Three Wise Monkeys presents a startling new way of viewing the entangled, often hidden, economic, political and social dynamics that informed the rise of 20th-century South Africa, often at the expense of neighbouring Mozambique. It is history that transcends state boundaries to take the reader into previously uncharted domains of the recent past. This 3-volume work was published as a box set but is also available as individual volumes.
Three Wise Monkeys culminates with volume 3, 'The Quest for Wealth Without Work', 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, Volume 3 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.