simply to stabilise operations.
What followed was a slow-motion collapse
Suspended trading, failed rescue plans and finally, the application for provisional liquidation after the rescue plan became “no longer implementable”.
The mills in Tongaat, Maidstone and Felixton have fallen silent. Entire towns built around the rhythm of the milling season now face an uncertain future.
Tongaat Hulett snapped about a quarter of the 18-million tonnes of sugarcane crops hand-picked by thousands of black labourers. The lifespan of these precious sticks of sugar is short — 24 hours and counting — otherwise they are useless for sugar and by-products production.
The industry provides 65 000 jobs across the jobs pipeline.
The human cost of collapse
The shockwaves are devastating. Almost 24 000 Zulu-speaking workers, small-scale farmers and rural residents who depended on the industry face deepening hardship. One thousand commercial cane growers are in limbo. Hundreds of transporters who hauled cane from field to factory are stranded without contracts. Small growers — the backbone of the rural economy — are among the hardest hit.
As Dr Robert Zunke, CEO of SA Canegrowers, warned, mills could become “mothballs” as global pressures, including President Donald Trump’s 30% tariffs on sugar imports to the US, squeeze the industry further, alongside competition from Brazil and India.
“Buy Made in South Africa,” he urges millions of supermarket sugar-loving consumers.
The collapse is not just economic. It is cultural, historical and deeply personal.
Two men, two destinies: The sugar baron and the indentured visionary
The sugar belt’s history can be told through two men who represent opposite ends of its social spectrum.
On one side stood Chris Saunders — the polished sugar baron, the corporate toast of KwaZulu-Natal, whose influence stretched from Tongaat Hulett’s boardrooms to the corridors of provincial power. He embodied the establishment: wealth, pedigree and the confidence of a man born into the upper terraces of the colonial economy.
On the other side stood Babu Partabsing Bodasing — an indentured labourer who arrived with nothing but grit, hope and the clothes on his back. When his indentureship ended, he made a decision that defied the script written for thousands of labourers: he cashed out the value of his contract and bought 600ha, later expanding to 8 000ha of sugar land in Stanger and KwaDukuza.
In an era when land ownership by Indians was rare, Bodasing’s leap was revolutionary. He transformed himself “from labourer to landowner, from contract worker to agricultural pioneer.”
His family became what many regarded as the royalty of the plantations — self-made, respected and rooted in the soil they once toiled.
Today, the collapse of Tongaat Hulett threatens that legacy. Keval Bodasing, the sixth-generation custodian of the family’s sugar destiny, now faces a future clouded by uncertainty.
His story is not a footnote — it is a testament to resilience, vision and the audacity to rewrite one’s fate. The Bodasing brand was huge and generations were “ingrained from birth” to continue farming.
A province at a crossroads
KwaZulu-Natal now stands at a historic junction. The collapse of Tongaat Hulett is not merely a corporate failure — it is the unravelling of a system built over 165 years. The abandoned cane fields and shuttered mills are more than industrial ruins; they are symbols of a province struggling to redefine itself.
What began as a colonial enterprise that reshaped land, labour and society may end not with triumph but with what the document calls “a quiet industrial obituary”.
If that happens, the loss will not only be measured in balance sheets. It will be felt in the fading memory of a crop that once turned hardship into opportunity for generations.
The bitter irony
There is a painful symmetry to this moment. An industry built by the resilience of indentured labour — people who endured suffering to build a future in a strange land — may now wither in the era of freedom.
The collapse of sugar is not just an economic story; it is a story about memory, identity and the fragility of industries that once seemed eternal.
Sugar turned green fields into gold. Today, those fields stand as reminders of both the promise and the peril of an economy built on a single crop.
The question now is whether KwaZulu-Natal can imagine a future beyond sugar — and whether the residents who built this industry will be supported as they navigate the uncertain road ahead.
Historical perspective
Five years after his death during the Covid-19 pandemic on 12 March 2021, the slow collapse of KwaZulu-Natal’s once-mighty sugar industry — after 134 years as the province’s economic backbone — would have pained King Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu deeply, especially given its impact on small growers and rural workers.
In the 1990s, during a royal visit to Port Louis, he sought the support of Mauritian Prime Minister Dr Navin Ramgoolam to help revitalise the sugar sector for his subjects living in deep rural belts of poverty and unemployment.
Over the decades, the monarch’s profound appreciation of the province’s multicultural tapestry often resonated during the anniversary of the Indian indentured labourers: “The story of the Zulu nation cannot be told without the story of the Indian and German communities.”
Now, the current Zulu royal household has spoken out, saying the industry is the lifeblood of thousands of workers.
One solution may be to turn sugarcane into ethanol as a biofuel. At least the private homeowners at Mount Edgecombe Estates could sleep in peace and swing golf balls around the prestige greens and fairways — developers Tongaat Hulett do not own this gated village nor the ecosystem of Zimbali.
Marlan Padayachee, formerly a political, diplomatic and foreign correspondent, is a freelance journalist, photographer and researcher.