Episode 291 - The Miracle of South Africa’s Railways: Navvies, Gangers and Granny Mavis

0:00Welcome back to the history of South Africa podcast with me your host, Desleyth, and this is episode 291, the miracle of South Africa's railway engineering, Navi's, Ganges, and Granny Mavis. Yes, it's that instantly recognizable sound of a steam train which I've travelled in around the world. This trip pre-school from Inquilini station to Empangani, where one of the main sugarmills of Zillaland could be found back in the day. My grandmother Mavis Allport was the shaperone as young Desmond and brother Gary clamored aboard the snorting beast of the Visceral Experience. Exciting stuff the steam train business, except for the small matter of my eyes, which had been staring rapturously out of the window towards the engine, drinking in all that romance of steam trains. And everybody who's actually ridden behind a coal-fired boiler knows is that romance troubles with shrapnel. Tiny and candy-s and shards of burnt coal riding the slipstream like benevolent little

1:04embers with a grudge aimed directly at your eye. Granny Mavis warned me of course, but I was a farm boy possessed of that particular strain of confidence, found only in the termally under-informed, and so I ignored her, leaned further out and gave the shrapnel a much bigger target. She said something about Acyadom, es mutye, expletive deleted, and continued smoking her menthol cigarette through her telescopic cigarette holder. She had met enough penacious little bastards to recognise one clean lesson in the making when she saw it, and let him find out for himself, and of course I did, fade up the sniveling sounds. Later a trip from a show where to dobbin by steam train, there's a couple of times school outings, you know. The last in Maharskul, 1979, when I returned from boarding school, dobbin to Shawee, and the lion was stable enough for me to play Bruce Springsteen's memorable darkness on the edge of town record on a portable battery-driven turntable, and fortunately none of those trips

2:07can be taken today, because the lions don't exist. They're gone. The reason for all this palava in this episode is about the accelerating pace of the rollways through the latter period of the 1880s and the 1890s. Moving goods around a country is not only about commerce, it's about strategy, and often military strategy. The key to being able to get your soldiers and machines from aid to be quickly is being able to exploit the rollways, even now Russia and Ukraine rely on rollways to move their tanks and their arms. During the Second World War when a track was blown up, engineers could repair the broken section within a day or two, everything about locomotives is about speed, and always has been. In South Africa commerce allows an aviation and tracking companies to move things around, but that's only because our rollways are somewhat shoddy and have degenerated, because keeping them going requires maintenance, and that's not something that most contemporary politicians have as a school set. So the cycle turns gloriously and predictably.

3:10Why I replace a sleeper when you can convene the TOSC team to explore the sleeper question with international best practice benchmarking naturally at a five-star conference venue and a starpined in dollars? Maintenance is a thankless art. Nobody erecs a flock to the man who tartened a vault in 1899. As you'll hear later, the gangers and nabbies are a distant memory on our dusty felt. Yet, the 19th century rolling stuck revolutionized South Africa, shrinking the country, where trips or weeks and months turned into days and sometimes hours. The rollway line from Cape Town reached Kimberley in 1885, and that was only the opening act. By 1900, almost 10,000 kilometres of rail had been laid in South Africa, accounted for over half of all the lines and the whole of Africa, where the rest of the continent combined, could count only on 7,000 kilometres. After the line reached Kimberley, the celebration subsided. The Cape Government was under pressure by capitalists like Cecil John Rhodes to extend

4:13it beyond the Cape and into the Orange Free State, onto the Transval, and then from Natell inland to the Rand, once established, a southern African customs union could follow as a way to maximise free trade, but some in the Cape were not entirely sold in that idea. The Afrogana Bunt, for example, was initially Scottish. Bunt members were mainly farmers who regarded the vast matrix or tracks across the country as a possible increased risk as competitors from further afield could access Cape markets. Nevertheless, the survey as maps had been drawn up. One ambitious plan was to extend the Midland line, which connected Port Alfred and Port Elizabeth to Graimston, that would go deeper into the interior. The extension was duly completed when it met the Western line at Da'ar, and this is where there was a problem. It involved that all the bugbearer of trade, something called Cariffs, and that other fairtour of growth called nationalism. Each of these colonies and fledgling republics collected customs duties at points of entry,

