The extent to which the emerging global economic system was being fed by developments in the southern hemisphere was strikingly evident even before 1914. In 1890, the par value of capital invested in the low-grade Witwatersrand mines stood at £22 million, by 1899 it was up to £75 million, and by 1914 it was £125 million. In 1886, the infant Rand industry produced less than 1 per cent of the world’s gold, by 1898 the figure had sprinted to 27 per cent, and by 1914 a whopping 40 per cent of the world’s supply of the precious metal derived from this astounding, still developing new source.

The Chamber of Mines, intent on ensuring favourable balance sheets and dividends for its risk-averse investors spread around the developed world, saw no reason for its having to absorb the cost of running an international rail service that amounted to a third of the overall cost of labour recruitment.

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.

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.

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.