The Night Trains

Moving Mozambican miners to and from the Witwatersrand Mines, circa 1902–1955

Charles van Onselen

• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781868429950
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

On the night trains, the last stop was always hell.

The price exacted from across the African sub-continent for South Africa's stalled 20th century industrial revolution is – in human terms – still largely hidden from history. It was the people of southern Mozambique, bent double beneath the historical loads of forced labour and slavery, and then sold-off en masse as contracted labourers to the new coal and gold mines of the Witwatersrand by a Portuguese administration intent on securing a guaranteed volume of rail traffic for its east coast port, that paid the highest price for the development of South Africa's primary industry. An iniquitous inter-colonial agreement for the exploitation of ultra-cheap black labour in the extractive industries was only made possible through the use of the steam locomotive on the trans-national railway linking Johannesburg and Lourenço Marques.

The privately-operated, nightly labour trains running between Booysens and Ressano Garcia left deep scars in the urban and rural cultures of black communities whether in the form of popular songs, such as Stimela and Shosholoza, or in a belief in nocturnal witches' trains that captured and conveyed zombie workers to the region's most unpopular places of employment. By tracing the up- and down-rail journeys undertaken by black migrants over half a century it is possible to reconstruct how racial thinking, expressed logistically, reflected the evolving systems of segregation and apartheid. Mozambican migrant labour formed an integral part of a largely hidden, parallel universe that created the wealth of 20th century South Africa and some of the deepest roots of an on-going tragedy lie, to this very day, besides the rails of the Eastern Main Line.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

The Eastern Main Line

Umbilical Cord of South Africa’s Mining Revolution circa 1902–1955

Railroad trains are such magnificent objects we commonly mistake them for Destiny.

– EB WHITE

If you insert yourself among the sprawling social ruins that connect the supposedly separate universes of town and countryside in southern Africa – and you listen carefully enough – you may catch the outlines of a poignant refrain or two. Mournful lyrics remind you why, after a stalled industrial revolution scarred by crude divisions of class and colour, we probably need to be reminded of how the very act of migration – that ceaseless rotation of bodies between their places of birth and the subterranean vortices of wealth that opened up among indigenous peoples after 1870 – was central to the plight of those who were pushed into giving most and gaining least from the coming of a new order built almost exclusively on the relentless maximisation of profit.

Elsewhere across the world, amid similar upheavals, contracting economic sinews drew men and women from preindustrial dispensations into broadly contiguous, regionally defined patterns of work and residence. The first Industrial Revolution saw no great physical distance separating most farmers from their field hands, factory owners from workers, pit owners from miners, or even shipowners from ports. But, in colonial Africa, political power and racial difference were aligned to meet the demands of industries locked into financial markets spread around the Atlantic periphery and whose local agents contrived to keep rich and poor, white and black, in separate domains. Here, more so than in almost any comparable case in modern history, the spatial articulation of capital and labour was manipulated so as to benefit the emerging economic centre while simultaneously promoting the political and social separation of a privileged, enfranchised white minority from an unenfranchised black majority. The older, more familiar, centripetal economic dynamic was offset by centrifugal political forces that gave rise to an inherently antagonistic tendency that was as counterintuitive as it was counterproductive. Such an unusual configuration was possible only with the aid of the most modern technology. Steam-driven locomotives, puffing along well-defined pathways determined by colonial administrations, shuttled to and fro in a ceaseless attempt to minimise costly differences of time and space.

Nowhere was the physical hardship and psychological pain occasioned by the movement of migrant workers more evident than along the international line linking colonial Mozambique and South Africa. It was the enduring memory and trauma of rail journeys that commenced at the port city of Lourenço Marques, in Delagoa Bay, and proceeded through the roundly resented coalfields near the Eastern Transvaal town of Witbank (eMalahleni) before eventually terminating in the goldfields of Johannesburg (Egoli) that chiselled their way into the souls of black men and women from right across southern Africa. Around 1910, by which time the railway was already firmly embedded in African imaginations, one curious European was moved to record a fragment of what he called an ‘epic poem’ recited by his servant. The train was, the young black man chanted, ‘the one that roars in the distance … the one that crushes to pieces the warriors and smashes them!’1 Just two decades later, in KwaGuqa, the African township that serviced greater white Witbank and gave us one of the country’s finest jazz musicians, men and women had long been singing a song destined to become famous throughout the troubled land.

