Some of the Johannesburg industrialists, men of a supposedly ‘progressive’ stripe, better-educated English-speaking urban sophisticates with supposedly more enlightened ‘liberal’ views, were content to chide or dismiss Afrikaans-speaking railway administrators and poor white workers as ‘backvelders’ and ‘wheel-tappers’, 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.

In much the same way, families in the Sul do Save learned, over a half-century of pain, that the much-vaunted benefits of modern technology - as supposedly embodied in the railways - were never quite hazard-free, and nor could their fatal shortcomings always be easily separated from colonialism, gross exploitation and racism. Modern technology is never class-neutral; the privileged or the wealthy, sometimes both, public and private alike, are always better placed to acquire it early and usually benefit most from it over the long run. What did the railway to the Rand ever do for ordinary men and women in southern Mozambique?

For half a century, African miners on the up-train were never referred to as ‘miners’ but as ‘East Coast Boys’; the living dead and terminally ill Mozambicans on the down-train were never referred to as ‘patients’ but as ‘rejects’ or ‘sick boys’; and the Sul do Save migrants never qualified as ‘passengers’ but were ‘special fares’ or ‘Bantu’. Racism, a product of the mind, perverts the thinking of the oppressors and the oppressed alike.

The operation of the transnational migrant-labour service between Ressa o Garcia and Johannesburg had, for five decades, carried with it a faint warning as to how, when recist thinking, steam technology and political power were brought into alignment, they carried within them the potential for crimes against humanity and, in its most extreme form, genocide.

Africa, of all places, arbitrarily drawn colonial borders that make little sense in either ethnic or geographical terms seems to offer an exceptionally weak platform on which to try and construct an understanding of political economies and new societies.