As a nation, South Africa has been “born out of processes of mobility” (Nuttall 2004, 735) such as the Mfecane, European colonialism, the Great Trek, and labour migrancy. The making of South Africa is fundamentally “the story of visible and invisible mobilities” (Nyamnjoh 2013, 660). It is the frequently invisible railway mobilities of Black migrant labourers moving between the township and the city during the apartheid period that will be explored in this chapter. These railway journeys reveal both the “racialized mobility” of South Africa as well as “the centrality of mobility to South African everyday life” (Pirie 2015, 40).

During the apartheid period (1948–1994), the space of the township emerged as a space of immobility that functioned to contain the Black population outside of the “White” city. However, the economy was dependent upon the mobility of the Black migrant labourer from the township to the city as a “temporary sojourner.” This daily commute was enabled through the construction of public transportation systems and commuter railways. These township trains were a “significant force” (Pirie 1987, 283) in materialising South Africa’s racially segregated cities under apartheid, with approximately 1.5 million Black migrant labourers commuting daily between the townships and the city centres (Pirie 1992b, 175; McCaul 1991; Witulski 1986). 1 This everyday mobility routine of commuting became a key site of regulation and resistance to apartheid’s racialised mobility politics.

This chapter explores the symbolic meanings of these uniquely South African township trains as represented in the magazine Staffrider and its associated book series, the Staffrider Series. These were both published by Johannesburg’s Ravan Press, a publishing company first created in 1972 that is known for being “critical, creative and socially committed” (Moss 1997, 18). Ravan Press positioned itself as “a radical publisher dedicated to publishing new or previously marginalised voices and offering new paths for the country’s culture” (Penfold 2017, 48). Whilst the Staffrider magazine was published between 1978–1993 and comprised 11 volumes of, typically, 4 issues each, the Staffrider Series published a total of 28 low-cost paperback books including novels, short stories, anthologies, and poetry between 1979–1986. Through the publication of popular history, social documentary essays, photography, and art as well as the traditional literary genres of poetry, fiction and drama (Oliphant 1992, 99), Staffrider and the Staffrider Series not only provided “a counter discourse” to the officially-sanctioned apartheid media narrative but also created “a space for those rendered invisible by the system to contribute to media and cultural production” (Manase 2005, 56). The promise of Staffrider was:

A South Africa in which Meadowlands and Morningside were on the same page, where Douglas Livingstone of Durban and Mango Tshabangu of Jabavu were side by side, with nothing between them but a stretch of paper and a 1-point rule. The resonance of such a simple idea is almost impossible to recapture now, but in the demented, divided space of apartheid it was bracing. All the other borders the magazine crossed between fiction and autobiography, written and spoken word, lyrical flight and social documentary rest on that first idealistic gesture. (Vladislavic 2008)

It was therefore committed to crossing boundaries, both within the pages of its publications as well as within the nation.

Whilst the township space is “deeply embedded in the nation’s social imaginary” (Mbembe et al. 2008, 239), it is the township train that is focused on here. The train is culturally significant in South Africa (Barnard 2007, 7) and has been described as “the only trope powerful enough to assemble the microcosm” (Wade 1994, 78). A key focus of Staffrider texts were “the difficulties encountered during the daily travels by train” (Manase 2005, 56–57). While critical analyses of the train in South African literature have tended to focus on poetry (McClintock 1987; Wright 2010, 2011; Jones 2016), this chapter will instead focus on the township train short story or “faction” that blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction (Zander 1999). 2 The short story in Black South African writing enabled authors to focus on the community through its typical setting “in communal or public places” such as trains and railway stations (Trump 1988, 44). This chapter analyses the following township train short stories which were all associated with Staffrider : Mango Tshabangu’s “Thoughts in a Train” (1978), Michael Siluma’s “Naledi Train” (1978), Bereng Setuke’s “Dumani” (1980), and Miriam Tlali’s “Fud-u-u-a” (1989). A key focus of Staffrider was the blurring of the “documentary” and “imaginative” genres (Vaughan 1984, 200) and these short stories are all located at the intersection between journalism and creative writing (Seroke 1981, 42).

These texts all attempt to derail apartheid through creatively and critically engaging with the symbolism of South Africa’s “railway apartheid” (Pirie 1989) through focusing on the commute between Johannesburg’s Park Station and the township of Soweto. These representations of “railway based mobility” (Urry 2007, 91) and “railing” (Mom et al. 2009, 30) on the township trains offer oppositional representations of a mobile modernity in South Africa during the apartheid period. In exploring how “riding the rails” (Fraser and Spalding 2012) functions as a key metaphor of alienation and resistance to apartheid, in “reading and writing the rails” (Spalding and Fraser 2012) these Staffrider texts rail against the apartheid structures of racial oppression that dominated the national imaginary at that time. 3

Mobilising the Railways in South Africa

The railways “played a fundamental role in industrial capitalism and the organization of its national (and international) space” (Lefebvre 2003, 212). It is therefore “not only communications media which enable the construction of the imagined community of the nation, but also physical communication and transport links” such as the railways (Morley 2000, 34). In nineteenth-century Britain, the railways heralded “a new era of national community and identity” (Mathieson 2015, 6) through their construction of a national networked community of people, objects, and materials. Similarly, the railways developed a national consciousness which enabled South Africans to move around and experience themselves as part of a connected nation.

The railways were “a defining technology of the modern world” (Revill 2012, 8), and their invention in the nineteenth century was nothing less than a “revolution for mobility” (Thomas 2014, 215). The “machine ensemble” (Schivelbusch 1986) of the railway technically conjoined the route and the vehicle to form an indivisible entity in contrast to previous forms of transportation. The railway system revolutionised “the contours of time, space and everyday life” (Urry 2007, 92), and introduced the railway compartment and the railway station as new public spaces of sociability (Urry 2007, 104).

