Unstable Ground

Antjie Krog, author of Pillage and Country of My Skull:
Brilliant! With writerly flair, Morris presents interviews from the margins and gives them a close reading based on more than twenty years of wide-ranging research, combined with dazzling theoretical analyses. Vivid and compelling, this counter-history is a work of exceptional power and literary richness.

Isabel Hofmeyr, author of Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House:
This is a history of South Africa and the gold mining at its core unlike any you have encountered. Enriched by two and a half decades of field and archival research, this exquisitely crafted book calibrates many registers: poetical and lyrical, geological, legal, philosophical, technical, sociological, and much more. The result is sumptuously layered, each page shimmering with insight and a delight to read.

Jacob S. Dlamini, author of The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police:
Morris offers an ethnography that astutely and illuminatingly captures the stubborn fiction that there is such a thing as a distinction between the formal and informal sectors of the economy, or between the normal and abnormal modes of existence in southern Africa’s political economy. This is all one economy. The haves and the have-nots inhabit one world. Different for sure but one.