5:16and if there was a free trade area, there it would lose that income. While Cape based engineers and others in the British Empire girded their set squids across the Valle river, Transvalle president Paul Kreer wasn't hanging around. Anyone looking at a map of South Africa can immediately see that the shortest route from Pretoria to the sea is directly east to Maputo, when those days Lorenzo Mox on Deligo obeyed. The Transvalle was already constructing a line from Pretoria to the bay. For Kreer, this was his best chance of true independence for the Transvalle to finally break free of the Eccursed English and their propensity to interfere in the burr republics business. Every role way that it approaches me, he said, I look upon as enemy on whatever side it comes. I must have my Deligo obeyed line first, and then the other lines may come. The Deligo obeyed role way ahead for the geopolitical complexity, as the initial role way monopoly was granted to a Dutch consortium funded by German capital, and then financially

6:17rescued by the London branch of Rothschild when the consortium was declared insolvent. Why would the Rothschilds help the Transvalle when he was plainly anti-imperial? In a bizarre twist in our tale, the Rothschilds you see were aggressively pursuing goal mining interests in the Transvalle by buying shares in Bernabot and company and other prominent mining assets. At the time the Bart mining operations were the largest of its kind on the Pitbottos front and necessitated heavy machinery only accessible via rail. We'll hear more about this deal in a few minutes. This was of course a direct threat to imperialists inside the Cape government, of which Rhodes was the ringleader, along with Gordon's sprig the Cape Prime Minister. They began to play the Union of South Africa card. All people of the region would only be advantaged by a line from the Cape, they said, anything else, i.e. a line from Lorenzo Marx, represented a threat to commerce. Privately Rhodes confided, it was also a threat to his grand idea of building colonial

7:18states throughout Africa for England. The Afro-Khanna-born finally agreed with Rhodes, although they still viewed an independent royal line to delegate obey as competition. Despite a common culture, Kriya and the folks right in Pretoria did not see eye to eye with their Dutch-speaking brethren of the Cape. Kriya pointed out that Cape Colony-Portes would still be able to collect their tariffs and their taxes and duties on import ship by rail to the landlocked borough republics, which by inference would not be able to collect their own dues. Kriya edged his bet. After three years of haggling there was a breakthrough, the Cape reached a common customs union agreement with the Orange Free State in 1889, but the Transvile held out, so too did Natal, always jealous of the Cape. That may come as a surprise, what with Natal being the last British art post, full of imperialists, but they were businessmen first, of course. A Cape based railway line all the way to Johannesburg, even in those early days of the gold

8:20fever on the bitvisaast front, would suck vital tariff duties away from the port of Durban. Things became even more complex when the Orange Free State signed a defensive military lines with the Transvile, despite also having agreed to the Cape railway line, talk about layers of trouble and strife. But you can't stop the advance of commercial logic, and farmers inland were making good money. The mines were rolling in the cache, and the Bueh republics had to allow the Cape to build their own rail line into their countries. Yeah, it was a warning sign glowing brightly, and it had blinded some of the political leadership. A state-owned railroad from the Cape was on building a line into the Orange Free State, and soon to the Transvile, with Cape money. Gordon's Briggs government was going to pump millions of pounds into that endeavour, and that meant heavy borrowing from the banks. But the Transvile and Orange Free State were independent Bueh republics. In 1888, the decision was taken to extend the Midland Line from PE, which had reached Colesburg

9:22to cross the Orange River at Norfalspont. Up to then, travelers had to hunt across the river, the pont, riding a pontoon attached to a wire that went back and forth pulled by a team of horses that turned large wheels. Things were moving fast. Then two years, not only had a bridge been built across the Orange River, but the railway line had extended from Colesburg all the way to Blumfentaint, completed in 1890. That is the distance of 227 kilometres, which meant the builders were averaging around nine and a half kilometres a month. Somehow, the engineers managed to also construct bridges over all the small rivers on the way, as well as an impressive bridge at Norfalspont. Another line was built from Blumfentaint to the Valle River, with a crossing point at Fulyunstreff. Paul Krier was not too pleased, but the Transvile was short of money, and he had to make a deal with his nemesis to British, with at least the Cape government. In exchange for the Cape, paying part of the cost of his line to Delegue Bay, along with

10:27Rothschilds, Krier allowed the line from the Cape to be built from Fulyunstreff to Johannesburg, which was completed in 1892. There is a relationship between railway and photography, the combination that has helped construct an imaginary geography of South Africa. The territory is vastness and fractured states, jostling forward tension in the late 1880s, and through the 1890s seems to be tied together by both the lines being built, and the photographs generated from these trains. The time-space imagination, which can be esoteric, soon forms part of a national consciousness, at least for those who can afford to buy the publications and feature the photographs. With no navigable rubbers, South Africa depended on railroads to carry agricultural and industrial goods along with people. Fortunately for the fledgling nation, coal had been discovered, and laying close to the surface and parts of the Orange Free State and Natell, and coal cost about a sixth in South Africa, or bought it constantly in the United States, to mine.

