$6.49
Details
The Night Trains: Moving Mozambican miners to and from the Witwatersrand Mines, 1902–1955
Author: Charles van Onselen
Narrator: Sello Sebotsane
Unabridged: 7 hr 54 min
Format: Digital Audiobook
Publisher: Findaway Voices
Published: 09/01/2023
Genre: History - Africa
Synopsis
ON THE NIGHT TRAINS, THE LAST STOP WAS ALWAYS HELL.
The price exacted from across the African subcontinent for South Africa’s stalled 20th-century industrial revolution is, in human terms, still largely hidden from history. For half a century, up to the mid-1950s, privately operated trains travelled by night between Ressano Garcia, on the Mozambique border, and Booysens station, in Johannesburg. The night trains carried Mozambicans recruited to work in the mines of the booming Witwatersrand. The up-trains disgorged their human cargo into the maw of the great Rand mining machine, while the down-trains whisked away the time-expired miners – often ill, broken or insane, and preyed on by con men, petty criminals and corrupt officials. While mine labour was recruited from all over southern Africa, Mozambican migrants made up the largest component, and they paid the highest price.
Charles van Onselen clinically reconstructs the world of the night trains, which were run as a partnership between the mining houses and the railways. By tracing the up and down rail journeys undertaken by black migrants over half a century it is possible to discern how racial thinking, expressed logistically, reflected South Africa’s evolving systems of segregation and apartheid. Mirroring the brutal logic of industrial capitalism, this was a system of transport designed to maximise profit at the expense of the health, well-being and even the lives of those it conveyed.
The story of the night trains echoes today through songs such as ‘Stimela’ and ‘Shosholoza’. But the experience of the poverty-stricken Mozambicans who travelled on the trains has never been told. THE NIGHT TRAINS lays bare this hellish world.
by Arthur Talmage Abernethy
“The most the startling book of the year...its research is unanswerable.” -Literary DigestAbernethy’s 1910 book “The Jew a Negro” has been analyzed by numerous modern authors studying race relations in earlier times in ...
Published: 10/23/2019
by Charles River Editors
The modern history of Africa was, until very recently, written on behalf of the indigenous races by the white man, who had forcefully entered the continent during a particularly hubristic and dynamic phase of European history. When they began to arr...
Published: 03/10/2020
by Charles River Editors
The modern history of Africa was, until very recently, written on behalf of the indigenous races by the white man, who had forcefully entered the continent during a particularly hubristic and dynamic phase of European history. In 1884, Prince Otto v...
Published: 02/09/2020
by Charles River Editors
The modern history of Africa was, until very recently, written on behalf of the indigenous races by the white man, who had forcefully entered the continent during a particularly hubristic and dynamic phase of European history. In 1884, Prince Otto v...
Published: 01/06/2020
by Charles River Editors
By the dawn of the 17th century, Portuguese influence in Africa fell into decline, and the occasions of European contact with Ethiopia became very few and far between. It would be another three centuries before another European would venture into th...
Published: 03/10/2020
by Charles River Editors
“The Boers were hostile toward indigenous African peoples, with whom they fought frequent range wars, and toward the government of the Cape, which was attempting to control Boer movements and commerce. They overtly compared their way of life t...
Published: 03/28/2019
by Anthony Holmes
Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour. Learn about the Egyptian gods, mummification and how the Egyptians built the only wonder of the ancient world still standing – the Pyramids of Giza. Exploring the historic rise of Egyptian...
Published: 01/03/2013
by Charles River Editors
The Boer War was the defining conflict of South African history and one of the most important conflicts in the history of the British Empire. Naturally, complicated geopolitics underscored it, going back centuries. In fact, the European history of ...
Published: 03/30/2019
by Charles River Editors
“The Boers were hostile toward indigenous African peoples, with whom they fought frequent range wars, and toward the government of the Cape, which was attempting to control Boer movements and commerce. They overtly compared their way of life ...
Published: 03/20/2019