Get Back on Track

The Symbolism and Legacy of Trains in South African History

The train moves through landscapes stitched with violence, carrying bodies and destinies alike… where to every birth its blood flows on tracks of both exile and homecoming.
— Mongane Wally Serote

Trains have long held a powerful place in the narrative of Black South Africans. They are not just mechanical constructs but symbols of colonial extraction, displacement, and resilience. These metallic centipedes of colonialism carry the weight of history, embodying themes of spatial justice, economic migration, and political struggle. In South African cultural production, trains function as metaphors that intersect with lived realities, reflecting the complex relationship between movement, memory, and identity.

Trains as Cultural and Political Metaphors

Whether it is in Stimela’s songs about labor featuring Ray Phiri’s musical narratives or Busi Mhlongo’s explorations of urbanization with railway metaphors, trains are evoked as sonic carriers of displacement, worker solidarity, and the aspiration for healing and reunion. They embed collective memory and resistance within cultural expression, serving as more than just transportation—they are vessels of history and meaning.

Hugh Masekela’s iconic song, Stimela (Coal Train), vividly captures the historical role of trains as instruments of exploitation during colonial and Apartheid South Africa. The lyrics reflect the harsh reality of migrant labor, where trains brought workers from distant regions to work in the gold and mineral mines of Johannesburg. This imagery underscores the deep connection between railways and the extraction of resources, shaping the socio-economic fabric of the country.

Colonial Railways: Tools of Extraction and Control

European colonial powers built railways in Africa mainly to extract and export valuable resources—minerals, timber, and agricultural products—from the interior to coastal ports linked to global markets. In the gospel of development, trains were seen as symbols of progress, turning “unclaimed” land productive. However, this narrative often obscured the darker realities of colonialism.

In South Africa, railway lines connected the mineral-rich interior, notably Johannesburg’s goldfields and Kimberley’s diamond mines, to the coastal ports of Durban and Cape Town. Yet, these rail networks were not built for the benefit of all; they were designed to serve the interests of colonial and later apartheid regimes. The infrastructure was a tool of spatial control, reinforcing racial segregation and social hierarchies.

The Dual Economy and Spatial Violence

Colonial and apartheid rail networks were acts of spatial violence that reinforced and entrenched racial segregation. Built to connect mines with markets, they bypassed communities considered irrelevant to the extractive economy, creating a “dual economy” where development clustered along rail corridors serving white settlers. At the same time, Black nations were confined to marginalized homelands and segregated urban areas with poor infrastructure access.

This spatial engineering shaped the geography of apartheid, creating a landscape marked by exclusion and dislocation. Trains became symbols of both oppression and resistance, carrying the weight of history and the aspirations of those who sought to reclaim their place in society.

Personal Memories and the Impact of Railways

For many South Africans, trains evoke personal memories that reflect the complexities of life under apartheid. Some of my most vivid childhood memories are about trains. These memories are more pleasant than those commonly associated with Black South Africa and, ironically, highlight a positive aspect of living in a totalitarian police state; it was safe for a nine-year-old to travel alone to Vereeniging, a town 50km from Soweto, where I lived.

My mother’s older sister lived in Sharpeville, a township outside Vereeniging. My mother grew up in Sharpeville after her family was forcibly removed from Topville, or “Top Location,” as they called it. Sharpeville was “officially” constructed to replace Topville due to “overcrowding” and “illnesses like pneumonia.” But in my family’s telling, the real illness was the apartheid state’s obsession with containment, its refusal to allow Black life to flourish on its own terms.

The Role of Railways in Industrial Development

The first railway to Vereeniging arrived in 1892, connecting the Cape and Johannesburg via Bloemfontein, an essential infrastructure development that channeled imported goods, mining equipment, and labor into the interior mining areas, enabling efficient resource extraction and industrial activities. The old trains carried more than freight; they carried the smell of coal, the sting of iron in the air, and the unspoken knowledge that the line served somewhere else’s wealth.

