Meet the plants: sugarcane
“In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime.”
Desmond Tutu
Saccharum officinarum
Sugarcane are several species of tall grasses native to the warm tropical regions of South Asia. It has stout fibrous stalks rich in sucrose. Sugarcane plant belongs to the grass family poaceae which also includes maize, wheat, rice, and sorghum.
The world demand for sugar began when the Persians, followed by the Greeks, discovered the famous “reeds that produce honey without bees” in India between the 6th and 4th centuries BC. Merchants began to trade in sugar from India, it was considered a luxury and an expensive spice. In the 18th century AD, sugarcane plantations began in Caribbean, South American, Indian Ocean and Pacific island nations and the need for laborers became a major driver of large human migrations, including the transatlantic slave trade. White Gold, as British colonists called it, brought millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas beginning in the early 16th-century. The history of every nation in the Caribbean, as well as parts of South America and the Southern United States was shaped by sugar cane plantations started as cash crops by European colonizers.
Sugarcane was long considered the most violent of all chattel crops, as harvesting it proved deadly to many of the enslaved. One tool of the abolitionist movement fighting to end slavery was a boycott of slave-grown sugar, a consumer protest celebrated by contemporaries as a key component of abolition’s success. In writings about the boycott sugar is equated, and figuratively imbued, with the blood, sweat, and tears of the enslaved, morally polluting the crop.
Sugarcane at Solitary Gardens. Both cotton and sugarcane are folded into our revolutionary mortar to build prison-cells-turned-into-garden-beds. Illustrating the evolution of chattel slavery into mass incarceration.
Separating ourselves from history causes much pain and ignorance in the present. To collectively heal, we must remember and repair the ways that colonization influences our current landscape.
What do you consider the most pressing and distressing issues affecting the world today? Make a list.
What do you know about what you consume regularly— food, culture, music, social media, information, etc.? Make a list of things you consume regularly and deep dive into research. Look into their origin stories, conflicts, cultivation practices and history.
Are any of your values or issues you care about compromised by what you learn? Remember that boycotting, divesting, or choosing not to consume are all powerful acts of resistance.
Baby sugarcanes to help us imagine a landscape with out prisons.