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.

Some of the Johannesburg industrialists, men of a supposedly ‘progressive’ stripe, better-educated English-speaking urban sophisticates with supposedly more enlightened ‘liberal’ views, were content to chide or dismiss Afrikaans-speaking railway administrators and poor white workers as ‘backvelders’ and ‘wheel-tappers’, while out at Ressano Garcia their own employees, the black living dead extruded from coal and gold mines, were being hauled through the coastal bush in hammocks and resided for the loneliest journey of all.

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.

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.

The inhabitants of the Sul do Save, now one of the poorest regions on earth, may have entered the modern world poor, but the mining revolution in South Africa helped keep them and their descendants poor.