Racialized Railway Mobilities: Repression and Resistance in the Anglophone South African Short Story During the Drum Decade

ABSTRACT

South Africa has a complex history of racialized (im)mobilities. During the social engineering of apartheid, the city became a racialized white space that was dependent on black migrant workers who were forced to live in the marginal spaces on the edge of the city. This daily commute was enabled through the construction of public transportation systems and commuter railways. This mundane and banal form of mobility became a key site of both repression and resistance during the apartheid era. The present article explores how these racialized railway mobilities were represented during the ‘Drum decade’ of the 1950s in South Africa. It explores how the short story, as a liminal genre positioned within local and transnational literary cultures, is mobilized to narrate railway mobilities during this transitional decade. Texts analyzed include the news reports and short stories by Can Themba, Es’kia Mphahlele, and Nat Nakasa. This article explores how the mobile public spaces of the railways and the mobile figures of railway passengers were mobilized in the Anglophone South African short story as a form of resistance to the repression of the apartheid era.

KEYWORDS:

• Anglophone
• apartheid
• liminality
• mobilities
• race
• railways
• short story
• Sophiatown
• South Africa
• train

Introduction

South Africa has historically been ‘born out of processes of mobility’ (Nuttall 735), and mobility is equally central to everyday life in South Africa today (Pirie, ‘Colours, Compartments and Corridors’). The public transport of the railways during the apartheid era is the focus of this article, specifically as represented in the Anglophone short stories associated with Drum magazine in the 1950s. Since the National Party’s election victory in 1948, the institutionalization of racial separation (apartheid) cannot be disentangled from increasing urbanization and the production of the apartheid city. It is the railway mobilities of the black migrant workforce, forced to travel daily to and from the white spaces of the city, that reveal how apartheid institutionalized the ‘racialization of mobility’ (Seiler 232). These journeys were enabled through public transportation systems that were a ‘significant force’ (Pirie, ‘African Township Railways’ 283) in materializing the racially segregated apartheid city. The railways are a key site for exploring both the repression and resistance to apartheid’s ‘racialised mobility politics’ (Nicholson and Sheller 4).

Within South Africa, the cultural significance of the train is specific to ‘the cultural manifestation of apartheid’ (Gunne 143), and 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 102–103). The train is described as ‘the only trope powerful enough to assemble the microcosm’ (Wade 78, emphasis original). Public transport such as the railway function as chronotopes of space and time as well as social relations (Quayson 115).

Whilst my previous research analyzed how railway mobilities were represented in the short stories published by Staffrider magazine during the 1970s as a way of ‘derailing apartheid’ (Gibson), this article instead explores how writings associated with Drum magazine during the 1950s narrate railway im(mobilities) in the apartheid city. A key theme mobilized to protest against apartheid at this time was that of travelling on public transport. This article explores the narratives of railway mobilities as represented through the news reports and short stories of Es'kia Mphahlele, Nat Nakasa, and Can Themba. The short stories and journalistic reports have been selected for their representation of the railway mobility system between the townships and the city centre. The selection excludes writings focusing on intercontinental train journeys or those exploring other forms of mobility (such as walking, cycling, driving, and the bus transportation system). Es’kia Mphahlele first published ‘Man Must Live’ in his short story collection Man Must Live and Other Stories and later republished it in the collection In Corner B. Can Themba won the first Drum short story competition in 1953 with the short story ‘Mob Passion,’ and railway mobilities also feature in his later short stories ‘Crepescule’ and ‘The Dube Train’. The journalistic reports ‘Terror in the Trains’ by Can Themba and ‘Must We Ride to Disaster’ by Nat Nakasa are also considered in relation to the short stories.

Originally launched in 1951 as the African Drum, the initial aim of the magazine was to ‘serve a black readership with stories of tribal culture, religion, great leaders, worthy homilies, and intellectual essays’ (Cowling 14). African Drum was not a commercial success, and within a few months a new editor (Anthony Sampson) was appointed, the offices moved to Johannesburg, and the magazine was renamed Drum. It did not take long for it to become ‘the first transnational popular publication in English to be published and widely circulated in Anglophone Africa’ (Odhiambo 158). The ‘Sophiatown renaissance’ was ultimately a failure (Visser 42) as a result of the increased censorship laws, the banning of individuals under the Suppression of Communism Act, and the effects of the introduction of Bantu Education under which black Africans were educated in native languages rather than the English language.

