All whites knew that the prosperity of the country depended on the mining industry but nobody wanted to see the coerced black labour that rendered the system possible and profitable. The mine compounds were designed to keep indentured black workers tied to their places of employment, but they also had the great benefit of keeping a servile labour force out of the direct line of sight of a European electorate living through its radical dream.

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 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.

And what the SARP could not, or would not, provide by way of safeguarding the returning miners and their possessions, the Chamber of Mines and the WNLA - two bodies controlling private police of most descriptions when it came to protecting mine property or on-site black labour - were unwilling to supplement. So, just as the 307 hospital coaches were without doctors or trained nurses for the terminally ill, so were vulnerable passengers carrying meaningful amounts of goods and wages on the slow down-train left without the benefit of protection of the South Africsn Railways or any dedicated WNLA train police.

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.