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.

A single surviving file detailing the medical history of 654 Chinese mine workers repatriated from the Rand compounds in 1905 after only a year’s work underground offers us comparative, albeit tangential, evidence of how severe was the medical onslaught on workers of colour. All the workers had undergone repeated medical examinations prior to their departure from China, during the voyage to South Africa and after their arrival on the Witwatersrand, and 99 per cent of them were between 20 and 39 years of age.

By the time the mining industry repatriated them, after barely 12 months’ underground labour and compound incarceration, their disorders were said to fall into two broad categories - the bodily and the social. Not surprisingly, just over 18 per cent of the repatries were suffering from respiratory diseases such as silicosis and tuberculosis; 12 per cent had developed musculoskeletal deficiencies; another 10 per cent had been either seriously injured or blinded while working; while yet another 6 per cent has become infected with syphilis. Crudely staed, around 46 per cent, almost half of those repatriated, had been reduced to bodily wrecks - many, perhaps most, never to recover.

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.

By mid-1963 the full down-train, replete with two Red Cross coaches, a ghostly spectre most often glimpsed gnawing away at the tracks of the great Eastern Main Line during the early hours of the morning, was seen less often. The 307 and its hospital-on-wheels without doctors or patients continued to do it as it had done for half a century, ferrying the living dead and the mentally impaired across the River Styx at Komatipoort/ Ressano Garcia. The down-train had often left the souls uncoupled from the bodies of the returning migrants, but that was not its full repertoire. It was also the vehicle by which men were separated from their savings and few worldly goods.

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.