This “railway mobility system” was central to the emergence of “new times, spaces and sociabilities of public movement” (Urry 2007, 91). The term “railing” refers to this rail-based mobility , and incorporates rail-subjects, rail-objects and rail-scapes (Mom et al. 2009, 30). The railway signalled a number of important changes: the flattening of nature; the passengers’ movement through space; the moving landscape that could be viewed through the window; the enclosed space of the train compartments that placed strangers in close proximity; and the standardisation of time through timetabling (see Urry 1994, 119; Schivelbusch 1986). The railway system appeared to unify the nation for the traveller through the ordering of “railway space ” (the railway map that featured only certain places on the railway route) and “railway time” (the railway timetable was regulated and systematised) (Mathieson 2015, 8). However, while the railways were predominantly associated with the nineteenth century in Britain, Europe and America, they were an early twentieth century phenomenon in Africa, India and Latin America (Urry 2007, 93; Wolmar 2009).

In South Africa, the growth of the railways did not begin in earnest until the 1880s and 1890s, and they were central in the construction of what eventually became South Africa (McCracken and Teer-Tomaselli 2013, 427). South African Railways [SAR], a fusion of the Cape Government Railways, Natal Government Railways, and the Netherlands South African Railway Company, was created as part of the 1909 South Africa Act that led to the Union of South Africa in 1910 (Foster 2008, 202). It eventually became South African Railways and Harbours [SAR&H] in 1922. The railways were seen “as an instrument of social change” (Foster 2008, 202) that ensured that economic and social integration of the previously separate colonies of the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Orange River Colony and the Transvaal. The railways were “an iconographic symbol of the progressive white state” during the early twentieth century (Foster 2008, 203).

The headquarters of the South African Railways and Harbours was established in Johannesburg in the 1920s, thereby positioning the new economic centre of South Africa in the Witwatersrand in contrast to the colonial port cities of Cape Town and Durban (Foster 2008, 204). Johannesburg’s main railway station is Park Station. In 1890, “Park Helt” was the first site to have passenger facilities on the original route between Boksburg and Braamfontein, and it was only in 1894 that it became known as “Park Station” (Jackson 1952, 167). By 1897, Park Station “boasted an imposing steel and glass structure removed from the Amsterdam Exhibition and large enough to house all station offices and passenger facilities” (Klintworth 1975, 324). This Victorian structure was replaced during the building-boom of the 1930s with a new Park Station complex designed by Gerard Moerdijk and Gordon Leith (Kruger 2013, 12). The modern complex of Park Station “announced the nation-building power of the SAR&H” (Foster 2008, 204).

In South Africa, the arrival of the railways signalled “the advent of cultural modernity” (Wright 2010, 3). The railway is therefore “a powerful and multivalent symbol” of industrialisation, urbanisation and colonisation (Wade 1994, 76). Histories of transportation systems such as the railway are “crucial starting points for thinking about the relation between theories of race and mobility in white-settler countries” (Nicholson and Sheller 2016, 5) such as South Africa. The railways cannot be untangled from their colonial histories and geographies. The colonial expansion and development of the railway was a celebration of a cultural modernity conceived as rationality, technological progress, and a privileged form of mobility (Aguiar 2011). Frantz Fanon wrote that “cutting railroads through the bush, draining swamps, and ignoring the political and economic existence of the native population are in fact one and the same thing” (Fanon 2001, 201). Whilst the railways were mobilised in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century as a result of “railway imperialism” (Davis et al. 1991), it was the shift to “railway apartheid” (Pirie 1992a) that reveals the changing significance of the railways in imagining the national and cultural identity of South Africa at distinct political moments. The railways are mobilised in the South African cultural imagination as a way of creating and critiquing myths of national identity and belonging.

Racialising Mobility in South Africa

Railway-based mobility reveals the “the politics of mobility” (Cresswell 2006, 2010) in the social and cultural context of apartheid South Africa. Such a mobility politics refers to “the ways in which mobilities are both productive of such social relations and produced by them” (Cresswell 2010, 21). These “power geometries” of mobility do not merely involve “the issue of who moves and who doesn’t […] it is also about power in relation to the flows and the movement. […] Mobility, and control over mobility, both reflects and reinforces power” (Massey 1994, 149–150). This “power geometry” of mobility was apparent during the period of apartheid in South Africa, where there emerged “a racialized mobility politics” (Nicholson and Sheller 2016, 4). The “racialization of mobility” refers to how practices and institutions of mobility, such as the railways, have been racialised (Seiler 2009, 232). These racialised politics highlight the mobility inequality and injustice of apartheid, as a racial project “concerned with the management of mobilities” (Sheller 2018, 57).

Whilst the “new mobilities paradigm ” (Sheller and Urry 2006) enables an understanding of how “mobility is relative with different historical contexts being organized through specific constellations of uneven mobilities” (Sheller and Urry 2016, 12), it has been critiqued for being “firmly anchored in the global North” (Pirie 2009, 21). This chapter engages with the call for “understandings of mobilities in the context of Global South cities” (Priya Uteng and Lucas 2018, 2) through its focus on the racialised mobility politics of the township train commute between Johannesburg and Soweto. 4

The ideology of apartheid was introduced in 1948 following the National Party’s election success, and its rhetoric appealed to the rise of Afrikaner ethnic nationalism (Dubow 2014, 16). “Apartheid” was a neologism which translates as “apartness” or “separateness” (Dubow 2014, 10). In South Africa however “apartheid” was “a translingual representation of institutionalized racism” that was codified into “a systemic legal structure that divided South Africans into racial groups” (Freuh 2003, 41). The Population Registration Act (1950), Group Areas Act (1950), Natives (Abolition and Coordination of Documents) Act (1952), Native Laws Amendment Act (1952), Bantu Education Act (1953) and the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953) were all central to the ideology of apartheid (Guelke 2005, 84). It was through the “control over education, employment, and mobility” that apartheid successfully institutionalised racism in South Africa (Freuh 2003, 43). These laws which governed “the mobility of Africans” were collectively known as “influx control” (Harber 2018, 160).