11:30Crowd of engineers and skilled otisons arrived in South Africa, taking advantage of both the new mines and the new railway developments. One of these was James Sivratt, an expert at telegraphs and educated in Scotland at the University of Aberdeen. After a short stint in England, he moved to the Cape in 1878 and met a distinguished career receiving an award for his services during the Anglo-Zulu War. Sivratt had much bigger plans than just South Africa, because he envisaged a Cape to Cairo Telegraph line. That was superseded in 1879, with the opening of the first undersea cable, which was laid from Durban to Aden in Yemen, but that didn't disheartened Sivratt. He's always been a fascinating correlation between Scots and Boos, and the Scots Sivratt joined the Afro-Kharna Bont, and Cape English politicians regarded him as a bit of a schemer, a loose cannon. Although in the surface Sivratt appeared a classic Anglo-File, he knew that joining the Bont was not to enable him to build credibility for his business ventures.

12:30A trial partied contractual flotation between the Transfile National Bank of the Roshchild and Pretoria to fund railway development was Judy over-subscribed in July 1882. Amsterdam's allotment of £1 million was subscribed immediately and the Transfile issued another £717,000. Paul Krier insisted on the Dutch and South African allotment and representation and contended that the full name of the Transfile National Bank and Amsterdam was required on the coupon of the bond, and Krier also requested changes to the loan documents. The idea that Krier was a rough and ready-bwer with little financial acumen is totally incorrect. This series is going to keep a close eye on the Rothschilds, who were very interested in reports of gold further north in Becho, Analand and Zambiesia, which lay north of the Limpoppo. Civil Rights began to invest very early in telegraphs in the Transfile before gold was discovered, so in the boom began he was in the right place at the right time to put it mildly.

13:32So here is the link between transport, communication, banks and mines. Civil Rights like Rhodes believed that the mix of business and politics was crucial, both who imbued with a colonial philosophy that settler colonies could govern themselves while maintaining ties to Britain. Civil Rights however believed emphatically in the empire while civil rights being Scots and not English preferred more local autonomy. Both understood technology was at the heart of development. Just before his death, civil rights said colonial growth was based on, and to give the bad Scots accent. A collection of states, with a sword and a rifle as instruments of government had to make way for steam and electricity and where the railway and the telegraph were welding all the component parts into one mighty hole. My Scots great aunt has just turned into her grave. The coal-ified locomotives hauled the rolling stock across the country coal among it, fuel carrying more of itself to where it was needed, and the lines those trains ran on had been

14:34laid by black workers, who then rode those same rails back to the mines. The railway didn't just serve the extraction economy, it was the extraction economy, closing its own loop, labour building the track that would carry labour to the coal phase. These lines would eventually snake into far flung territories like Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, South West Africa, even Nakhonga. They became the symbol of colonial development, but also the symbol of growth. A kind of philosophical dichotomy where the line itself in the image it represents was something which settlers could point at as a matter of pride while African-Nashlists could point at as proof of colonisation. This is one of the reasons why the ruling African National Congress in the 21st century has allowed the railways to become delabited. To the ANC, the railways are a physical embodiment of a potet of organised gangs of labour, toiling away in the harsh African sun supervised by white men.

15:35It's a kind of psychosis buried deep in the memories of now aging politicians. This was the story of the 19th century, though, and much of the early 20th, where global trend was playing out. Black labourers and Chinese created a culture out of the sound of hammers striking metal pins combining hospital and country and African-chance, which became the blues and then rock and roll. In England, the labourers often were Irish. These were the navies, a corruption of the word Navigator, which had been assigned to the man who worked with others and cutting the inland navigation canals of the 18th century in Britain, some 70 years before the coming of the railways. The navies were the unsung heroes of the 19th century railway building era, and the prodigious feats of work and endurance are legendary and visible. In South Africa, for many involved in the pioneering work of breaking new ground, there was a supreme sense of achievement for both black and white worker. This is perhaps overlooked by what happened next politically.

16:35Compared to the daring, pioneering and romantic worker railway navies, the train drivers, the breakmen, the railway gangers, as well as the pumpers and station workers, they're just sedentary routine and dull life. Instead of breaking new ground and a frenzied struggle with nature and the clock gangers had the humblet task of maintaining a repairing railway track, semi-skilled men worked in small groups along designated stretches of line. In the Cape Midland system in the 1890s, for example, individual gangs were responsible for sections of track between 8 and 15 kilometres long, but further inland. These were 16 kilometres apart, and when the lines arrived in Namibia, 50 kilometres apart. Waiting at these posts were water pumpers and a gang of men whose job was to ensure adequate supplies of water for steam engines and to fix the tracks. Work gangs remained widespread even after the engine drivers and the firemen and the guards had been centralized at workshops and large centres. The gangers were deposited in outlying areas.

