The 1967 oil spill from the Torrey Canyon, which ran aground near the Scilly Isles, Italy, exposed a number of serious shortcomings, in particular the absence of an international regime on liability and compensation in the event of oil spills from tankers. That incident led the International Maritime Organization to establish a legal framework for compensation for victims of oil pollution from tankers. This framework was called the International Convention on Civil Liability for Oil Pollution Damage and was adopted in 1969. the book resonates with the urgent message of how landless african/black people have been dispossessed of their homelands. after painstaking and accurate analyses of how the majority has turned out to be merely existing below the towering and wealthy minority. there are solutions offered and there are also challenges that are facing african people at all levels of the labor and capitalist market. mthembu writes from his own academic and personal experience as a black african scholar who has seen and searched for the reasons why his own society has been deprived of taking advantage of all possibilities for socio--economic growth. a society without proper roots and a dubious level of ownership of their ancestral land is under serious threat. the book is a well balanced assessment of the labor, landlessness and pauperization of africans who have been shifted around their homeland for political and economic gain. after reading the book, one is left with a sense that the land and worker question in sa needs to be addressed immediately.