But longer familiarity with the Tshidi taught us that these images were not fortuitous, and that the meaning of the old migrant's message was widely shared. The clue lay in the form of his utterance: by a subtle choice of words, the vernacular term for work (or, more precisely here, "work for myself") was nicely distinguished from that used for labor done for whites. The first, itirela, implies "making oneself." It is the reflexive form of the Setswana go dira, "to do" or "to make." Bereka, on the other hand, comes from the Afrikaans werk, and connotes wage labor (apparently for all Sotho-Tswana speakers; Ziervogel and Mokgokong 1985). As we shall see, these terms form a significant opposition, carrying with them a fan of associations interlaced in the Tshidi imagination: work contrasts with labor as does self-construction with self-destruc- tion; as time logged "out there" with the creative processes of production and reproduction "at home" (mo gae); as the enduring value of cattle with the capricious flow of money. But these contrasts are neither frozen in a timeless cultural scheme nor played out in a narrative vision of history. Rather, they provide a versatile and poetic language, one capable of giving voice to both the musings of the migrant and the creations of the crazy prophet. In them, as in the polythene robes, lay a key to the Tshidi sense of themselves, of the making of their present world.