The story of South Africa's sugar cane industry

South Africa's sugar industry grew from colonial ambition and Indian labour into a pillar of KwaZulu-Natal's economy, blending science, struggle and resilience to sweeten the nation's history and culture.

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Sugar runs deep in South Africa's soil, and its history is one of resilience, innovation and human endurance.

While sugar cane has ancient origins in India, it found a home along the humid coastal plains of KwaZulu-Natal through colonial trade, migration and industrial ambition.

According to Dr HH Dodds, former director of the South African Sugar Association’s Experiment Station and author of Sugar: The Origin and Development of a Primary Industry (SASA, UKZN Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre), “South Africa's sugar story began in 1847 when Durban merchants Milner & Milner imported the first canes from the island of Réunion.”

Dodds mentions in his book that it was a settler named Edmund Morewood who, in 1851, “built the country’s first sugar mill at Compensation, 56km north of Durban, a small wooden factory powered by oxen and hand labour”.

GLOBAL ORIGINS OF SUGAR

Sugar cane’s story begins thousands of years before it touched South African soil. Historians trace its origins to India, where it was cultivated as early as 500BCE. From India, sugar spread to Persia and the Arab world, reaching the Mediterranean by the 7th century. European colonisation carried sugar further, first to the Canary Islands, then to the Caribbean and the Americas.

In The History of Sugar, Noel Deerr writes, “Sugar is the most widely traded commodity in the colonial world.” (This was up until the 1970s, when Brent crude oil took over this title).

The introduction of sugar to South Africa mirrors this global pattern. Early settlers looked to Mauritius and Réunion, islands with established cane industries, to supply both plant material and labour systems. According to Dodds, “European settlers brought cane, machinery and labour systems from Mauritius and Réunion under British colonial expansion.”

A COLONIAL CROP TAKES ROOT