‘The Night Trains’: southern Africa’s murderous migrant system

[John Ashworth]

‘The Night Trains’: a masterly study into southern Africa’s murderous migrant system

It would be a truism to say that the functions of trains in modern history have been diverse and multifarious. Steam engines were drivers of the British industrial revolution, and the motors of internal westward expansion in North America. Railways were instruments of imperial expansion, as exemplified in Cecil Rhodes’ Cape-to-Cairo fantasy, and instruments of extermination, carrying Holocaust victims to their awful fate.

A railway map of South Africa reveals much about the course of the country’s economic history since the 1880s, with lines converging on the Rand, the industrial and mining metropolis. Meanwhile rural branch lines were constructed to serve the interests of white capitalist farmers, totally excluding the needs of black rural areas.

Trains can also be indicators of inequality. The Blue Train provides luxury travel for those who can afford it, while the Phelophepa Train – a mobile clinic – provides basic healthcare across the country for those who cannot afford it.

In his impressive The Night Trains: Moving Mozambican Miners to and from South Africa, 1902-1955, historian Charles van Onselen provides a grim account of trains as instruments of brutalisation and dehumanisation. He tells the story of the trains that transported migrant workers from Mozambique to the Rand mines and back during the first five or so decades of the twentieth century – journeys that Van Onselen describes as ‘mobile incarceration’.

It is a harrowing story...