In the half-century spanning 1860-1910, Mozambican workers tramped to the sugar plantations, diamond fields, and gold mines of South Africa. They arrived with the values, signs, and rituals of authority they had learnt at home, and it was through their encounter with other blacks, as well as Europeans and colonists, that a new and dynamic culture emerged. This book is a history of the making of that culture.

Deploying a wide range of materials drawn from Portuguese, French, English, and Afrikaans sources, Work, Culture, and Identity is fresh and provocative, a compelling narrative of the day-to-day life of the migrants as they traveled to work and lived out their daily existence far from home.

Part One deals with the origins and early history of migration; Part Two examines the changes effected during the first decade of mining on the Witwatersrand, and Part Three is concerned with the impact of the first fifteen years of Portuguese colonial rule. The story closes in 1910, one year after the conclusion of the formal treaty that was to systematize migrant labor, and a year before the downfall of the Portuguese monarchy.

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The author focuses on several traditional themes: the causes and consequences of migrant labor, the social history of the migrants, and their changing relations with employers and the state. There is also a discussion of the manner in which workers constructed new ways of seeing themselves and others through innovative rituals, traditions, and beliefs.

Culture, identity, and interpretation are central themes in this book; the practices of leisure are discussed as thoroughly as work, portraying workers as not mere units of suffering, but human beings attempting to deal with exploitative situations in culturally creative ways.