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This book examines the dark odyssey of official and private collective violence against the rural African population and Africans in general during the two generations before apartheid became the primary justification for the existence of the South African state. John Higginson discusses how Africans fought back against the entire spectrum of violence ranged against them, demonstrating just how contingent apartheid was on the struggle to hijack the future of the African majority.

A Gathering TumultAll of history does not appear in action, or in public records. Much of it, and that often the most revealing and significant is not what appears in . .. ,speeches, reports, and blue books. It is ideas, personal pleas, and visions, unspoken motives, which largely drive the wheels of action; and unless they are duly taken into account the story that results is one-sided and only partly true.' Jan Smuts circa 1914Violence rarely, ifever, exists in pure form. It alwayshas a namative dimension: the stories we tell about it-the reports, descriptions and confessions--or keep secretly, inaccessibly even, in the recessesof our mind. There is, we imagine, mastery in the telling of it. We distance ourselves from it. We exorcise it. We impose a grammar on it. We give it structure and shape. We incorporate it in familiar genres ... For the listener and the storyteller the stories and the tales of violence are a kind of rehearsal for stories and tales of the future, which may have to be lived as well as told. They give cover to the terrifying silence of the pure act. 2

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Economists and historians have identified the period between 1870 and 1914 as one marked by the movement of capital and labor across the globe at unprecedented speed. The accompanying spread of the gold standard and industrial techniques contained volatile and ambiguous implications for workers everywhere. Industrial engineers made new machinery and industrial techniques the measure of human effort. The plight of workers in South Africa's deep-level gold mines in the era following the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 provides a powerful example of just how lethal the new benchmarks of human effort could be. When by 1904 close to 50,000 Africans refused to return to the mines, mining policy began to coalesce around solving the “labor shortage” problem and dramatically reducing working costs. Engineers, especially American engineers, rapidly gained the confidence of the companies that had made large investments in the deep-level mines of the Far East Rand by bringing more than 60,000 indentured Chinese workers to the mines to make up for the postwar shortfall in unskilled labor in late 1904. But the dangerous working conditions that drove African workers away from many of the deep-level mines persisted. Three years later, in 1907, their persistence provoked a bitter strike by white drill-men.