A Place In The City: The Rand on the Eve of Apartheid by Luli Callinicos

ISBN: 9780636018082

Ravan Press, 1993

139 pages, Paperback

A Place in the City, the third volume of A People's History of South Africa, continues the fine tradition of popular history established by its predecessors.

In Gold and Workers, Luli Callinicos examined the rise of the South African gold mining industry through the eyes of the working people who made South Africa's industrial revolution possible. The award winning Working Life, the second in the series, explored both the world that made the workers and the world the workers made on the Rand between 1886 and 1940 - their working conditions, lifestyles and occupations, political activities, art forms and entertainments.

A place in the city looks at the decade of the 1940s through the experience of six ordinary people who lived and worked on the Rand fifty years ago. These stories form the background to Callinico's exploration of community and workplace struggles on the Rand, at a time when the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and the apartheid state were setting the context for increased conflict.