The magazine provided ‘a social barometer of the decade’ (Chapman 185) by representing life as lived in the margins of the city. The 1950s was ‘one of the most turbulent decades in modern South African history’ (Choonoo 252). This decade ran from the election victory of the National Party in 1948 until the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, when the South African police force shot and killed unarmed black protesters. Although not new, the impact of racial discrimination and apartheid for black South Africans ‘changed both quantitively and qualitatively’ from 1948 onwards (Chapman 184). The fifties thus ‘spelled out the end of one kind of South Africa and foreshadowed the beginning of another’ (Nkosi 20-21). Lewis Nkosi retrospectively described this period as both a ‘hectic’ (15) and a ‘fabulous’ decade (21). The decade was characterized by both the increased repression with the formalization of apartheid and the simultaneous emergence of resistance movements through the protest actions of strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience (Lodge).

Racing the Rails: Public Transport in Apartheid South Africa

The development of railways in the 19^th century in Britain, Europe, and America was nothing less than a ‘revolution for mobility’ (Thomas 215). The ‘machine ensemble’ of the railway technically conjoined the route and the vehicle to form an indivisible entity in contrast to previous forms of transportation and is characterized as the annihilation of space and time (Schivelbusch). The railway signalled a number of important changes: the flattening of nature; the travellers’ movement through space; the moving landscape that could be viewed through the window; the enclosed public space of the train compartment; and the standardization of time through timetabling (Urry, Consuming Places 119). This ‘railway mobility system’ was central to the emergence of ‘new times, spaces and sociabilities of public movement’ (Urry, Mobilities 91).

The railways were an early 20^th century phenomenon in Africa, India, and Latin America (Urry, Mobilities 93). The growth of the railways was central in the construction of what became South Africa in 1910 (McCracken and Teer-Tomaselli 427). South African Railways [SAR], a fusion of the Cape Government Railways, Natal Government Railways, and the Netherlands South Africa Railway Company, was created as part of the 1909 South Africa Act that led to the Union of South Africa in 1910 (Foster 202). It became the South African Railways and Harbours [SAR&H] in 1922, and the new headquarters in Johannesburg positioned the new economic centre of South Africa in the Witwatersrand in contrast to the colonial port cities of Cape Town and Durban (Foster 204). The railways were ‘an instrument of social change’ (Foster 202) that ensured the economic and social integration of the previously separate colonies of the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Orange River, and the Transvaal into a unified national community through the construction of routes, networks, and railway time. In effect, it is ‘not only communications media which enable the construction of the imagined community of the nation, but also physical communication and transport links’ (Morley 34).

The railways were also ‘a powerful and multivalent symbol’ of colonization, industrialization, and urbanization (Wade 76). The parallel tracks of the railway are entangled with histories of colonialism in white settler countries such as South Africa as ‘the train has always been a physical extension of an imperialist vision’ (Kirby 27). The railways signified not just the arrival of modernity in South Africa but also racialized oppression and subservience (Pirie, ‘Travelling under Apartheid’ 177). It was the shift to ‘railway apartheid’ (Pirie, ‘Rolling Segregation into Apartheid’) that provides the socio-political context for the short stories analyzed in this article.

With the election victory of the National Party in 1948, there was a consolidation and formalization of a new racialized mobility control in South Africa. The National Party had been elected as their rhetoric of apartheid had appealed to the rise of a white Afrikaner ethnic nationalism (Dubow 16). During apartheid’s first decade, the formalized segregation of the races was controlled by the passing of numerous Acts and legislation that controlled ‘the mobility of Africans’, which were collectively known as ‘influx control’ (Harber 160).

The Population Registration Act (1950) made it compulsory for the population to be classified into racially defined groups, and the Group Areas Act (1950) effected the urban spatial segregation of the various population groups and restricted black Africans to dwelling in either the peri-urban townships or the rural homelands. Whilst the iron rails of the railways were used as buffers that acted as ‘barriers to movement’ (Christopher 103), the railways simultaneously enabled the movement of people between and across the racialized spaces of the city and township through passenger transport routes and corridors (Pirie, ‘Colours, Compartments and Corridors’ 44).

