Three Wise Monkeys

The Three Wise Monkeys trilogy culminates with a forensic examination of South Africa's long struggle to suppress gambling, and especially lotteries. The opposition of the Calvinist churches - both Afrikaans and English-speaking - had its counterpart in the eager embrace of games of chance by the white working class on the Witwatersrand. Focusing on the career of Rufe Naylor, an Australian bookmaker, horse dealer and entrepreneur who, with the help of a defrocked Portuguese Catholic priest, ran the Lourenço Marques Lottery, The Quest for Wealth without Work shows how the efforts of church and state to control the leisure time and morals of the working class intersected with the need to ensure the flow of cheap mine labour from Mozambique. Ultimately, in the suppression of the Lourenço Marques Lottery - and in campaigns against pinball machines, dog racing and other 'social evils' - can be seen the emerging outlines of the apartheid police state.

CHARLES VAN ONSELEN is the author of several award-winning books, including The Fox and the Flies, Masked Raiders, The Night Trains and The Seed is Mine, which was voted one of the hundred best books to come out of Africa in the 20th century. He has held visiting fellowships at Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford and Yale universities and has been Research Professor in the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (CAS) at the University of Pretoria for the past two decades.