‘I am not my own person’

In Children of Sugarcane, the stoic, feisty protagonist Shanti, a young woman shipped from India to SA as an indentured labourer in the late 19th century, has this to say about the indignities visited upon her:

“You cannot conceive of my life here. The rights you talk about — the rights you believe have been bestowed on us through some commission are rights on paper only. I am not my own person. This body does not belong to me! When I put my mark on the paper, I signed all of it away — my freedom, my rights, my body, my life.”