Whilst the 1949 Railway & Harbours Amendment Act enforced racial segregation in trains (Simons and Simons 604), the 1953 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act created separate public spaces for black and white. This 1953 Act was justified through reference to the railways as it was argued 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 5). Train stations were architecturally designed to consolidate the racial and class divisions of the train, and station platforms were segregated into whites and non-whites (Revill 143). As public spaces, both the ‘mobile public space’ (Tuvikene et al. 2967) of the train and the ‘fixed public space’ of the train station (2966) effected racial segregation.

The ‘spatial mobility’ of black Africans was controlled through the introduction of ‘Pass Books’ following the 1952 Natives Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents Act (Guelke 28). These Pass Laws had a contradictory aim in that they were designed to serve an ‘exclusionary need’ to restrict black Africans from the ‘white’ city and an ‘inclusionary need’ to ensure cheap labour within these same spaces (Savage 181). The spatial engineering of apartheid maximized the need for public transport, the construction of commuter railways, and the subsidization of commuter fares. This was ‘the commuting conundrum’ of apartheid (McCaul 218). For those forced to live in the margins of the city, the commute can be read as ‘an intensely political activity’ (Tuvikene et al. 2966), and it was trains that became ‘a significant feature’ of the daily commute (Mbembe et al. 246).

The railways were also mobilized in the resistance movement to apartheid during the 1950s. The anti-apartheid movement ‘concentrated their public displays of defiance on urban environments and amenities from train stations and bus lines to park benches and concert halls’ (Kruger 62). Public transport emerged as a site of ‘popular protest and political mobilization’ in South Africa at this time (Khosa 167). Despite the efforts of social engineers, the black commuters were not simply ‘just units of unconscious freight’, and their experiences of public transport were ‘more than just uniform and passive mobility’ (Pirie, ‘Travelling under Apartheid’ 177). The contradictory meanings of the railway, as a site of repression and resistance, is conveyed through the image of the train as a ‘travelling incarceration’ (de Certeau 111). This ambivalent and contradictory meaning of the railways – as sites of immobility/incarceration and mobility/navigation – becomes a key theme for the protest writing of this period. However, before analyzing the texts in detail, it is important to first situate these writings within the wider cultural context as emerging from a particular location (Sophiatown), published within the medium of a magazine (Drum), and developing a specific genre (the short story).

Mediating Mobilities: Drum Magazine and the Short Story

Located to the west of Johannesburg, Sophiatown developed as a black freehold area that was ‘left to grow quietly in the shadows’ of Johannesburg (Proctor 59). It was attractive to migrant labourers because of its proximity to the city, freehold tenure, and freedom from state control (Gready 142). It became the largest suburban black residential area in South Africa (Coplan 170). Blake Modisane described it as ‘the most cosmopolitan of South Africa’s black social igloos’ (Modisane, Blame Me on History 16), and its ‘heterogenetic urbanism’ emerged as a form of resistance to the dehumanization of apartheid (Hannerz 192).

The co-existence of repression and resistance during the 1950s is captured in Themba’s description of Sophiatown at this time, through an intertextual reference to Charles Dickens’ The Tale of Two Cities: ‘it was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair’ (Themba, The Will to Die 5). Nkosi remembered that despite the increased repression it was also ‘a time of infinite hope and possibility’ (35), and Mphahlele recalled that ‘people felt that freedom was just around the corner’ (Mphahlele quoted in Nicol, 2). Sophiatown was a ‘liminal space’ in between the white city and the black rural homelands (Bailey and Rosenberg 73) that was connected to the city by the railways. It was this transitional moment in the emergence and consolidation of apartheid that ‘moulded both the significance and tragedy of Sophiatown’ (Gready 139).

