Business Maverick: Book by a master historian takes a nocturnal train ride into the region’s predatory mining past

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Business Maverick: Book by a master historian takes a nocturnal train ride into the region’s predatory mining past By Ed Stoddard

Public-Private partnerships” is one of those buzz terms frequently thrown around these days, often as if the concept was something fresh and exciting that will take the economy into the brave new world of other hip concepts such as the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The next cog in this relentless wheel was to get that source of migrant labour to mines hundreds of kilometres away at high elevation. This, of course, is where the private trains and the public rails came into the picture, working in tandem to deliver cheap labour in an efficient and clockwork-like manner, even if this partnership between the public sphere and private capital sometimes caused its own friction.

The down passage also carried what Van Onselen dubs “the living dead” – men maimed in the mines or stricken with fatal diseases such as silicosis, caused by breathing silica dust from gold-bearing rocks. It also carried “mental cases”, men psychologically shattered by their bewildering and frightening experiences in the industrial maw of the Witwatersrand.

These areas generally remain poor despite the wealth their sons of the soil have helped to generate elsewhere. Mozambique is one of the world’s poorest countries, with little to show for its contribution to South Africa’s historical development. This is why many of the rhino poachers who enter Kruger Park are drawn from southern Mozambique.

 

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