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.

The Chamber of Mines, intent on ensuring favourable balance sheets and dividends for its risk-averse investors spread around the developed world, saw no reason for its having to absorb the cost of running an international rail service that amounted to a third of the overall cost of labour recruitment.

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.

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.

All South Africans, but more especially those who owned and own the coal- and gold-mining industries, need to acknowledge that much of the country’s past prosperity, wealth and relatively advanced infrastructure were built on the backs of black labour pushed and pulled out of colonial Mozambique.