text: This story of a Zulu family is a composite story of events enacted by Africans whose experiences resembled the story’s events. Forced out of his village by famine, Zachariah leaves his family to take the only work available: in the gold mines near Johannesburg. Seeking better than a slave wage, he settles with his wife and children in a bleak room in a crumbling shack on the outskirts of the city. Here he confronts the pass laws – hundreds of laws which he did not know existed – restricting his every move: he cannot find work without a pass, and he cannot get a pass without work. At the same time he is constantly threatened with banishment or imprisonment if he is unemployed too long, or fails to comply with petty restrictions. Zachariah drifts through a succession of jobs – domestic servant, garage attendant, waiter, road gang laborer – tormented, insulted, and degraded by white employers who summarily dismiss him because of his ignorance or out of malice. In addition, he falls foul of Marumu, the leader of a gang of “tsotsis”  who are terrorizing the streets of Sophiatown. Fearful that poverty will drive her son to the street gangs, his wife takes a job as a domestic servant where she must live on premises, separated from her family. Zachariah is caught sleeping with Vinah during a nightly police raid and is arrested for trespassing. He returns from prison to find his wife dead, murdered by Murumu because she refused to give in to his sexual demands. Inexorably Zachariah’s overwhelming helplessness and frustration reveal the social impoverishment of all African men, women, and children. Starved off the land after confiscation by successive governments, the black man is uprooted from his native soil and forced continually to search for a home and livelihood. Deprived of political power, he must weave a treacherous path of survival among the myriad written and unwritten laws that govern black contact with the white world – laws which are often contradictory and inevitably result in severe penalties. The family is increasingly torn apart when both parents must work to buy bread, leaving their children to grow up amid the violence and filth of the streets. In the end, the African is completely defenseless in his struggle to survive, inhumanely pulled between the capricious brutality of white law and the wanton violence of the black outlaw.