As a young man growing up in the township of KwaMashu, some twenty kilometres north of Durban, I participated in the boyish game of stealing sugar cane from the fenced-in fields in the neighbourhood. There were dangers, real and imagined, attached to this pastime; one of which was to avoid capture by the amaMpondo labourers who, it was said, would do unnameable things to a boy. They came from somewhere unknown and were to be found doing the most menial of tasks performed by migrant workers, in the mines, cutting cane or carting night soil ... Mining the archives, A Long Way Home tracks this shameful history and goes a long way towards furthering our understanding of the migrant labour system.