working life, cruel beyond belief, A. The hidden voices series.

By (author): Alfred Temba Qabula. Alfred Temba Qabula, a forklift driver at a Durban tyre factory, wrote this account using the oral praise-poetry traditions of the Nguni peoples to expose the exploitation and oppression of Black workers under apartheid. Republished as part of Jacana's Hidden Voices series — which recovers left intellectual writing on race, class and nationalism suppressed during apartheid — it presents Qabula as what Gramsci called an "organic intellectual," bringing storytelling from the shop floor into political critique.