Mtukatshelwa Phewa came to Durban to work on the docks after his parents died in 1957. His aunt took him under her wing and brought him to the city; she asked a dock worker she knew to show him where to present for hiring. He was taken on the same day, and it did not take him long to figure out that dock labor offered opportunities to earn some money on the side. He pilfered spilled cargoes, especially rice, sugar, beans, maize, and samp, and took them back to his aunt's shack in uMkhumbane. Generally, he would carry it in bags on his shoulder, but when there was too much he would take a taxi. His aunt sold these pilfered goods from her shack, and later they built an extension to serve as a spaza shop. She also sold matches, paraffin, and other basic consumption items. Such African-run businesses, however, were illegal, and they bribed police officers to prevent being shut down and arrested. The success of this shop allowed him to marry and to establish an umuzi for himself and his aunt near Izingolweni in the early 1960s. Nevertheless, he continued to work, and pilfer, on the docks. His wife and aunt established a new shop at their rural home, and he asked Mdu Jama, a colleague who owned a bakkie, to transport the pilfered goods. Because he wanted the freedom to work on those ships that carried the goods their store needed, he refused to become a permanent worker. Instead, he made sure to keep the izinduna happy by buying them beer and meat, so that they would hire him on the ships on which he wanted to work. He retired from urban wage labor in 1983 at the age of fifty, after he had put his children through school. He and his wife still run the store and own four taxis.

The intersections between rural identity and urban wage labor have been an important topic in southern African history since the 1980s. However, a third thread in the lives of at least some African workers has not received the same attention, namely that of small-scale informal entrepreneurialism dependent on their waged labor. The livelihoods of dock workers’ households relied mostly on three forms of income: urban wage labor, rural agriculture and pastoralism, and small-scale entrepreneurialism.