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.

What is more revealing, however, is that of the 654 sent back to China, 12 per cent were addicted to opium (a percentage that had risen markedly during their stay on the Rand) and an extraordinary additional 22 per cent (by far the biggest category of ‘rejects’ being returned to Asia) were said to be suffering from social maladies of one kind or another - close to one in three. And of those 143 ‘social’ wrecks, no fewer than 83 were said to be suffering from ‘senile delay’ or were deemed to have become ‘mentally deficient’ or ‘half-witted’. Another 23 were considered to be engulfed by a ‘weak-minded mania’, ‘violent’ or just plain ‘insane’. Even when one considers the possibility that at least some of those suffering from these ‘social disorders’ might have faked or exaggerated their symptoms, one would have to ask what drove men to take such desperate measures.

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 ‘hospital orderlies’ - 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 ‘the futility of coping with an accident of any size without the present First Aid means at our disposal’, and to plead for any additional medical supplies including a ‘stove, so that [an] ample supply of hot water might be available for washing wounds, etc.

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.