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.

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 ‘rejects’ and the terminally ill.

The magic of managerial words, deftly deployed, turned the ill, the walking wounded, the lunatics and others into ‘convalescents’ - who by the WNLA’s 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 WNLA’s already minimal so-called Red Cross service.

And what the SARP could not, or would not, provide by way of safeguarding the returning miners and their possessions, the Chamber of Mines and the WNLA - two bodies controlling private police of most descriptions when it came to protecting mine property or on-site black labour - were unwilling to supplement. So, just as the 307 hospital coaches were without doctors or trained nurses for the terminally ill, so were vulnerable passengers carrying meaningful amounts of goods and wages on the slow down-train left without the benefit of protection of the South Africsn Railways or any dedicated WNLA train police.

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.