As already noted, the British administration that had fought a war to help advance civilization north of the Vaal River, was initially not very enthusiastic about the idea of providing third-class passengers with drinking water. Matters improved slowly after Union, but throughout the 1920s and 1930s there were complaints about faulty water pumps on passenger coaches that remained unrepaired for weeks on end, while at Komatipoort there was a time when the water quality was officially condemned.
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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 âprogressâ. 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.
From the same official, in January 1925: âI beg to report that Reject Disc No 8339 died en-route to Ressano Garcia on the morning of the 13th instant. Body removed from the train at Komatipoort and 75 pounds returned herewith.â In most cases, however, state officials merely noted that an individual bearing an incomplete name of sorts had been âfound deadâ on the train. It was a formulation that suggested that, in his final moments, the dying mn had been on his own only to be discovered dead sometime later.
The Chamber of Mines and the readers of the English-medium press on the Witwatersrand were content to see the hard-pressed, unqualified and occasionally well-meaning conductors portrayed as âhospital orderliesâ - in line with the display of the Red Cross on coaches. They were, for the most part, totally out of their depth when it came to dealing with terminally ill or seriously sick patients in hospital coaches. A series of rail accidents towards the end of the First World War allowed two of the longest-serving conductors to point out âthe futility of coping with an accident of any size without the present First Aid means at our disposalâ, and to plead for any additional medical supplies including a âstove, so that [an] ample supply of hot water might be available for washing wounds, etc.
Some of the Johannesburg industrialists, men of a supposedly âprogressiveâ stripe, better-educated English-speaking urban sophisticates with supposedly more enlightened âliberalâ views, were content to chide or dismiss Afrikaans-speaking railway administrators and poor white workers as âbackveldersâ and âwheel-tappersâ, while out at Ressano Garcia their own employees, the black living dead extruded from coal and gold mines, were being hauled through the coastal bush in hammocks and resided for the loneliest journey of all.
For half a century, African miners on the up-train were never referred to as âminersâ but as âEast Coast Boysâ; the living dead and terminally ill Mozambicans on the down-train were never referred to as âpatientsâ but as ârejectsâ or âsick boysâ; and the Sul do Save migrants never qualified as âpassengersâ but were âspecial faresâ or âBantuâ. Racism, a product of the mind, perverts the thinking of the oppressors and the oppressed alike.