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A slow-moving truck is making a steep climb on the N2 on the lower south coast of KwaZulu-Natal.
It heaves, seemingly with great effort, weighed down by its sweet load carefully secured by rusted chains.
Some of the sugar cane escapes from the ties and protrudes from the rest.
Kids in discoloured school uniforms, thin from too many washes, stand on the road’s non-existent pavement reaching out, hoping to relieve the truck of some of its burden.
Some succeed in yanking the goods from the truck but fail to hold on to the cane and watch in dismay as the huge wheels crush the stalks and feed their sweet liquid to the black tar.
It is a dangerous pastime, and some kids don’t make it home.
When we were young some sugar cane grew in our backyard, so our house was the spot for the kids in the neighbourhood.
We would spend hours entertaining ourselves in between the leafy stalks which towered over us.
My dad used to tell us not to eat the sugar cane because it would make us cough.
To avoid being caught, you would have to make sure to wash off the sticky remnants which dried white on our skin.
The older kids would bully the younger kids into keeping quiet about the cuts on their fingers and lips from the fine white hairs that grow on the green ends of the cane.
But it was always the coughs late at night that gave us away.
No matter how much you had held that cough in throughout an entire episode of Generations, it would always betray you in the early hours of the morning.
This is the relationship I have had with sugar cane: watching people yank it from trucks, eating it in the backyard or driving past endless fields of it.
In the women’s washrooms of the Pietermaritzburg City Hall where the parliamentary land hearings took place on Friday, a woman with a cold who could not get enough tissue to stem her runny nose, tells me a different tale about sugarcane fields.
Fields which harbour the remains of family members. In those fields, the cane grows over bones in a pact with the land that it won’t tell of how some of the bodies came to be discarded there.
Leaning against the porcelain sinks she eyes me suspiciously, as if trying to decide whether or not to go into detail.
“Okhokho nomkhulu (ancestors) are buried in Tongaat where they used to live. We were not born when our elders were taken from there, but we are told stories by our grandparents and other old people who lived there or knew people who lived there.
“It’s difficult to point out exactly where their homes were and, more importantly for us, where they are buried, because it is all sugar cane fields now. Recently they found human bones while harvesting the cane. Those bones were people who belonged to people, umuntu womuntu.”
She says that a delegation made up of families who lived in the area had been to the Land Claims Court in 2011, but were turned away because of the backlog. They were told to return in 2018, but she is not hopeful anything will come of the next visit.
She is not the only one doubtful of government, which has admitted that there is a serious backlog in the land redistribution process using the current system.
Her sentiments were echoed by a speaker earlier on in the day.
“I want to say to you members of Parliament, I don’t know why you keep romanticising the land question. You know that the land was taken from the disadvantaged by the apartheid regime. The second thing I want to say is that some of you who sat in Codesa sold us out. You now want to come sell us out for the second time, you are even in a rush to target land under the Ingonyama Trust,” the man said in isiZulu to loud cheers.
“These people arrived here with nothing. The ships are ready, they must board the same ships and go back to where they came from,” he added to rapturous applause.
On Thursday evening the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal was at great pains to ease the concerns of traditional leaders, giving them front-row seats at the provincial conference.
Secretary-general Ace Magashule gave a history lecture on fearless Zulu warriors who fought bravely for their land against the English and the Voortrekkers.
“Usithinte emhlabeni uNobhala (you have moved us on the land question SG),” former deputy chairperson Willies Mchunu said of the address.
President Cyril Ramaphosa had to clarify that he did not in fact kneel before King Goodwill Zwelithini when he was forced to abandon his diary plans and race to the royal household to explain that the ANC had no intentions of expropriating land under the control of traditional leaders.
Back at the hearings in Pietermaritzburg where a large contingent of IFP supporters were denied entry into the already packed hall, things took an ugly turn.
A white male who was clearly agitated sent the gathering into a tailspin with his submission.
“I have land which I bought using my pension money. I was sent on early retirement as a result of this racist regime that we have, which has racist laws against white people. I lost my job three times because I have a white skin. I took my money and I didn’t go overseas, I moved all of my money and was taxed 40% of it. Tax money which this racist government uses to empower black people. I get taxed on every last cent and now you want to come and take it, it’s fine. It’s fine, you will only get that right over my dead body,” he said in Afrikaans before pulling the middle finger as the crowd erupted into shouts of anger.
Chaos broke out, with the group calling for a translation.
Parliamentary representatives admitted that there was no one available to translate from Afrikaans to isiZulu, only from English.
The group insisted that Afrikaans MPs translate but they were advised against doing so by the committee chairperson.