First published in 1951, Drum magazine symbolized a new urban South Africa that was epitomized by Sophiatown (Gready 144). The writers did not romanticize the rural or tribal areas nor condemn the moral degradation of the city (Gready 147). They rejected the ‘Jim Comes to Joburg’ trope of South African English language fiction (Gray) and instead articulated an urban black experience that had been ‘virtually unrepresented’ in the black commercial or alternative political press at the time (Choonoo 253). The magazine provided a platform for ‘authentic black voices’ to speak directly to their audience about their daily experiences (Mahala 6). The authors chose to write in ‘a medium that was readily accessible to their public and in a language that enabled them to reach the widest possible readership’ (Lindfors, Early Black South African Writing in English 22). Magazines were ‘vital literary outlets’ (Bosch Santana 170) in this period, and Drum’s emergence helped to nurture ‘modes of cultural resistance’ (Helgesson 22). Their cultural and political value centred on the foregrounding of ‘local experience and political resistance’ and the ‘circulating textuality’ of cultural forms’ (Helgesson 24). Drum was associated not only with the circulation of the English Literature but also Hollywood cinema, African American cultures of jazz, and the Harlem Renaissance in America. The magazine’s position within the world literary system is also evidenced through its publication of both local and international authors, and the inclusion of local and international judges to judge the short story competitions (Bosch Santana 170). The magazine was a mobile medium that circulated across Anglophone Africa (Odhiambo), and the short stories it published were a ‘migrant form’ (Bosch Santana).

The short story was ‘perfectly suited’ (Ehmeir 114) to publication in such a magazine. The magazine’s distinctive contribution to the literary history of South Africa was the development of the short story, with over 80 being published during the 1950s and through the six short story competitions it ran from 1952 (Gready 145). It is questionable whether the Anglophone short story would have developed at all without it (Barnett 172), and the magazine marked ‘the substantial beginning’ of the modern black short story in South Africa (Chapman 183).

The magazine’s appearance ‘excited enormous writing activity’ in the English-language short story (Mphahlele, The African Image 223). The use of English reflected the writers’ missionary education in English. English was ‘a working language, a learning language, [and] a political medium of communication in a multilingual society’ (Mphahlele, In Corner B 3). The English language was, for these Johannesburg-based writers, the language of modernity that was best ‘able to realize the transgressive potential of print’ (Helgesson, 16). Yet the Drum writers ‘did a number of exciting things to and with the English language’ (Mphahlele, ‘Landmarks of Literary History’ 51). The English language was hybridized with the language of townships that was called tsotsitaal. This urban language originated with the migration of workers to the city and was described as the ‘new lingo in the townships, bright as the bright-boys, made of Afrikaans, Zulu, Sotho, English and Brand-New Words’ (Themba, The Will to Die 109). This ‘African English’ became the vehicle of ‘painful protest against social injustice and spiritual domination’ (Barnett 16).

The act of writing itself was a form of resistance as ‘to write at all under these conditions becomes in effect a challenge to the authority of the State and an act of political subversion’ (Cornwell 52). The increasingly repressive conditions in which the writers lived in Sophiatown partially explains their preference for the short story rather than the novel. Mphahlele wrote that it was a time that was ‘viciously difficult for a non-white to write in. It requires tremendous organization of one’s mental and emotional faculties before one can write a poem or a novel or a play. … Although the short story is very demanding, it is often used as a shortcut to prose meaning’ (Mphahlele, The African Image 223). Nkosi similarly noted that ‘it is not so much the intense suffering … which makes it impossible for black writers to produce long and complex works of literary genius as it is the very absorbing, violent and immediate nature of experience which impinges upon individual life’ (Nkosi 30). Bloke Modisane argues that the short story ‘serves as an urgent, immediate, intense, concentrated form of unburdening yourself’ (‘Short Story Writing’ 3).

The short story is ‘the liminal genre par excellence’ (Achilles and Bergmann 4). The ‘fragmented and restless form’ (Gordimer 264) best conveyed the precarity of urban existence under apartheid. The short story form was deemed ideal to capture the sensibilities of societal outcasts or ‘submerged population groups’ (O’Connor 18) as it has been used ‘to introduce new regions or groups into an established national literature, or into an emerging national literature in the process of decolonization’ (Pratt 104). As ‘a dissident form of communication’ (March-Russell ix), the short story is ‘a form of the margins’ (Hanson 2) associated with the ‘lonely voice’ of ‘outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society’ (O’Connor 19). The short story genre is particularly important for studies of Anglophone literature, which is characterized as being ‘not only pregnant with representations of mobile bodies; it also displays mobilities within literature’ (Chemmachery and Jain 11).

The ‘crepuscular, shadow-life in which we wander as spectres’ (Themba, The Will to Die 8) that Themba describes was suited to the short story. Nakasa similarly describes Sophiatown as both ‘the fringe’ and as a ‘no-man’s land’ (9). This voice of the outlaw is a common device in South African protest writing as the ‘fictional outlaw hero’ was ‘a manifestation of racial discontent’ and ‘a sublimation of the urgent need of oppressed peoples to protest against things as they are’ (Lindfors, ‘Robin Hood Realism’, 16).