The lyrics and rhythm of ‘Shosholoza’ evoke such a powerful image of stimela, the steam-driven locomotive ferrying Mozambican and other workers back home through the mountains, that, rather unusually, the song has entered the repertoire of people of all colours right across the region, even though its deepest meaning is often lost on the well-heeled. Perhaps it was the very words of the song – ‘Shosholoza, wen’ uyabaleka, wen’ uyabaleka, kuleza ntaba, stimela siphume South Africa’ – that subconsciously primed the great Hugh Masekela, once of Witbank, when, one night in 1973, during his exile in the United States, the tempo and lyrics for his own composition, ‘Stimela’, tumbled forth from his mind and lips in what he later recalled as a single, near-unstoppable deluge:2

There is a train that comes from Namibia and Malawi

there is a train that comes from Zambia and Zimbabwe,

There is a train that comes from Angola and Mozambique,

From Lesotho, from Botswana, from Swaziland,

From all the hinterland of Southern and Central Africa.

This train carries young and old, African men

Who are conscripted to come and work on contract

In the golden mineral mines of Johannesburg

And its surrounding metropolis, sixteen hours or more a day

For almost no pay.

Deep, deep, deep down in the belly of the earth

When they are digging and drilling that shiny mighty evasive stone,

Or when they dish that mish mesh mush food

into their iron plates with the iron shank.

Or when they sit in their stinking, funky, filthy,

Flea-ridden barracks and hostels.

They think about the loved ones they may never see again

Because they might have already been forcibly removed

From where they last left them

Or wantonly murdered in the dead of night

By roving, marauding gangs of no particular origin,

We are told.

They think about their lands, their herds

That were taken away from them

With the gun, and the bomb, and the teargas, the Gatling and

the cannon.

And when they hear that Choo-Choo train

A-chugging, and a pumping, and a smoking, and a pushing,

a pumping, a crying and a steaming and a chugging and

a whooo whooo!

They always cuss, and they curse the coal train,

The coal train that brought them to Johannesburg. Whooo whooo!

Stimela

Sihamba ngamalahle

Sivel’ eDalakubayi

Sangilahla kwaGuqa

Bathi sizo-mba-malahle

sizo-mba-malahle

Iyohhh …

(Stimela)

Sidl’ inyu enkomponi.

(Stimela!)

Sihleli njengezinja, siyelele mame

Emigodini, babe

Sikhalel’ izihlobo zethu

(Masibuyele le! eDalakubayi)

Sikhalel’ izingane zethu wololo!

(Masibuyele le! eDalakubayi)

Sikhalel’ abazali bethu!

(Masibuyele le! eDalakubayi)

Sikhalel’ abafazi bethu, sithi

Yelele yelele yelele yelele yelele

(Masibuyele le! eDalakubayi)

Stimela

Sihamba ngamalahle,

Sivel’ eDalakubayi.

Helele bathi Stimela mawo

Stimela

Sihamba ngamalahle,

Sivel’ eDalakubayi.

Stimela!

Sihamba ngamalahle,

Sivel’ eDalakubayi.

There are now several versions of this haunting evocation of the incoming train and the fate of young men deposited in the most merciless of industrial settings. The one that perhaps gets closest to conjuring up the migrants’ trauma, however, has lyrics that are rendered a cappella style. It is replete with telling phrases of how the coal-gobbling engine and open trucks coming from eDalakubayi – Lourenço Marques – simply dump their quota of unhappy migrants on the station platform at Witbank, from where they are swept up into a nearby compound before being dispatched into the blackened underbelly of the collieries. It ends with a plea for the unhappy workers to be returned to Lourenço Marques so that their longing for absent wives, children and parents might be sated. Unlike ‘Shosholoza’ – a catchy tune but one with far less overtly emotive appeal – the heartbreaking poetry of ‘Stimela’ is perhaps just too painful for it to be accommodated easily in the ‘South African’ psyche. There are other reasons for this; it sometimes leaves ethnic nationalists of all colours, of whom there is no shortage at present, or historically, just a mite uncomfortable.

Although the lyrics of ‘Stimela’ resonate strongly with the experience of all incoming migrants on the mines, and there are oblique references that speak powerfully to the specific nature of racial oppression in the apartheid era, it is equally clear that the train’s passengers are not, in the main, black South Africans. In fact, they are outsiders, Africans drawn in from beyond the country’s borders, men hauled in from across the central and southern regions of the continent, pulled into the work that, arguably, demand...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• PART IV
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Acknowledgements
• Endnotes
• Praise for the book
• About the book
• About the author
• Imprint page