While the Population Registration Act (1950) “provided for the compulsory classification of the population into discrete racially defined groups” of White (European), African (Bantu or Black) and Coloured (Christopher 1994, 101), the Group Areas Act (1950) effected “the total urban spatial segregation of the various population groups” (Christopher 1994, 102). The Group Areas Act restricted the homes of Black Africans to either the peri-urban, dormitory townships or to the rural homelands (or Bantustans) and following the Group Areas Act, Black, Coloured and Indian South Africans were forcibly removed from central city spaces. The apartheid city was “divided into compartments” (Fanon 2001, 29) between the (White) settler and the (Black) native.

The township refers to an urban residential area created for Black migrant labour , usually beyond the town or city limits, and was a means of providing a cheap migrant labour force for the city. The township was thus “a peculiar spatial institution scientifically planned for the purposes of control” (Mbembe 2003, 26) and was the material and physical embodiment of apartheid ideology. Interestingly, the Group Areas Board required that “each group area should be separated from others by suitable buffers. Railway lines, main roads, rivers, streams and ridges all form separation media and these should be used as far as possible” (Floyd 1960, 205). These buffers “were to act as barriers to movement and therefore restrict social contact” (Christopher 1994, 103). So, whilst the railway lines functioned as physical barriers to contain the Black population within the township and outside the city, the railways also enabled the daily movement between the township and the city. The railways enabled the movement of people across different racialised geographical spaces through the production of racialised passenger transport routes and corridors (Pirie 2015, 44).

Social contact between population groups was further restricted through the segregation of public space. From 1948 onwards, “Whites-only buses, railway carriages, ambulances, park benches, beaches, swimming pools, libraries, toilets and even lifts in public buildings were a pervasive feature” in South Africa (Guelke 2005, 27). The 1949 Railway & Harbours Amendment Act “enforced racial segregation in trains” (Simons and Simons 1969, 604) and the 1953 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act created “separate social environments for the White and other population groups” (Christopher 1994, 142). In introducing this 1953 Act, Mr. C. R. Swart, the Minister for Justice, explicitly justified the Act in reference to the railways by arguing that:

If a European has to sit next to a non-European at school, if on a railway station they are to use the same waiting-rooms, if they are continually to travel together on the trains and sleep in the same hotels, it is evident that eventually we would have racial admixture. (Christopher 1994, 5)

The compartmentalised city spaces were literally reproduced in the different compartments on the train, with the 1953 Act legalising “railway apartheid” in South Africa (Pirie 1989, 183). With the passing of this Act, trains and train stations “ceased to be public places where people of different backgrounds would encounter one another” and “South Africans on-the-go lost an opportunity to identify mutually and associate as people sharing the mundane task of movement” (Pirie 2015, 42). As well as the separation of races on the train into different compartments, railway stations were architecturally designed to consolidate racial divisions with station platforms throughout the Johannesburg commuter system separated into segregated areas for whites and non-whites (Revill 2012, 143). Johannesburg’s Park Station was “one of the most potent monuments to racial segregation” (Richards and MacKenzie 1986, 91). In designing the new station in 1952 it was noted that “suburban non-European traffic will be catered for on lines similar to those adopted for the European suburban passenger” (Jackson 1952, 174).

The 1952 Natives (Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents) Act required all Africans to carry identification as a way of “ensuring that control over African influx into the towns could be exercised” (Davenport and Saunders 2000, 390). The Pass Laws controlled the “spatial mobility” of Blacks (Dubow 2014, 12) in that they curtailed and controlled freedom of movement , as well as regulating the length of time that could be spent within the city as they were expected to be “temporary sojourners” (Guelke 2005, 28). This Pass system had two contradictory aims: an “exclusionary need” to restrict Black Africans from the city centre and an “inclusionary need” to ensure cheap migrant labour within it (Savage 1986, 181).

The apartheid legislation of spatial engineering, as a “deliberately distorted form of urbanization” (Pirie 1992b, 173), thus maximised the need for public transportation systems which materialised through the construction of commuter railways and the subsidisation of commuter fares. 5 These commuter railways were a significant force in “shaping and articulating South Africa’s racially segmented cities” (Pirie 1987, 283). While the “influx control” laws were attempts to restrict and control the mobility of Black Africans, there also “had to be a way to move people as needed” (Harber 2018, 160) within racialised compartments and corridors. This was “the commuting conundrum” (McCaul 1991) of the apartheid era.

Despite restrictions imposed by “influx control” on their freedom of movement , mobility was an enforced and everyday occurrence for township dwellers. While the railway is a technology or medium of movement, this movement is prescribed by the iron rails of the railway. The township trains perhaps best represent what Michel de Certeau identified with the railway system, when he described the railway as a “travelling incarceration” and the train compartment as a “module of imprisonment” (de Certeau 1984, 111). Township residents were “captive” users of public transport as a combination of long geographical commuting distances between home and work, and the low income wages earned, made other transport options unfeasible (Pirie 1986, 42). In the compartmentalised apartheid city, the native is condemned to “immobility” and is “hemmed in” (Fanon 2001, 40). They are captured and incarcerated by apartheid’s racialised structures.

This racialised mobility politics of the journey between the city and the township cannot be equated with the conceptualisation of commuting as “a privileged form of mobility” (Edensor 2011, 189; Aldred 2014). For the population of Black migrant labourers in South Africa, having been forcibly removed to dwell in the marginal spaces of the township, the daily commute is anything but a privileged form of mobility: it is an enforced, compulsory and incarcerated mobility. The railway journeys experienced by these township dwellers are thus a manifestation of travel as well as travail. 6 The daily commute to and from work is a distinctive modern routine, where commuting time is “a surplus labor which correspondingly reduces the amount of ‘free’ time” (Debord 2006, 59), and is associated with the rise of “compulsive time” (Lefebvre 1971, 53). The everyday routine of commuting travel objectified and dehumanised the passengers, transforming “a man from a traveller into a living parcel” as John Ruskin famously phrased it in the nineteenth century (Schivelbusch 1986, 121). This was more so in twentieth-century South Africa where commuting was a racialised mobility practice. However, whilst Black commuters were constrained by compartments, corridors and timetables through their dependence on the railways, there remained opportunities for resistance. These commuters were “not just units of unconscious freight” and their experience of public transport was “more than just uniform and passive mobility” (Pirie 1992b, 173).

