In the event, and throughout most of the 20th century, the southern African states, and more especially most of the mine owners - whose primary, if not sole, loyalties in terms of culture, lifestyle, wealth creation and choice of domicile upon early retirement lay in the northern hemisphere - did better than hold black wages; they managed, over 50 years, to lower them continuously.

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.

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 ‘batches’ better suited to the needs of the mining industry, commenced in the WNLA’s remote recruitment camps deep in the rural Sul do Save.

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.

All South Africans, but more especially those who owned and own the coal- and gold-mining industries, need to acknowledge that much of the country’s past prosperity, wealth and relatively advanced infrastructure were built on the backs of black labour pushed and pulled out of colonial Mozambique.