Sugar Cane Alley Summary

Sugar Cane Alley

Sugar Cane Alley and Van Onselen’s article, Worker Responses in a Labor Coercive Economy, show the life of Africans after slavery has been abolished. Sugar Cane Alley took place in Martinique on the sugar cane fields, while Van Onselen’s article took place in Rhodesia in the mines. Sugar Cane Alley and Van Onselen’s article both show Africans working to make a living but not being able to fully leave because of the control of the white owners. The white owners tricked their workers into staying the villages by using money and other ways to think they had it best at this field or mine. The white owners made it extremely hard for their workers to leave the fields or the mines by having laws to follow and debts that need
Jose is one out of two that are picked to continue on with his education and take a test to receive a scholarship for another school. At school Jose becomes friends with a boy named Leopold who has a rich white father and a black mother. Leopold is told not to play with the black children he attends school with but cannot go to a white school because he is a mulatto. One day his father sees him playing with Jose and gets kicked by a horse and as a result ends up dying, while on his death bed Leopold’s mother begs his father for Leopold to have his last name but his father refuses because he is not white; without his last name he will get nothing from his father. Leopold has it easy and hard because he has a good life because of his father but hard because he will never have everything a white child has and can grow up and
They controlled them by their debt. They kept them in rural areas around the mines had them use the general store that they used and kept them in debt also. Another way they controlled the African workers was by paying them with money that can only be used in that mining town, called tokens. There were workers who traveled from mine to mine searching for better treatment. The white owners also kept the workers there by having alcohol for them and also women, for the traveling men to sleep with and keep them there to work. The whites also gave them meat after a 10 hour shift and they could look forward to that all day while they worked. There was a scurvy problem and all the African workers were said to look like skeletons. The traveling workers would hear of the best mines to go with the best treatment and more likely end up at a mine where more could be