Ralph Callebert has written a concise, thoughtful, and well-argued monograph that demands the attention of all historians of Africa. He examines Durban dockworkers, or dockers, after the Second World War to explain how their allegedly simple lives, in fact, intersected with many different worlds. That is, the day-to-day lives of these workers were complicated and interesting, and they defy easy stereotypes. Although he never invokes the term, Callebert could be writing about ‘sonder’, the concept that every random person one encounters is living a life as vivid and complex as one's own. In its approach and focus, Callebert's book thus puts in dialogue African social history and global labor history.

In the mid-1800s, colonists in Britain's outpost on southern Africa's Indian Ocean coast started employing local men to unload and load ships. Shipping was, and remains, the city's central industry. In this back-breaking and dangerous work toiled thousands of men, nearly all of whom were Zulu, along with some Pondos and members of other African ethnicities. Historically, dockers were hired ‘casually’, referred to as togt in Dutch; Durban's dockworkers and their history of casual labor has much to contribute to contemporary conversations about precarity.

Thanks to the writings of activist-scholar David Hemson, students of South African history know Durban's dockers possess a long and important history of labor militancy —including during the 1940s and 1950s, a period that Callebert examines. Hemson contended that Zulu dockers, all originally rural dwellers, were among Durban's first black urban proletarians. While not denying their activism, Callebert convincingly argues that they also remained committed to their rural identities.

Zulu dockers hailed from rural areas and, in the city, lived mostly in ‘hostels’ operated by the local government or employers, and Callebert documents that every single person in his sample retired to rural KwaZulu homesteads. Callebert bases this claim on approximately eighty interviews that he commissioned; several native Zulu speakers located the subjects and conducted the interviews. Undeniably, oral history possesses great value, but it would have been useful to know more about the interviewing process and method. Still, Callebert ably mines these interviews along with the relevant archival and secondary sources. In so doing, he proves that Durban dockers never shed their rural identities despite urban workplace activism and residency.

Building on this finding, Callebert explores how and why Durban dockers retained strong rural ties, focusing especially on their interlocking ethnic, family, and gender identities. He also examines their involvement in ‘pilferage’ to supplement their meager earnings in order to purchase cattle and land, pay for ilobolo (bridewealth), and plan for retirement. Using their strategic access, dockers acquired all sorts of goods that they sold, often with the help of women in nearby townships and more distant rural communities. Many also sold dagga. In short, their ‘livelihood strategies’ (8, passim) included both wage labor and small-scale entrepreneurship.

In these and other ways, Callebert documents how Durban dockers maintained close connections to women, children, and other family members in rural KwaZulu. Notably, their experiences differed greatly from many other African migrants, particularly those who travelled to the Johannesburg area, as the distances were far greater in the latter case. By focusing on such matters, Callebert guides readers off the waterfront to more fully explore workers’ complex lives.

Callebert also thoughtfully analyzes the major role Durban dockers played in the landmark Cato Manor riots of 1949 and some other, earlier political events that gained less notoriety. Callebert contends that Zulu dockers’ ‘economic nationalism’ took precedence over multiracial, working class solidarity which, at least in 1949, was undeniably the case (138). Yet despite the limited education of this workforce, Callebert is less convincing in claiming ‘the lives of Durban's dock workers in the 1950s did not reflect the cosmopolitanism of the world of global shipping’ (3). For instance, legendary historian-activist Ben Magubane's 2010 memoir recalled how, in the 1950s, he read the newspaper to his father after returning home from working on the waterfront; that is, this illiterate docker actively sought out the news. Moreover, as Callebert notes (and is further confirmed by Hemson and my own research), dockers increasingly coordinated with anti-apartheid groups when downing tools in the late 1950s. Of course, to engage in the pilferage Callebert discusses, at least some Durban dockers must have known a bit of English and other languages. That knowledge also would explain why, in 1935, they refused to load cargo aboard an Italian ship shortly after Italy invaded Ethiopia. The study concludes in 1959 because in that year, the Durban government and its maritime employers totally overhauled the hiring system — decasualizing hiring to reduce dockworker power.

Callebert intentionally situates his work at the nexus of South African, African, and global labor history. Those interested in South Africa, Africa, rural-urban migration, precariousness, gender, Zulu culture, social history, and global labor history all would do well to read this fascinating book.