As already noted, the British administration that had fought a war to help advance civilization north of the Vaal River, was initially not very enthusiastic about the idea of providing third-class passengers with drinking water. Matters improved slowly after Union, but throughout the 1920s and 1930s there were complaints about faulty water pumps on passenger coaches that remained unrepaired for weeks on end, while at Komatipoort there was a time when the water quality was officially condemned.

A single surviving file detailing the medical history of 654 Chinese mine workers repatriated from the Rand compounds in 1905 after only a year’s work underground offers us comparative, albeit tangential, evidence of how severe was the medical onslaught on workers of colour. All the workers had undergone repeated medical examinations prior to their departure from China, during the voyage to South Africa and after their arrival on the Witwatersrand, and 99 per cent of them were between 20 and 39 years of age.

By the time the mining industry repatriated them, after barely 12 months’ underground labour and compound incarceration, their disorders were said to fall into two broad categories - the bodily and the social. Not surprisingly, just over 18 per cent of the repatries were suffering from respiratory diseases such as silicosis and tuberculosis; 12 per cent had developed musculoskeletal deficiencies; another 10 per cent had been either seriously injured or blinded while working; while yet another 6 per cent has become infected with syphilis. Crudely staed, around 46 per cent, almost half of those repatriated, had been reduced to bodily wrecks - many, perhaps most, never to recover.

The needs of northern-hemisphere bankers, financiers and speculators ‘risking; their hard-earned capital to recover gold from thousands of feet beneath the surface had unleashed the equivalent of a full-scale war, one foguht at close quarters in exceedingly cramped quarters on the most unequal of terms. As often happens in street-by-street engagements - or, in this case, rock-by-rock, stope-by-stope fighting - the war produced tens of thousands of casualties and fatalities. And, as in many a bloody conflict, there was a train to evacuate the living dead and those who had fatally wounded in the struggle for an ostensibly noble cause that was understood only imperfectly by the idle, the poor, the vulnerable or the weak.

Gogosoa reportedly had fifteen huts and at least 1600 cattle and sheep. He had shown these to some Dutch men sent by the commander to trade copper wire in exchange for a calf and a cow. Autshumato served as interpreter in the trade. Later, the Dutch found it difficult to trade their copper and tobacco with Gogosoa, blaming the impasse on Autshumato. Due to this deadlock, there were even thoughts of sending Autshumato and his family to Robben Island, as the Dutch thought this would unlock bartering with Gogosoa people. Subsequent trades became even more difficult, with Autshumato accused of advising Saldanha Khoe to demand more copper for livestock. At the end of November, in Autshumato’s absence, the company bought nineteen sheep from the Khoe from Saldanha in exchange for copper wire and tobacco. A sheep cost about six to seven stuivers.

Louis from Bengal had arrived at the cape from present-day Bangladesh as a teenager. He is estimated to have been about nineteen or twenty years old when he had saved enough money to buy himself out of slavery. The piece of land he received in 1675 at Table Valley is now located in the Gardens Shopping Centre precinct. This specific garden spot was apparently given to him so that he could produce fruits and vegetables. In 1676, Louis was granted an erf in town, in Hout Street, at what is now the corner of the St George’s Mall. On Hout Street, Louis from Bengal bult a house with living accommodation which he let. He had enslaved people staying on that property too.