History, when done well, is an appeal to the mind, and is about debate, contingency and questioning received wisdoms in ways that deepen our appreciation and understanding of who we are and why and how we did certain things, and perhaps even allows us to learn.

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.

The cruder the manner in which power is exercised by those in authority, and the deeper the pattern of deference implanted in the minds of the powerless, the easier it is for the confidence trickster to mimic and manipulate the characteristics of oppression as he exercises the dark arts of fraud and theft. And who better placed to do that than those most familiar with how arbitrary power is exercised? When the confidence trickster’s mischief was perfectly executed in an ethically flawed dispensation it could, like a work of art, expose the underlying fault lines of colonialism by holding a mirror to the economy and society and revealing its many pressure points.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes - Proust, Remembrance Of Things Past