ABSTRACT
The testimony of Tshidi migrants dwelt particularly on the theme of dehumanization. As rural Tswana have long said, migrant workers are "outside"; in forced exile to the realm of the whites, they are external to the creative life of the community. South African Railways had carried him to the gold mines as young migrant, and it had brought him back again when the Spirit called him to return once more and "work" among his own people. The letters stood for South African Railways, alongside whose track the hospital lay. The advent of the South African state formalized the process of dispossession by extending taxation, limiting access to land, and progressively confining blacks to the lowest and most insecure reaches of the labor market. With the rapid development of mining and industry in the late nineteenth century, and the rise of the South African state in the early twentieth, the southern Tswana found themselves being steadily impoverished.