The train becomes part of the daily commute and the railway line is imagined as being “like an umbilical cord” between the township and the city (Kiernan 1977, 215). While the train is part of township dwellers’ everyday life, it is also a daily reminder of the racist discrimination of apartheid policies: it is a symbol of industrial technology associated with speed and time; of exclusion from “white” areas, in that the train removes them from the city at the end of the day; of white control over African lives in the form of Government departments; of African dependence and impotence experienced through the daily commute; and of danger associated with both accidents and crime (Kiernan 1977, 215–216). Trains then “are not simply a means of getting from one place to another. They give expression to the status of black people as foreigners in South Africa, as a migrant labour force” (Vaughan 1984, 198–199). So the public transport of the railways signified not just the arrival of modernity in South Africa but also oppression and subservience (Pirie 1992b, 177).

The railways, then, “came to play an ambiguous and variable role in the historical geography of African townships” (Pirie 1987, 293). Trains became “a significant feature of the movement between the township and the city” (Mbembe et al. 2008, 246). It is “the migrant worker” rather than the flâneur who is “the paradoxical cultural figure of African modernity” (Mbembe and Nuttall 2008, 23) and the experience of travelling by train is “the key image of African urbanity” (Kruger 2013, 74). The railways became central to how modernisation and urbanisation were racialised in in this specific national context, and the imagery of the migrant worker’s daily commute on the township trains increasingly became mobilised in anti-apartheid movements in the South African cultural imaginary.

Staffrider: Railing Against Apartheid

Staffrider magazine was launched in 1978, following the Soweto uprisings of June 1976 nearly two years earlier. 7 The magazine was initially conceived by Mike Kirkwood and Muthobi Mutloatse who had identified a need for a community-based magazine, following the banning of anti-apartheid cultural and political organisations (Oliphant 1990, 358). The Staffrider magazine ultimately became one of South Africa’s “most successful cultural journals ever published” (Oliphant and Vladislavic 1988, viii). The magazine was “the most representative literary magazine of the Soweto era, the high-water mark of the Black Consciousness period” (Mzamane 1991, 182).

As publications influenced by the Black Consciousness Movement, Staffrider and the Staffrider Series had “a socially transformative role” (Gqola 2001b, 32) in emphasising “positive images of Blackness” (Gqola 2001a, 132). As Mutloatse writes “the black community is hungry […] ever-ready-and-willing to lay its hands on ‘relevant’ writing, writing by blacks about blacks” (Mutloatse 1980, 1). The Staffrider dictum is that “black literature is the property of the people loaned to creative writers” and “it is the concern of all Staffriders to take our contributions to our rich black heritage back to the people” (Mutloatse 1980, 6).

Black Consciousness writing in South Africa predominantly focused on “transforming consciousness, overcoming fear, and building racial pride” (Mzamane and Howarth 2000, 176), and the three dominant motifs in Staffrider of “Blackness, revolt against oppression, [and] the people” (Vaughan 1984, 197) reflected these aims. The texts published were simultaneously “the voice of the people” and “the polemical activation of that voice” (Vaughan 1985, 196). It was the “black township reading public” (Vaughan 1985, 195) and their everyday experiences that were rendered visible through the publication of Staffrider and the Staffrider Series. The explicit policy of Staffrider was “to encourage and give strength to a new literature based on communities, and to establish important lines of communication between these writers, their communities, and the general public” (Editorial 1978, 1). This writing “continually re-shaped its idea of the ‘nation’ and, in turn, offered a new way for us to write South Africa’s national literature” (Penfold 2017, 3).

From the outset, Staffrider promoted “an aesthetics of calculated defiance and collectivity” (McClintock 1987, 599) that challenged literary standards as well as traditional modes of creation and distribution. This aesthetics of resistance was reflected in the naming of the magazine and book series. The first issue of the Staffrider magazine explained that:

A staffrider is, let’s face it, a skelm of sorts. Like Hermes or Mercury—the messenger of the gods in classical mythology—he is almost certainly as light-fingered as he is fleet-footed. A skilful entertainer, a bringer of messages, a useful person but … slightly disreputable. […] Like him or not, he is part of the present phase of our common history, riding “staff” on the fast and dangerous trains of our late seventies. (Editorial 1978, 1)

A staffrider, as Mike Kirkwood explains, is “someone who rides ‘staff’ on the fast, dangerous and overcrowded trains that come in from the townships to the city, hanging on to the sides of the coaches, climbing on the roof, harassing the passengers. A mobile disreputable bearer of tidings” (Kirkwood 1980, 23). Staffriders were “symbols of a new order” as they “epitomized freedom and revolt” (Pirie 1992b, 176). It was this freedom and resistance embodied in the mobile figure of the staffrider that made it so appealing in the naming of the magazine: “we drew a comparison between the liberties the staffrider took with the law and the liberties we wanted the magazine to take with censorship system” (Kirkwood 1980, 23).

In a 1979 article published in Staffrider , Mafika Gwala characterised Black writing as focusing on “the complex nature of ghetto life” and stimulating “an awareness of positive values in indigenous culture” (Gwala 1979, 55). A key example highlighted in his discussion was that of “the over-loaded ghetto trains” (Gwala 1979, 55) moving between the townships and the city. These were publications that were dedicated to the publication of the everyday experiences of township dwellers, and were central to what Njabulo Ndebele termed “the rediscovery of the ordinary” (Ndebele 1986) and the rise of “populist realism” (Vaughan 1982, 121) in South African writing. The short story as a genre is able to communicate the experiences of constant pressure and the imminent threat of disruption: “a condition of harassed movement appears generic to township life” (Vaughan 1982, 128). It is significant that “travel” is a key motif within Staffrider as it is “an aspect of black life that is absolutely pervasive” and that is “tied into the specific terms of exploitation and oppression” in South Africa (Vaughan 1984, 198–199).