17:38These gangs were usually led by a white ganger whose immediate superiors were permanent way in spectre and a district engineer. These senior staff, periodically toured sections of the line, generally with the help of a gangers trolley, which is a lightweight, open-topped four-wheeled rail vehicle, built on a flat wooden deck, a steel frame, designed to transport maintenance crews and the heavy tools directly along active track corridors. You'd probably see them in the movies, traditionally propelled by central hand pump mechanism, workers pushed a sea-soaring wooden lever up and down to drive the axles. It featured a low slung, minimal profile with a simple mechanical handbrake acting directly on the flanged iron wheels. The entire contraption was engineered to be light enough for a small gang to manually lift it off the rails and onto the shoulder of the line in a matter of seconds whenever an oncoming train approached. The roll-way work gangs comprised between five and fourteen men, most of whom were black.

18:40Housing was a mixture depending on the region. In the free state, for example, there was a solitary gangers cottage in a cluster of huts for Dutch white labourers, but 80% of the gangers were married and lived with their families along the side of the checks in small huts. Their labourers lived in even more spot-in fashion, their shelters constructed from wooden sleepers. In keeping with the general pattern in southern African society, black gangers and labourers lived in compounds or locations, apart from white workers. An increasing number of what became known as poor whites were employed as gangers, and a distinct class system emerged where these families were regarded as an embarrassment by citizens of the poor republics and other colonists. The life of the ganger and the labourer meant working outside in all weather, but the world of bolts and fish plates, sleepers and track was less taxing and brutalising and less dangerous than rock-blasting and earth-working required to build the line in the first place. Still accidents happened regularly.

19:42Gangers trolleys toppled over or careered out of control on the inclines, maiming or killing passengers and bystanders. For the maintenance gangs, tedious days spent along monotonously linear track were hardly relieved by the prospect of dreary meals and primitive camps, where the frugal dinner was pup and bully beef. Sometimes dinner was what the cook called ever-lasting goat's meat, a stupor that was never empty, Sega putting made with water. Working on the railroad was like into imprisonment, but it was a job. Other than 12 days annual leave, labourers toiled away for 53 hour weeks in summer and 49 hour weeks in winter, including Saturday mornings. They were forbidden to leave their section over weekends in case of an emergency. In the larger railway camps there was more female company. Families were perhaps the key normalising element in life, along the railway lines where youthful marriages and large families were common, which historians say may have been

20:43an accidental or strategic. Infant mortality in the labour huts was high up to 50 per cent in some places. The intermingling of Englishmen and Afghans was only one facet of railside society, the other was the mixing across colour lines. In some railway camps white people kept a careful social distance from black gangers and the house servants, but far away along never ending lines, a degree of colour blindness also crept into emotional and sexual relationships, especially in small, secluded camps. The social ramifications were profound. We are fortunate to have archival records created by the South African Church railway mission. It collected stories starting in the early 1900s but reflected on earlier times. Most particularly the master servant relationship was eroded as white railway men intermixed with black women. Since from the missionaries of the period revealed they were horrified by the social development instead of supporting the idea of integration.

21:45Christian ministers railed in a most un-Christian manner, it must be said, about the mingling of what they called savage blood, with civilised blood. Many white workers married black women and coloured children played alongside their father's gang, so lifestyle hardly captured by our history books, shelved, denied. The lives drifted past passengers staring out of the railway carried your window at the gangers and the labourers and their families, a fleeting view almost mythical. While the trains seemed to exchange the traveller from the landscape, turning it into a detached panorama scrolling past the window, the accounts from those riding the Cape to the Rand, tell a more nuanced story. The traveller's own body was keenly present through the sensations of the light and the heat and the dust and the small indignities that came with them, not least the advice, to fold a rug between one's nether region and the scorching leather cushions, but seated

22:45on leather rather than a wagon box, was enough to sound the death now of the long-distance oxwagon and trade, which leaves us with a curious symmetry to close. The oxwagon's true descendant, the modern 18 wheeler, has spent the last few decades taking back from the train, the cargo the train once took from it. History is rhyming once again. Next we'll join a British South Africa company convoy of oxwagons as the departs from Kimberley in 1890 next stop, Buluwio in Mutabili land in a territory imperial records referred to as Zambesia. Please rate the podcast and your favourite platform and you can sign up for the newsletter at DesmondLatham.blog.