The distinctive writing style associated with Drum was characterized through both ‘unconventional genres and stylistic innovation’ (Manus 73). Whilst the fictional short story has predominantly been ‘the literature of witness, documentary, and protest’ (Attwell 169), the non-fiction writing of Drum was written ‘in a storytelling style that prefigured American New Journalism’ (Driver 395). There was blurring of genres even as the writing was unified through a style that was ‘urbane, ironic, morally tough and detached’ (Nkosi 24). This new generation of writers used ‘the short story and reportage as a way of coming to terms with their anger [and] as a response to the immediate pressures of deprivation and racism’ (Mphahlele, In Corner B 6–7). This boundary crossing of fact and fiction resulted in ‘faction’ (Zander 29) being the predominant mode of black South African English writing and that contained ‘journalistic fact parading outrageously as imaginative literature’ (Nkosi 50).

Characterized by its realism and naturalism, it was the stories which narrated the everyday experiences on public transport that were important in resisting apartheid as ‘the ordinary daily lives of people should be the direct focus of political interest because they constitute the very content of the struggle’ (Ndebele 156, emphasis in the original). Mphahlele reflected ‘Now, what could I say to the world? Well, many things. For example, I could tell of the two men I saw on the station platform recently. … And so my mind goes on recalling characters I have met on station platforms [and] on the trains’ (Mphahlele, In Corner B 13). The everyday was a defining experience of apartheid’s repression as ‘our writers feel life at the basic levels of sheer survival, because blacks are so close to physical pain: hunger, overcrowded public transport in which bodies chafe and push and pull’ (Mphahlele, ‘Landmarks of Literary History’ 53).

In articulating the experiences of travelling by train, the protest of these writings was ‘implicit rather than explicit’ (Lindfors, ‘Robin Hood Realism’ 17). These texts aimed ‘to show the effects of apartheid’ as a form of direct protest (Mzamane, n.p.). The blurring of the narrator and the author in the texts further ensured that the news reports and short stories retained ‘credibility as a reliable witness’ (Cornwell 57). I thematize their representations of the railways through focusing on the mobile public spaces of the train station, train compartment and platform, and the mobile figures of the passengers as migrant, commuter, tsotsi (gangster), and intellectual.

Mobile Public Spaces: Train Stations, Platforms, and Compartments

The railway mobilities narrated in the short stories and factual reports all take place on the commuter railway journey to and from Park Station in Johannesburg. The renovation of Park Station in Johannesburg, designed by Gerard Moerdijk and Gordon Leith, announced ‘the nation-building power of the SAR&H’ in the 1930s (Foster 204), and it became ‘one of the most potent monuments to racial segregation’ in South Africa (Richards and MacKenzie 91). The railway station and the train compartments emerged as new public spaces of sociability with the arrival of the railways (Urry, Mobilities 104).

Railway stations functioned as ‘the threshold’ for the black migrants who poured into the city (Kruger 12). In Themba’s short story ‘Crepuscule,’ the narrator describes how ‘the morning township train cruised into Park Station, Johannesburg, and came to a halt in the dark vaults of the subterranean platforms’ (Themba, The Will to Die 2). The platforms are described as ‘the thickening platforms’ that ‘gathered the populations disgorged by Naledi, Emdeni, Dube, Orlando, Pimville, Nancefield, Kliptown, Springs, Benoni, Germiston (2). The trains are portrayed as ‘great maws that spewed their workership over Johannesburg’ (2). The narrator describes how the architectural design of the station controls the passengers’ mobility as ‘we were forced, like the substance of a toothpaste tube, through the little corridor and up the escalator that hoisted us through the outlet into … the teeth of pass-demanding South African Police’ (2). On the arrival of a commuter train at Park Station, Nakasa reports that ‘there was a stampede as workers scrambled to get through the barriers’ (38–39).

