Sugar Girls & Seamen: A Journey into the World of Dockside Prostitution in South Africa

Sugar Girls and Seamen illuminates the shadowy world of dockside prostitution in South Africa, focusing on the women of Cape Town and Durban who sell their hospitality to foreign sailors at one of the busiest cultural intersections in the world. Through their continual interactions with international mariners, 'sugar girls' are major traffickers in culture, ideas, languages, styles, goods, currencies, genes and diseases. Many become cunning linguists by mastering the men's tongues, develop emotional relationships with the salty waifs, bear their babies and entangle themselves in vast webs of connection. In many ways, these mermaids are the ultimate cosmopolitans, the unsung sirens of globalisation. Based on fifteen months of research at the seamen's nightclubs, plus countless interviews with sugar girls, sailors, club owners, cabbies, bouncers and barmaids, this title provides an account of Dockside 'romance' at the Southern tip of Africa. Through stories, analysis and first-hand experience, Sugar girls and Seamen reveals this gritty world in all its raw vitality and fragile humanity.