While critical attention has been paid to the imagining of the staffrider figure (Vaughan 1984, 1985; Gqola 2001b), little consideration has been given to how the “railway mobility system” (Urry 2007, 91) and the experience of “railing” (Mom et al. 2009, 30) during the apartheid period has been imagined, represented and negotiated within Staffrider and the Staffrider Series. While representations of the train “pervade South African literary production of the apartheid era as surely as railways formed part of the daily fabric of the lives of millions of black South Africans” (Alvarez 1996, 102–103), there has been little attention paid to the representation of commuting on these township trains. The commuter is often a “frustrated, passive and bored figure” (Edensor 2011, 189) and as such the commuter’s experience of train travel has been neglected in contrast to the active, resistant, and protesting figure of the staffrider. The monotonous tedium of commuting renders the experience invisible, as “the journey itself remains enigmatic” (Pirie 1993, 713–14). The four short stories analysed below all focus on the journey between Johannesburg and Soweto and represent the embodied experience of the commute on these township trains.

“Thoughts in a Train”

Mango Tshabangu’s short story “Thoughts in a Train” was first published in Volume 1 Issue 2 (1978) of Staffrider . The short story is a first-person narrative of the journey between Johannesburg and Soweto, and Tshabangu is both the commuter and the narrator. The journey through the space enables Tshabangu to reflect more widely on the racialised spatial structures of apartheid. Tshabangu narrates both his own journey within the train compartment, but also narrates the experience of his friends Msongi and Gezani as they move through the spaces of the city centre. The railway mobility is juxtaposed with the pedestrian mobility of walking through the suburbs of Johannesburg. The narrator’s train of thought moves from the railway compartment to the city space and back again, from railing to walking. These different modes of mobility highlight the racialised mobility politics in constructing apartheid and in securing and legitimating the discourse of whiteness associated with the rise of Afrikaner ethnic nationalism through the emotional geographies of fear. The cultural politics of fear are implicated in relationships of bodies, space, and the politics of mobility (Ahmed 2004, 70). 8

The train is imagined as an industrialised mechanical object for Tshabangu. Described as alien objects in the landscape, the narrator describes them as “these things” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). The setting of this short story is the crowded commuter train which is a “symptomatic expression of urban black experience” (Vaughan 1982, 129). The experience of the commute on the overcrowded trains represents the township commuters oppression and imprisonment, with “our bodies sweating out the unfreedom of our souls” (Tshabangu 1978). In describing the train compartment, Tshabangu foregrounds the physical discomfort and proximity to strangers involved in travelling on the overcrowded trains: “we stand inside in grotesque positions—one foot in the air, our bodies twisted away from arms squeezing through other twisted bodies to find support somewhere” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). The railway compartments are congested, as he reflects that “it’s as if some invisible sardine packer has been at work” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). The commuters are metaphorically imagined as sardines who have been packed so closely together that they cannot move easily, and the train is imagined as an industrialised tin. The passengers are dehumanised and objectified, being passively transported inside and along the iron structures of the railways.

The township train with its Black passengers is opposed to the White suburban trains as “we move parallel to or hurtle past their trains” (Tshabangu 1978). These trains moving in parallel reflect the parallel tracks of apartheid. While the township train is associated with overcrowding and congestion, the suburban train is “almost always empty” (Tshabangu 1978) reflecting the different mobility options available to those in power in South Africa. While the overcrowding has led to standing room only for the Black passengers who are positioned in grotesque and undignified positions, the White passengers are seen to “sit comfortably on seats” (Tshabangu 1978).

The exploitation of the Black migrant labour system is realised through the spatial restriction of oppression on the train but is also imagined through the temporal duration of the journey. The commuting time is the subject of rhetorical questions, reminding the township reading community of how their time is wasted and undervalued through the enforced commute: “How far is it from Soweto to Johannesburg? It is forty minutes or forty days. No-one knows exactly” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). This is the empty wasted time associated with modernity.

Yet, despite the mechanised and industrial power of the trains, the railways and apartheid structures have not managed to completely overpower the Black migrant workers who travel on them, as in railing “there is no doubt as to our inventiveness” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). It is through riding the rails that enables the commuters to be active participants on the train journey and to find their communal identity and culture. The community of Black passengers is foregrounded as they are “on the lookout for those of our brothers who have resorted to the insanity of crime to protest their insane conditions” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). The figure of the staffrider in this story is not a criminalised figure, but rather a young figure (reminiscent of the 1976 student protests in Soweto): “We, the young, cling perilously to the outside of coach walls,” and the act of staffriding or riding the rails is associated with bravery and resistance rather than criminality: “We are not a helpless gutless lot whose lives have been patterned by suffering. The more daring of us dance like gods of fate on the rooftop” (Tshabangu 1978, 27).

The experience of the train journey also transports the narrator to reflect on the experience of petty apartheid within the city, with the train acting as a metaphor for urban and national space. Msongi and Gezani experience fear whilst “walking through the rich suburbs of Johannesburg” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). In contrast to the townships they are travelling home towards on the train, the White suburbs are protected by “the numerous policemen who patrolled the streets and snarled in unison with their dogs at Black boys moving through the streets” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). This fear in the suburbs is connected to the closed windows on the White suburban train: “he’d been noticing the shut windows of their train” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). When a fellow passenger throws a bottle of beer at their train, the White passengers “jumped into the air” and “the shut windows were shattered wide open, as if to say danger cannot be imprisoned” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). While the suburbs of Johannesburg and the White suburban trains are “full of fear” and “oppress even the occasional passer-by,” the community of the townships and the township trains is celebrated for its sense of community and conviviality: “they did not have stone walls or electrified fences in Soweto” (Tshabangu 1978, 27).

