The Night Trains

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 extent to which the emerging global economic system was being fed by developments in the southern hemisphere was strikingly evident even before 1914. In 1890, the par value of capital invested in the low-grade Witwatersrand mines stood at £22 million, by 1899 it was up to £75 million, and by 1914 it was £125 million. In 1886, the infant Rand industry produced less than 1 per cent of the world’s gold, by 1898 the figure had sprinted to 27 per cent, and by 1914 a whopping 40 per cent of the world’s supply of the precious metal derived from this astounding, still developing new source.

From 1919 to 1963, the average yield was 9 per cent, as compared to 7.6 per cent for UK equities. If there were investment ‘risks,’ they were reasonably manageable.

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.

All whites knew that the prosperity of the country depended on the mining industry but nobody wanted to see the coerced black labour that rendered the system possible and profitable. The mine compounds were designed to keep indentured black workers tied to their places of employment, but they also had the great benefit of keeping a servile labour force out of the direct line of sight of a European electorate living through its radical dream.

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.

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.

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.

Durkheim had already suggested that society’s space-time perceptions were a function of social rhythm and territory. That being so, one might imagine, the swifter and starker the transition between a rural universe pulsed by the seasons and an urban dispensation governed by the clock and industrial discipline, the greater the potential for disorientation as to time and space - the very bedrock of an individual’s mental well-being. Any such problem might be further exacerbated by the effect of fatigue on a person’s circadian rhythm.

The dismantling of the thousands of individual personalities of the migrants, whether press-ganged or voluntary, and the systemic remoulding of separate personas into the collectivised ‘batches’ better suited to the needs of the mining industry, commenced in the WNLA’s remote recruitment camps deep in the rural Sul do Save.

The mine compounds were part of a factory-like system that helped entrench notions of inferiority and servility in black populations throughout the region. Together with the ghetto-like urban ‘locations’ and the ‘native reserves’, the mine compounds formed a vital cog in the articulated geospatial machinery that pumped economic life into the emerging systems of first segregation and later apartheid. But not even the delegates of the inaugural conference of the South African Native National Congress (the forerunner of the African National Congress) in 1912 sensed how the mine compounds already had, for close on two decades, undermined both the physical and mental well-being of African miners and that the two elements were closely intertwined.

Yet, for all that, and as we shall note in due course, WNLA officials knew, from the turn of the century, that the pressures and stresses of mining left an unknown number of men withdrawn, deranged or extremely violent.

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.

What is more revealing, however, is that of the 654 sent back to China, 12 per cent were addicted to opium (a percentage that had risen markedly during their stay on the Rand) and an extraordinary additional 22 per cent (by far the biggest category of ‘rejects’ being returned to Asia) were said to be suffering from social maladies of one kind or another - close to one in three. And of those 143 ‘social’ wrecks, no fewer than 83 were said to be suffering from ‘senile delay’ or were deemed to have become ‘mentally deficient’ or ‘half-witted’. Another 23 were considered to be engulfed by a ‘weak-minded mania’, ‘violent’ or just plain ‘insane’. Even when one considers the possibility that at least some of those suffering from these ‘social disorders’ might have faked or exaggerated their symptoms, one would have to ask what drove men to take such desperate measures.

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.

...it was stipulated that the sliding doors on each of the coaches be provided with large metal staples so that they might be locked with WNLA-supplied padlocks. The WNLA also wanted more work done on one of the four compartments in each coach that would be used for holding the ‘mental cases’. Light switches had to be located outside the doors, internal fittings such as mirrors, racks and washbasins had to be removed, and, as always, heavy iron bars were to be fitted to the windows. By early 1963, the last of the hospital coaches were one again making use of coupes for restraining the mentally ill who were potentially dangerous.

In a sense, then, for a decade or so before the development of improved mine hospital facilities on the Rand, Red Cross coaches were little more than coffins-on-wheels and part of a systemic mass-evacuation campaign for permanently disabled ‘rejects’ and the terminally ill.

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.

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.

The magic of managerial words, deftly deployed, turned the ill, the walking wounded, the lunatics and others into ‘convalescents’ - who by the WNLA’s own admission left the hospital coaches in worse conditions than they had entered them. It was precisely part of this same unspoken 40-year-long tussle between the cash-starved, revenue-seeking Railway Administration on the one hand, and the profit-driven, cost-pairing initiatives of the Chamber of Mines on the other, that eventually led to the partial abandonment of the WNLA’s already minimal so-called Red Cross service.

By mid-1963 the full down-train, replete with two Red Cross coaches, a ghostly spectre most often glimpsed gnawing away at the tracks of the great Eastern Main Line during the early hours of the morning, was seen less often. The 307 and its hospital-on-wheels without doctors or patients continued to do it as it had done for half a century, ferrying the living dead and the mentally impaired across the River Styx at Komatipoort/ Ressano Garcia. The down-train had often left the souls uncoupled from the bodies of the returning migrants, but that was not its full repertoire. It was also the vehicle by which men were separated from their savings and few worldly goods.

As the peerless Lewis Hyde suggests, ‘eternals are vulnerable at their joints’, and to get at a god (as in, say, Achilles’ heel) or an ideal, he argues, ‘go for the joints’.

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.

Please advise,’ wrote the Secretary of the Chamber of Mines, ‘whether it is possible to produce evidence in substantiation of the statement that the pilferage complained of actually occurred while the luggage was in the custody of the Railway Administration, and whether the luggage was booked by the natives concerned before boarding the train.’ It was a fool’s errand. In the late 1950s there was another spate of thefts, and even in those cases where the Railway Administration did accept responsibility for the loss of goods, it generally reduced to pay compensation on items of clothing unless documentary evidence as to the precise value of the goods lost could be provided by workers who were, almost to the man, perfectly illiterate.

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.

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?

Such systems are not the product of chance; they have a shape and purpose dictated by design that reflects ideology clearly.

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.

The operation of the transnational migrant-labour service between Ressa o Garcia and Johannesburg had, for five decades, carried with it a faint warning as to how, when recist thinking, steam technology and political power were brought into alignment, they carried within them the potential for crimes against humanity and, in its most extreme form, genocide.

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.

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.

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

Africa, of all places, arbitrarily drawn colonial borders that make little sense in either ethnic or geographical terms seems to offer an exceptionally weak platform on which to try and construct an understanding of political economies and new societies.