ABSTRACT
Gold mining, and the system of oscillating labour migration upon which it is based, has acquired a paradigmatic significance for understanding larger issues of race, class and politics in South Africa.1 The result is a plethora of academic writing on the origins, entrenchment and reluctant transformation of the modern world’s most enduring, organised and rapacious system of international labour movement.2 Gold also has a special kind of symbolism for the literature of colonial and post-colonial resistance in South Africa. Any work of fiction set in Johannesburg must inevitably engage at some level with the foundation of gold, for without it the city could not have come into existence.3 Travellers exploring past and present South Africa inevitably pass through Johannesburg and they too write the city and its mines as emblematic of the country as a whole.4