“Naledi Train”

Michael Siluma’s “Naledi Train” was first published in Volume 1 Issue 4 (1978) of Staffrider . In introducing it, the editors comment on “how often Staffrider writers return to the theme of the journey” (Siluma 1978, 2) and write that this should come as no surprise given that “black South Africa spends a good part of a lifetime ‘on the move’” (Siluma 1978, 2). They challenge the readers to “judge whether Michael Siluma gets things right in this depiction of a typical trip from Park Station into deep Soweto” (Siluma 1978, 2). This echoes the self-conscious remit of Staffrider as a two-way line of communication between the writer and the community: “the writer is attempting to voice the community’s experience (‘This is how it is’) and his immediate audience is the community (‘Am I right?’)” (Editorial 1978, 1).

Naledi Station is the last station on the line that runs from Park Station to Soweto. This journey from Park Station to Naledi Station is the structuring device for the story. Departing from Park Station, the story finishes once the narrator has disembarked from the train at his destination, once he has arrived at Naledi Station. Incidents and reflections on the train journey are interposed with the narrator charting the journey and its various stops and stations along the way: Park Station, Braamfontein Station, Mayfair Station, Grosvenor Station, Langlaagte, Croesus Station, New Canada, Mzimhlophe Station, Phomolong Station, Phefani Station, Dube Station, Ikwezi Station, Merafe Station, and finally Naledi Station.

This is a first-person reflection or account of the journey home by train which begins with “I show my ticket to the barrier-attendant and descend the flight of stairs leading onto the adjacent platforms one and two, Park Station” (Siluma 1978, 2). He notices that “the platform is filled with black faces as the train stops” (Siluma 1978, 2). This crowd of black faces are his “brothers and sisters” (Siluma 1978, 2). “It is sweat, heat and noise” and “we are still packed like sardines” (Siluma 1978, 3).

The speed of the train annihilates the space between the stations, represented through the ellipses and gaps: “Mayfair … Grosvenor … Langlaagte, then Croesus Station” (Siluma 1978, 2). The train is constantly described as speeding in Siluma’s story as “the train speeds towards Naledi” (Siluma 1978, 4). The train’s industrial mechanised speed is foregrounded through its frictionless mobility: “the iron wheels roll on: the iron rails offer no resistance” (Siluma 1978, 4). Despite the speed of movement, the train journey itself is described as one of tedium and boredom: it is a “long and exhausting ride” (Siluma 1978) due to the number of stations the train stops at.

Within this train from Park Station to Naledi, he witnesses the effect of the staffriders/criminals: “We have just left Phomolong Station when pandemonium suddenly erupts as, wide-eyed with fear, the people in the other compartment stampede like wild buck scenting a lion, towards our compartment” (Siluma 1978, 3).

A beer can is thrown out of the window of the train and hits a man on the platform. As the narrator wonders if he is the only person to have witnessed this, a fellow passenger, “an African sister,” suddenly exclaims: “Africans! You hear them demanding freedom but look at the things they do. Do they expect the white people to grant them freedom while they still behave like this?” (Siluma 1978, 3). The narrator pities the woman: “how misguided she is to believe that it is the white man who will decide whether and when to grant us freedom” (Siluma 1978, 3). He looks at his “poor misguided African sister” and realises that her appearance explains her statement: “instead of black plaited African hair she wears long brown wig that looks like a white woman’s hair” (Siluma 1978, 4).

“Dumani”

Bereng Setuke’s “Dumani” was first published in Forced Landing (1980), edited by Mothobi Mutloatse and the third publication of Ravan Press’s Staffrider Series. It focuses on the experience of journeying home and is an account of the commuting experience. This monotonous, repetitive, everyday mobility on these township trains could happen at “any time during the day on any day of the week” (Setuke 1980). The story’s title, “Dumani”, refers to the third-class section or the “Black” section of the train. It is the “first coach in the train, and the last when the train is travelling in the opposite direction” (Setuke 1980, 60–61). “Dumani” derives “its feared name from the sound it makes when the train is in motion, especially at high speed—‘ukuduma’ in Zulu, ‘the buzzer’” (Setuke 1980, 61).

In contrast to the first-class coach “which is occupied by the well-to-do middle-class passengers and is always guarded by a ticket-examiner” (Setuke 1980, 61), the “dumani” coach is a dangerous space, where commuters encounter “iniquity and corruption on a scale that would leave Sodom and Gomorrha dumb with shame” (Setuke 1980, 61). This dumani coach has “no authoritarian intervention from the train-driver or the guard” and is a space where the staffriders “are free to do what they want to victimise the ‘blind-deaf-and-dumb’ passengers anytime, anywhere” (Setuke 1980, 61).

The railway station’s segregation, with the “non-white” and “white” train platforms, architecturally represent the ideology of apartheid and the differing experiences of travelling by train. While the “white-only” concourse holds white passengers who have “enormous dignity,” the “non-white” concourse is “trampled to the edges by people of the ghettoes” (Setuke 1980, 58). The third-person narrator of this story recalls that “walking down the ‘non-white’ stairs on the platform where trains leave for the ghettoes one sees a sea of black faces” (Setuke 1980, 59).

These parallel tracks, or separate experiences of railing, is also featured through the timetable. While the “non-white” passengers are “waiting impatiently for the uncertain arrival of the much-resented Soweto-bound train,” in contrast the “white” passengers’ trains “arrive and depart […] regularly according to the schedule” (Setuke 1980, 58). In contrast to the mechanised and industrial clock time that structures the timetables, the township dwellers’ experience of commuting is anxious and uncertain. The commuters are described as waiting for the trains to arrive and depart.

