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.

In much the same way, families in the Sul do Save learned, over a half-century of pain, that the much-vaunted benefits of modern technology - as supposedly embodied in the railways - were never quite hazard-free, and nor could their fatal shortcomings always be easily separated from colonialism, gross exploitation and racism. Modern technology is never class-neutral; the privileged or the wealthy, sometimes both, public and private alike, are always better placed to acquire it early and usually benefit most from it over the long run. What did the railway to the Rand ever do for ordinary men and women in southern Mozambique?

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.

And today, with 70 per cent of the rural population still living in abject poverty, the country [Mozambique] as a whole is deemed by various United Nations agencies to be among the ten poorest on earth.

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.