From Natal’s sugar fields to galleries around the world

When visual artist Zenaéca Singh graduates from the University of Cape Town (UCT) on 10 September with her master’s in fine art, it will mark a key moment in her artistic journey to uncover the history of the indentured Indians who left their homeland to work in the sugar plantations in the British Colony of Natal from 1860 to 1911.

The dispensation of indentureship saw more than 150 000 Indians migrating to Natal with promises of a better life – but this was not the case. Working conditions were punitive with pathetic wages, poor housing conditions, extended working hours and numerous injustices on sugar estates.

Zenaéca’s work – through painting and sculpting with sugar – focuses on the “complex history of the sugar economy in South Africa and its entanglement with migration, colonialism, labour exploitation, and the dynamics of the domestic sphere”.

“My use of sugar expands on its cultural economy to include the lost history of indenture, connecting the nuances between slavery and indentureship. I use sugar, in its varying liquid and solid properties, to reflect upon the sticky residues of the archive. I extend the medium of sugar as a marker of mourning and strength. The ways in which sugar reacts to different materialities represents the slow violence of indentureship. However, the sweetness of sugar also speaks to the desires of descendant communities to work through their historical trauma and find a means to be seen and recognised,” she said in her master’s explication text.

A personal and political investigation into indentureship

As a fourth-generation Indian born in South Africa, this investigation into indentureship is both a personal and political one. Zenaéca’s work uses sugar in various states of “solidity and fluidity”. Her paintings, sculptures and installations aim to interrogate and reinterpret the mostly state-produced archival materials relating to the lives of indentured ancestors and their descendants. Her work intends to honour the resilience and acts of self-making against all the odds against the Indian community, she said.

“The ways in which sugar reacts to different materialities represents the slow violence of indentureship.”

She uses family photographs to envision “an intimate picture of the lived experiences of South African Indians, which remains silenced in colonial documentation”. She also creates sculptures of melting sugar ships to represent the shifting relations between India and South Africa via the Indian Ocean, including Britain’s colonisation of both nations during the late 19th century. Much of her subject matter relates to domestic life: For instance, It’s Playtime, a series of five portraits of children playing in a yard which is part of an ongoing series of paintings where Zenaéca translates her own family photos onto hand-made sugar-paste, painting with molasses and preserving the artworks in resin; and her sculpture High Tea, in sugar, clay and resin, is a sculpture of melting sugar-ships aimed at highlighting the implications of British colonialism on domestic life, and critiquing British ‘high tea’ culture.

Debunking the “sugar coating”

The sugar references are everywhere in her work, and she also looks at how colonial archives or governments used “sugar coating” to try to “obscure the narrative of indentured Indians”.

“There’s also this conception that there was a linear transition from slavery to indenture, which wasn’t the fact. It was purely another cheap labour source for colonial administrators and sugar barons to establish a booming sugar economy in South Africa,” Zenaéca said.

She believes strongly in the importance of seeing the history of indentureship through the eyes of the plantation workers and their descendants, as opposed to those of the colonial authorities.

Zenaéca, who received numerous awards for her BA in Fine Art and who was also a UCT Accelerated Transformation of the Academic Programme (ATAP) fellow, completed her master’s with distinction at UCT’s Michaelis School of Fine Art.

Her work forms part of several private collections, and she has had numerous art exhibitions locally and abroad. She exhibits at, among others, the Slavery Remembrance Gallery at Leeuwenhof in Cape Town, the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, Guns & Rain in Johannesburg and the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Last year, she was commissioned to make a sculpture for the new Fenix museum of migration in Rotterdam, Netherlands, which forms part of Fenix’s permanent exhibit All Directions (2025).

A lifelong passion for art

Born and raised in Port Shepstone on KwaZulu-Natal’s (KZN) south coast, Zenaéca recalled, from early on, wanting nothing more than to become an artist. “I’m thankful I’ve manifested this dream, but it was not an easy journey. I do not come from an artistic background, and I grew up largely self-taught.”

In Grade 11, she transferred to the National School of Arts in Johannesburg. “It was a great move. The staff were wonderful and challenged my creative process.”

Zenaéca described her creative practice as “research led”. “My great-great-grandfather arrived in KZN as indentured labour, but this was relatively silenced in our family. I grew up not knowing much about this history.”

Visualising the lost stories in the archives

Zenaéca said the history of Indians and indentured labour in South Africa is better documented than the history of slavery. “I was able to find the colonial archives and learn about it for myself. My predicament was that these archives only offered the colonial gaze and not the voices of the people who were actually affected, and how they experienced it.,” she explained.

“That’s where my practice came into play – trying to visualise the lost stories in these archives and to dispel the many misconceptions.”

Her master’s, she said, looked at South African Indian historiography through a gendered lens to focus on the stories of indentured and passenger Indian women in South Africa at that time.

“Indian women were sidelined or defined by colonial and patriarchal structures that either constructed them socially as chaste or subservient wives and daughters. On the other hand, they were also exoticised

“The colonial psyche saw Indians as ‘other’, so notions of Indian womanhood were largely over-determined by the colonial and male gaze.”

She added: “I wanted my practice to respond to this and centre their positionality and to decipher their sense of agency as opposed to passivity and also just their lived experiences because you don’t get these voices from the colonial archives.”

A broader investigation into indenture

Turning to her future plans, Zenaéca said she hopes to do further research into South African Indians’ identity and is looking into doing a PhD, which dives deeper into the broader global aspects of indenture.

And, in the meantime, she’s moving from one exciting exhibition and commission to the next, including the commissioned sugar-ship work titled “25 days’ for Fenix”; an upcoming exhibition reflecting on colonial photography in Rietberg Musuem, Switzerland; and an exhibition titled Entangled at Rhodes House at Oxford University, which reflects on monumental representations of marginal identities.