While the passengers are separated or portioned at the train station following the regulations of “petty apartheid,” it is on boarding the train that the black passengers or “the Soweto-train fraternity” (Setuke 1980, 63) are divided between the commuter, anxiously and impatiently travelling home after a day’s work, and the staffrider, riding the trains in order to victimise the commuters. The commuters are figured as “innocent passengers” whilst the staffriders are criminalised as “amateur gangsters” who routinely pick the pockets of the innocent commuters “throughout the day in each and every train on the railway-line” (Setuke 1980, 58). The commuters are further described as “train-commuters” (Setuke 1980, 64) and as the “poor hijacked passengers” (Setuke 1980, 65).

The commuters are “unsuspecting passengers,” the staffriders are “hooligans” who target “the pockets of those who are boarding and alighting from the train at every station” (Setuke 1980, 60). It is inside the train compartment that the opposition within the “Black” community is created: “the train is now packed to capacity with the seated and the standing; the robbers and the robbed, the assailants and the victims; the jubilant and the disgusted; the confident and the confused; the residents and the non-residents” (Setuke 1980, 62). The passive commuter stands and these “standing passengers are expected to cram themselves like a flock of sheep” in order to give space for the staffriders to play games and drink alcohol (Setuke 1980, 63). Mobility within the train is also controlled. While the commuters’ movement is limited in that “the more one manoeuvres in these coaches, the worse one is exposed to pickpocketing,” the “train gang” of staffriders have “free passage between one coach and the next” (Setuke 1980, 64).

The passengers are assumed to be male with the exception of “some old women” and the “selfish young girl” (Setuke 1980, 62). These women in the train are either “an ailing old widow” (Setuke 1980, 63) or “a fit and healthy young lady” who is subjected to the male gaze of the staffriders (Setuke 1980, 62). The train is a space of sexualised crime. The trains are dangerous as women “do not dare commute on these trains” (Setuke 1980, 67) for fear of being raped and “‘Pulling-the-train’ means a woman being raped by a gang of hooligans” (Setuke 1980, 66).

The account ends with the reader being directly addressed with the rhetorical question: “who is to blame for this state of affairs?” (Setuke 1980, 67). Setuke argues that “these criminals are children who are brought up in homes. Since charity begins at home, is it not a parental duty to give children a primary socialization, right in the home? Every day of their lives?” (Setuke 1980, 67). He appeals to the reader that

“Dumani” is not the only coach in our train where all these inequities are carried out. This crime is spreading itself, and reaching out a hand to younger boys who will grow up and catch a ride with it. There are so many trains carrying passengers to and from various parts of our beloved, sunny South Africa, which are infested with young criminals molesting millions of helpless people. Unless something is done to check it, if not bring it to an end, there will, no doubt, forever be at the heart of our lives the recurring cycle that we call “DUMANI”. (Setuke 1980, 68)

“Fud-u-u-a”

While the gendered experience of travelling by train is articulated in “Dumani,” it is the contributions from Miriam Tlali that fully represent the female perspective of travelling on the township trains. It is this female perspective that is fictionalised in her short story “Fud-u-u-a” (Tlali 1989). As Tlali explains “Fud-u-u-a!” is “a chant sung by distressed commuters trying to get on to crowded trains” (Tlali 1989, 27). Tlali’s writings are primarily concerned with offering “glimpses into the lives of Africans—mainly women—living on the margins of white, urban society” (Gunne 2014, 167). In her writing, the focus on the gendered experience of Black women was in contrast to most of the writings in Staffrider which focused on the Black male experience (Gqola 2001a, b).

In the series “Voices from the Ghetto,” Tlali interviews an office cleaner who works in Johannesburg. Mrs. TH recounts that “we can’t go to Park Station; we may not sleep on the benches. We may not sit in the waiting rooms. We must stand outside. Even when there’s a train on the platform, we must not board it” (Tlali 1980, 3). The cleaners, as mobile women in the public spaces of the city centre, are mistaken for prostitutes: “they mistake us for streetwalkers” (Tlali 1980, 4).

“Fud-u-u-a!” is a short story written in the third person and follows Nkele’s commute home from Johannesburg to Soweto. The reader is first introduced to Nkele as she “hurried towards Park Station” (Tlali 1989, 27) at quarter past five in the evening on a “typical Friday evening” (Tlali 1989, 28) in order to catch the “First-Stop Naledi train” (Tlali 1989, 27). Rushing to catch the train, Nkele is anxious whether she will make it on time as the “stupid Boer guard […] has the filthy habit of blowing the whistle a whole three, even four minutes before ‘ten to’” (Tlali 1989, 29).

In her rush to enter the train station, “she mingled with the other pedestrians dodging, winding and scuttling along” (Tlali 1989, 27). The crowded city spaces look like “human avalanches” (Tlali 1989, 27). This crowd “was mainly black faces” as “most whites seemed of late to avoid moving along the main thoroughfares leading towards Park Station at that time of day” (Tlali 1989, 28). Within the city space, there is a shared Black community, as witnessed when the Black male commuter prevents Nkele from running out into the traffic. As she comments, “Our brothers are usually so protective towards us in town” (Tlali 1989, 28). In the city space and the railway station there is a “spirit of black solidarity” (Tlali 1989, 30). This is in stark contrast to the threat of violence experienced from her fellow Black commuters inside the railway compartment.

The trains are also compared to the white trains with the two moving in parallel. Ntombi states that “what is annoying about this congestion is that you never see it happening in their trains—those ‘whites only’ coaches. They make sure that the white passengers sit comfortably” (Tlali 1989, 36). Whilst the White train is comfortable, the township train is described as “‘our’ sardine-like packed train” (Tlali 1989, 36). Nkele compares the throngs of commuters as she complains to herself that “we are like bees” (Tlali 1989, 27). The station has “throngs of passing commuters” (Tlali 1989, 30). She comments on “the force of the moving ‘stream’” of passengers, “the ‘torrent’ of male passengers” (Tlali 1989, 31), the “joggling, propelling throngs” and their “‘wrestling’ bodies” (Tlali 1989, 33).

