This is the general problem which informs our analysis here, although we confine ourselves to a single social context. It is, however, a context in which issues of historical consciousness at large, and class consciousness in particular, arise in acute form: that of a black South African people drawn into the labor market and made to eke out an existence from a combination of small farming and wage work. Like others, Tshidi have been steadily impoverished by the rise of the regional political economy and have become yet another division in its reserve army of labor. In this respect, they are in no doubt that they are "oppressed" (patikega; "pressed down"), although they do not have a straightforward sense of themselves as members of either a class or a community of workers. Being peasant-proletarians, they have long migrated be- tween a rural "homeland" and the town, their journey articulating the worlds of agricultural production and wage labor, idealized past and discordant present.1