This book is a major contribution to the literature focusing on the formation of the South African working class, emphasizing African cultural practices and African resistance as a shaping force. Gathering information from source materials as varied as the James Stuart oral history collection, documents from government and municipal archives, travelers' diaries, settler memoirs, and colonial newspapers, Atkins manages to tell the account of black workmen from their point of view, and whenever possible, in their own words.
Thoroughly original and African centered in its approach, this book makes clear that black workers in this period exhibited a set of patterned responses, and were guided by a body of corporate values and shaped by structural practices that unmistakably constituted an African work ethic.