Shadi recounts her experience of violence on the train: “the train was packed and everyone was sandwiched into everyone as usual”; women “had to be strong to face the daily hazards of travelling in the trains of Soweto” (Tlali 1989, 35). Travelling on the train is described as “what was virtually the ‘front line’ of a black women’s battle for mere existence in the bustling city of gold” (Tlali 1989, 37). With the emergence of the railways, the train compartment was a gendered space in which women were vulnerable. This was a popular narrative during the Victorian period, where the dangers of railway mobility for women were foregrounded through the railway compartment as a key space of the railway system’s “geography of fear” (Despotopoulou 2015). The train compartment was potentially a site of a “dangerous incarceration, an entrapment” (Beaumont 2007, 152).

The commute is a familiar everyday routine for Nkele: “the familiar Friday-evening ‘stampede’ for trains, buses or taxis, etc. had now become, to her, like the other commuters, just one of those phenomena one had to live with and fight one’s way through” (Tlali 1989, 29). While the commute is a daily experience for Nkele, it is also a time of sociability for her. She travels home with her friend Ntombi every night, a friend she had made when she first “started travelling to work in town on board the Soweto trains” (Tlali 1989, 31).

Conclusion

These commutes, the community of commuters, and the spaces of the railway station and the train compartment all draw attention to the racialised mobility politics of apartheid, and the focus on the everyday experiences of the township dwellers helps to raise the consciousness of the Staffrider community. The actual train journeys represented in these township train short stories function metaphorically as journeys towards “political self-education” (Vaughan 1982, 129). The township train compartments and the corridors they traverse all work to raise consciousness of the spatial structures of the nation under apartheid, and the figure of the commuter, as a migrant labour force, embodies the excluded national subject. However, these train compartments, corridors and commuters are both the failure of the apartheid nation and the promise of an imagined nation to come. The train is both a site of disconnection, exclusion and separation and of connection, conviviality and community (Jones 2013, 41–42).

Railways are important as they both drive and reflect “broader changes in the social, cultural and economic landscape within which they are situated” (Thomas 2014, 215). The cultural significance of the commuter railways or the township trains reveals the “racialization of mobility” (Seiler 2009) within apartheid South Africa. Exploring the intersection of racial politics and mobility politics within this specific cultural context reveals the centrality of the railways in constructions of the nation. The railway was both a daily reminder of oppression and alienation but was also the inspiration for creativity and resistance. The short stories published by Staffrider reveal how the “mobilization of race” within the Black Consciousness Movement focused on revealing the “racialization of mobility” (Seiler 2009) in everyday life. Railing on the township trains enabled the authors published by Staffrider to rail against apartheid.

While this chapter has looked to the past, these railway routes between Johannesburg and Soweto still operate today. Despite the abolition of mobility controls in post-apartheid South Africa and the “freedom of movement ” being enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996), township trains continue to maintain “a system of labour for the majority and mass capital accumulation for the minority” (MADEYOULOOK and Mofokeng 2011, 65). The train, igado or isithemela, is “a means of transport that has become a stand-in for the distances between peoples, the construction of segregation and a mode of economic repression” and yet “somewhere between station and tracks, departure point and destination are the memories and futures of ordinary lives” (MADEYOULOOK and Mofokeng 2011, 65). Located somewhere between here and there, now and then, the railways continue to mobilise the failures, hopes, and dreams of the nation.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Township railway provision had three distinctive phases of development in South Africa from 1902 up until the 1960s and despite the apparent simultaneous development of townships and the railways, there was never any “unitary, harmonious state plan” (Pirie 1987, 293).

  2. 2.

    The new black literature of the 1970s was mainly poetry as a way of circumventing censorship in South Africa (Zander 1999, 15). Poetry and the short story were popular genres as they could be produced in shorter periods of time (Mzamane 1977; Trump 1988).

  3. 3.

    In the context of the railways, the noun “rail” means “one of a pair of parallel bars laid on a prepared track, roadway etc., that serve as a guide and running surface for the wheels of a railway train.” However, the verb “rail” can also mean “to complain bitterly or vehemently” (Collins English Dictionary 1999).

  4. 4.

    The “global South” refers to what has historically been regarded as “the non-West—variously known as the ancient world, the orient, the primitive world, the third world, the underdeveloped world, the developing world” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, 1). Many studies on racialised mobility have focused on the USA and the so-called “Jim Crow” practices where African-Americans were segregated on streetcars, buses, steamboats and railroads (Pirie 2015, 39; see, for example, Richter 2005).

  5. 5.

    The development of the township railways in South Africa was dependent on the “commuting” of the fares, which were subsidised by the Department of Transport, the South African Transport Services, and local authorities (McCaul 1991, 218). The word “commute” derives from the “commuting” of fares that were paid by nineteenth century Americans who regularly travelled to work by train (Aldred 2014, 450). Railways in South Africa are typically associated with two types of commute by the Black migrant labour force: the long-distance commutes associated with travel between rural homelands and the mines and the daily short-distance commutes between township and city centre (Pirie 1992b, 174).

  6. 6.

    Whilst travel refers to the commonplace meaning of taking a journey, travel also evokes pain and work as “travel” is linked etymologically to “travail” or “labour, toil, suffering, trouble” (Kaplan 2003, 208).

  7. 7.

    Soweto is South Africa’s largest township. The consolidated townships to the west of Johannesburg (the South Western Townships) were given the collective acronym of SOWETO in 1963 (Pirie 2016). Following the Soweto student uprising against the imposition of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in schools, 1976 has retrospectively been identified as a key moment in resistance to apartheid (Kruger 2013, 96).

  8. 8.

    Sara Ahmed (2004) analyses in detail Frantz Fanon’s account of being hailed “Look, a Negro!” that occurred on a train (Fanon 2008, 84).