The main rail corridor from Cape Town to Johannesburg still passes through landscapes marked as much by absence as by presence. Under apartheid, those absences were often by design. Passenger services on trunk lines seldom stopped in or near Black townships, while branch lines were oriented toward mines, grain silos, and white-owned farming towns. Where stations did exist in Black settlements, they were typically under-serviced, freight-only, or deliberately under-invested, reinforcing patterns of exclusion.

The Future of High-Speed Rail in South Africa

Today, many of the gaps remain. Between the Cape Winelands and the Vaal Triangle lie dozens of intermediate towns whose rail-dependent economies have contracted sharply since the 1980s. In De Aar, once the country’s largest marshalling yard, railway employment fell from more than 3,000 jobs in the early 1980s to under 400 by the late 2000s. Beaufort West’s railway depot closed in the 1990s, leaving road freight and tourism as the main employers.

A future high-speed rail (HSR) network could change this trajectory, but the outcome is not predetermined. International evidence varies: in France and Spain, intermediate HSR stations have stimulated regional manufacturing and logistics hubs when paired with targeted investment; in Morocco, the Tangier–Casablanca line has so far brought benefits mainly to its terminal cities. In South Africa, a Cape-Johannesburg HSR could either link these towns into the country’s economic framework or reinforce their marginality by passing through at 300km/h.

If integrated into a green industrialization strategy, the line could serve as a hub for agro-processing in the Karoo, renewable-energy manufacturing in the Northern Cape, and climate-resilient housing developments around selected station towns. Each stop could act as a node within a clean-energy logistics network, connecting solar farms, wind corridors, and regional food markets to the rest of the country.

Even green corridors can become extractive if they move energy, labor, and goods outward without fostering prosperity along their path. Whether this shift turns into a story of renewal or repetition depends on the maps we draw now—maps that determine who is included in the journey and who remains left off the timetable.

Reimagining the Nation Through Infrastructure

In a country where geography is biography, and memory is place-based, mobility has always been political. Apartheid criminalized Black movement. Democracy promised freedom of movement, but delivered dangerous taxis, slow buses, and long waits. Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow explores the ambivalence of train imagery in the postapartheid urban milieu, where trains represent flux and identity disruption.

For South Africa, where apartheid carved enduring fault lines of spatial exclusion, high-speed rail is not just about faster trains; it is about redrawing the very geography of apartheid and colonialism and reimagining the nation-state as modernized indigenous communities.

South Africa is not ideal for HSR because it is vast. It is ideal for HSR because it is broken. Not in some abstract developmental sense. But in the most literal, cartographic sense, the country’s geography is fractured, deliberately. Colonialism structured its provinces and cities to be apart. Apartheid engineered its cities and neighborhoods, its peoples to be separate. Apart from the land, separate from each other, disconnected from power.

The long-haul road from Johannesburg to Cape Town is not just long because the country is large. It is long because everything in between was made invisible. So when we talk about HSR, when we imagine sleek trains threading Gauteng to the Cape in five hours instead of fifteen, we are talking about an opportunity to rewrite the logic of extractive settler colonialism and apartheid ethno-capitalism. However, this will only happen if we actively engage with what is almost certainly an inevitability and act to counter dysfunctional elite design and capture.

In To Every Birth Its Blood, trains carry both the possibility of connection and the violence of dislocation. In South Africa, HSR can become a reckoning in motion, a way of the patchwork kilt of a new, genuine nation rather than the disoriented Frankenstein monster that settler colonialism and apartheid engineering tried to stitch together. But only if it is built with memory and intent. Because infrastructure, even with the best aspirations, is never neutral. It can build, but it can also dislocate. It can integrate, but it can also dispossess.

Suppose South Africa’s HSR moonshot is to be more than a technocratic fantasy or an elite vanity project. In that case, it must be yoked to a democratic vision: one that centers spatial justice, builds local capability, resists accumulation without redistribution, and honors the land’s precolonial past as much as its post-carbon future.

This is not about speed. It is about direction.