On the night trains; the last stop was always hell.
The price exacted from across the African sub-continent for South Africa’s stalled 20th century industrial revolution is – in human terms – still largely hidden from history. It was the people of southern Mozambique; bent double beneath the historical loads of forced labour and slavery; and then sold-off en masse as contracted labourers to the new coal and gold mines of the Witwatersrand by a Portuguese administration intent on securing a guaranteed volume of rail traffic for its east coast port; that paid the highest price for the development of South Africa’s primary industry. An iniquitous inter-colonial agreement for the exploitation of ultra-cheap black labour in the extractive industries was only made possible through the use of the steam locomotive on the trans-national railway linking Johannesburg and Lourenço Marques.
The privately-operated; nightly labour trains running between Booysens and Ressano Garcia left deep scars in the urban and rural cultures of black communities whether in the form of popular songs; such as Stimela and Shosholoza; or in a belief in nocturnal witches’ trains that captured and conveyed zombie workers to the region’s most unpopular places of employment. By tracing the up- and down-rail journeys undertaken by black migrants over half a century it is possible to reconstruct how racial thinking; expressed logistically; reflected the evolving systems of segregation and apartheid. Mozambican migrant labour formed an integral part of a largely hidden; parallel universe that created the wealth of 20th century South Africa and some of the deepest roots of an on-going tragedy lie; to this very day; besides the rails of the Eastern Main Line.
