Overview

On the night trains, the last stop was always hell. The price exacted from across the African sub-continent for South Africas 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 Africas 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 Lourenco 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 regions 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.

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9781868429943

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'Fierce and lyrical, furious and humane, this is the work of a master historian.' - Professor James Campbell, Department of History, Stanford University 'The great master of social history, van Onselen, provides us an unsurpassable lesson in the

`Fierce and lyrical, furious and humane, this is the work of a master historian.' - Professor James Campbell, Department of History, Stanford University `The great master of social history, van Onselen, provides us an unsurpassable lesson in the

Author Information

Charles van Onselen is the acclaimed author of The Small Matter of a Horse, The Fox and the Flies, Masked Raiders, and The Seed is Mine, which won the Alan Paton and Herskovits prizes and was voted as one of the 100 best books to emerge from Africa during the 20th century. He has been honoured with visiting fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and Oxford, and was invited to be the inaugural Oppenheimer Fellow in the WEB Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Studies at Harvard. He is currently Research Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria.

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