The dismantling of the thousands of individual personalities of the migrants, whether press-ganged or voluntary, and the systemic remoulding of separate personas into the collectivised âbatchesâ better suited to the needs of the mining industry, commenced in the WNLAâs remote recruitment camps deep in the rural Sul do Save.
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In a sense, then, for a decade or so before the development of improved mine hospital facilities on the Rand, Red Cross coaches were little more than coffins-on-wheels and part of a systemic mass-evacuation campaign for permanently disabled ârejectsâ and the terminally ill.
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.
The magic of managerial words, deftly deployed, turned the ill, the walking wounded, the lunatics and others into âconvalescentsâ - who by the WNLAâs own admission left the hospital coaches in worse conditions than they had entered them. It was precisely part of this same unspoken 40-year-long tussle between the cash-starved, revenue-seeking Railway Administration on the one hand, and the profit-driven, cost-pairing initiatives of the Chamber of Mines on the other, that eventually led to the partial abandonment of the WNLAâs already minimal so-called Red Cross service.
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.
All South Africans, but more especially those who owned and own the coal- and gold-mining industries, need to acknowledge that much of the countryâs past prosperity, wealth and relatively advanced infrastructure were built on the backs of black labour pushed and pulled out of colonial Mozambique.