"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.

Dockside sugar girls work at one of the busiest cultural intersections in the world. Through their continual interactions with foreign seamen, they become major traffickers in culture, ideas, languages, styles, goods, currencies, genes, and diseases. Many learn the seamen s languages, develop emotional relationships with them, have their babies, and become entangled in vast webs of connection. Henry...