The Night Trains: Moving Mozambican Miners to and from the Witwatersrand Mines, 1902-1955 by Van Onselen, Charles - 2019

Jonathan Ball Publishers, No Date. Softcover. Very Good/No Jacket. 5x0x9. The wraps are very slightly shelf rubbed with a sticker on the back, but they are tidy overall. The binding is excellent. No inscriptions or annotations. JHK.. Our orders are shipped using tracked courier delivery services.

ISBN: 9781868429943
Jonathan Ball Publishers Sa, 23 September 2019
Soft cover, 256 pages
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… Read More