This book rediscovers a remarkable South African life. James T Bain, hero and antihero of the South African past, has a claim to be the founder of trade unionism and socialism in South Africa. He started the first substantial trade unions in southern Africa on the Rand in the early 1890s. His International Independent Labour Party, founded in 1899, was the first socialist party in sub-Saharan Africa. He was a close associate of both the founders of the Communist Party and of the white segregationists of the South African Labour Party. But his political views, like much else about him, were complex: he often hesitated between democratic and racist ideas.