In the event, and throughout most of the 20th century, the southern African states, and more especially most of the mine owners - whose primary, if not sole, loyalties in terms of culture, lifestyle, wealth creation and choice of domicile upon early retirement lay in the northern hemisphere - did better than hold black wages; they managed, over 50 years, to lower them continuously.

Colonisation by military conquest entails an element of moral regression on the part of the invader, and thereafter cocnsistently complicates any simple-minded notions of what might qualify as ‘progress’. In a situation in which two colonial powers foregoing most ethical considerations had, without consulting the party principally affected, agreed to the wholesale appropriation of African labour at exploitative rates in exchange for rail traffic to a port city that otherwise might not stand up to open capitalist competition, the past and the present were not that easily divided.

The mine compounds were part of a factory-like system that helped entrench notions of inferiority and servility in black populations throughout the region. Together with the ghetto-like urban ‘locations’ and the ‘native reserves’, the mine compounds formed a vital cog in the articulated geospatial machinery that pumped economic life into the emerging systems of first segregation and later apartheid. But not even the delegates of the inaugural conference of the South African Native National Congress (the forerunner of the African National Congress) in 1912 sensed how the mine compounds already had, for close on two decades, undermined both the physical and mental well-being of African miners and that the two elements were closely intertwined.

The needs of northern-hemisphere bankers, financiers and speculators ‘risking; their hard-earned capital to recover gold from thousands of feet beneath the surface had unleashed the equivalent of a full-scale war, one foguht at close quarters in exceedingly cramped quarters on the most unequal of terms. As often happens in street-by-street engagements - or, in this case, rock-by-rock, stope-by-stope fighting - the war produced tens of thousands of casualties and fatalities. And, as in many a bloody conflict, there was a train to evacuate the living dead and those who had fatally wounded in the struggle for an ostensibly noble cause that was understood only imperfectly by the idle, the poor, the vulnerable or the weak.

For half a century and more, the men of Sul do Save were robbed of their freedom to choose an employer by the Mozambican and South African governments even before they left the country of their birth; on the Witwatersrand itself they were robbed of the true value of their labour by mine owners intent on reducing wages for the benefit of shareholders in the developed world; and upon their return to the border post leading to their homeland the miners were robbed of the true value of their savings by border officials, train conductors and unscrupulous dealers when they were forced to exchange any holdings in ‘foreign currency’ at fraudulent rates.