ระดับเทพCompelled to move between the urban workplace and the arid "homeland," Tshidi migrants soon produced a sardonic commentary on the lesson of free labor. This, as we might expect, was less a narrative of dispossession than a symbolic elaboration of the contrast between work and labor. For, as Alverson was to observe in Botswana, "wage-labor violates the very defini- tion of 'doing' " (1978:136). From the earliest years of this century, Tshidi have spoken, in their everyday practices and poetic forms, of the experience of alienation. They talked of the impact of labor that depletes rather than enhances the self; labor that denies a worker control over the products in which he invests himself and so vitiates a world of meaningful relations. The tes- timony of Tshidi migrants dwelt particularly on the theme of dehumanization. Drawing on brute physical images born in the racist workplace, these men characterized themselves as yoked beasts with no understanding of the situation into which they were drawn. Having lost control over their personal time and space, they were overshadowed, eclipsed. As Tswana have long said, migrant workers are "outside" (kaha ntle); in forced exile to the realm of the whites, they are external to the creative life of the community.