Description
About the Author
Charles van Onselen is an acclaimed historian of Southern Africa and Research Professor at the University of Pretoria. He has been honoured with visiting fellowships at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford and Yale University.
Reviews
'The great master of social history, van Onselen, provides us an unsurpassable lesson in the commodification and disposal of human life.' -- James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University
'Fierce and lyrical, furious and humane, this is the work of a master historian.' -- Professor James Campbell, Department of History, Stanford University
'Occasionally, social history research shines a piercing light on the entanglement of transport and society. Van Onselen's dazzling study of just one train route is about journeys loaded with fear, loathing and contempt. The Night Trains is a devastating account of human burden and wreckage.' -- Gordon Pirie, African Centre for Cities, UCT
'If you have never known about the fourteen-coach up-train 804 and the down-train 307, and their cargo of Mozambican men in cattle wagons, shuttling between Ressano Garcia, in Mozambique, that captured source of mine-bound labour, and Booysens railway station in Johannesburg, that mining hub in Southern Africa hungry for cheap labour, you are now about to know. You will know about colonial visions and the brutal mining origins of South African capitalism. It is an effect that will never let go of you. And then you will ask: where is South Africa today; where is it going? And you will ponder for a long time.' -- Prof Njabulo S Ndebele, Chairman of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and former Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Town
'The place of technology in social affairs is never neutral. But some are less neutral than others. Writing with deep empathy and evocation for the ordinary people in history for which he has become so uniquely capable, Charles van Onselen tells the story of the role of the locomotive in regimenting, deceiving, ensnaring, holding, destroying, indeed sucking in and puffing out, the thousands of Mozambican miners who came to work the mines of South Africa in the early 20th century. Nelson Mandela named his Presidential residence in Pretoria Mahlamba Ndlopfu (Tsonga for 'new dawn') in honour of the people of Southern Mozambique who made (some in) South Africa prosper. Charles van Onselen documents why.' -- Wilmot James, Visiting Professor at Columbia University and author of Our Precious Metal: African labour in South Africa's Gold Industry 1970-1990
Book Information
ISBN 9781787384040
Author Charles van Onselen
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd
Publisher C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd