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.

From the same official, in January 1925: “I beg to report that Reject Disc No 8339 died en-route to Ressano Garcia on the morning of the 13th instant. Body removed from the train at Komatipoort and 75 pounds returned herewith.” In most cases, however, state officials merely noted that an individual bearing an incomplete name of sorts had been ‘found dead’ on the train. It was a formulation that suggested that, in his final moments, the dying mn had been on his own only to be discovered dead sometime later.

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.

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 and more, the men of Sul do Save were robbed of their freedom to choose an employer by the Mozambican and South African governments even before they left the country of their birth; on the Witwatersrand itself they were robbed of the true value of their labour by mine owners intent on reducing wages for the benefit of shareholders in the developed world; and upon their return to the border post leading to their homeland the miners were robbed of the true value of their savings by border officials, train conductors and unscrupulous dealers when they were forced to exchange any holdings in ‘foreign currency’ at fraudulent rates.