The train platform also emerged as ‘an interstitial space’ for waiting and watching, departing and arriving (Thaggert 72). The platform is imagined as a congested place where the passengers are dehumanized and objectified as crowds, masses, and mobs. The railway policeman of ‘Man Must Live’ objectively views – and distances himself from – the ‘masses of people rush[ing] into the train’ (Mphahlele, In Corner B 14). Themba’s ‘Mob Passion’ similarly begins by describing ‘a thick crowd on Platform Two’, who were all ‘rushing for the All Stations Randfontein train’ (Themba, Requiem for Sophiatown 7). This crowd is comprised of men, women, and children who ‘were heaving and pressing, elbows in faces, bundles bursting, weak ones kneaded’ (7). The congestion of the railway mobility system is conveyed in similar language in Nakasa’s objective reporting of the ‘hundreds of people on the platform’ at Park Station and his description of how these passengers ‘surged towards the doors’ of the train (38).

The only individual that emerges on the space of the platform in these stories is the railway policeman, who was the enforcer of the apartheid system (Barnard 144). The central character of Mphahlele’s ‘Man Must Live’ works at Park Station as a railway policeman. Having first worked as a road-building contractor constructing the urban infrastructures of automobility, Khalima Zungu is now employed by the railway police. This position signifies his passive acceptance of the racialized mobilities of apartheid and the hidden histories of those workers who build the city’s mobile infrastructures. It also signifies his separation, isolation, and distance from the local community (Gaylard 74). His uniform becomes a disguise he hides behind as ‘one could hardly see his face under the peak of his cap’ (Mphahlele, In Corner B 21). As a railway policeman ‘he could control masses of people’, and he ‘paced up and down along the train to see his charges into the train’ (14). The short story begins on a platform of Park Station with Zungu making a station announcement: ‘First stop Mayfair, Langlaagte, Ikona Westbury, Newclare, Randfontein train!’ (14). As a symbol of authority of the SAR&H and apartheid, his power reverberates throughout Park Station as Zungu’s voice ‘echoed through the station platform and in the subways’ (14). He takes pleasure in ‘reciting the names of stations and sidings off pat without giving them much thought’ (14).

Whilst the commuters frantically ‘rush’ when boarding the train, he slowly patrols the platform and easily moves through the congested platform of ‘thick crowds of people waiting for their trains’ (Mphahlele, In Corner B 16). He objectifies one commuter through comparing them to a ‘wind-up toy’ who moves through ‘the clustering crowds of people’ (Mphahlele, In Corner B 19). This congestion is also noted in Themba’s report, as he writes that the commuter train was ‘packed, jammed like putty. On all sides humans were pressing against us’ (Themba, The Will to Die 69). The report details how the ‘congestion on the trains had become virtually unbearable during peak hours’ and how the compartments are ‘jam-packed with gasping, frightened humanity’ 68).

Themba’s news report ‘Terror in the Trains’ investigates the daily experience of commuting on the railways between the peripheries and the city centre. The report starts by explaining that the journey being reported takes place on a payday:

‘That’s why, joining the hordes that flowed into Park Station, Johannesburg, Isaac Moeketsi of Dube – and thousands like him – was scared. He had … that sinking, uneasy feeling he always got when he had to board any of these location trains’ (Themba, The World of Can Themba 111).

While ‘Terror in the Trains’ reports on the experience of travelling home on the railways on a Friday night, the action of ‘The Dube Train’ instead takes place on a Monday morning. The narrator describes how every Monday morning ‘I feel rotten and shivering, with a clogged feeling in the chest and a nauseous churning in the stomach’ (Themba, The Will to Die 57). His fellow passengers are described as ‘looking Monday-bleared’ (58).

The narrator describes how, ‘As the train moved off, I leaned out of the paneless window and looked lack-lustrely at the leaden platform churning away beneath me like a fast conveyor belt’ (Themba, The Will to Die 57). The view outside the train is also highlighted during the violence in the train compartment: ‘Phefani Station rushed at us with human faces blurring past’ and ‘Croesus Cemetery flashed past’ (61).

The platform harbours the threat of accidents and of crime. Themba describes how ‘here and there deft fingers were exploring unwary pockets’ (Themba, Requiem for Sophiatown 7). The train compartments were also ‘synonymous with apartheid segregation’ (Barnard 144) and became in the stories and reports places of violence (Gunne). The train compartment is a space of ‘true terror’ for the commuters as ‘many pick-pockets just put their hands into your pocket and take what they want’ (Themba, The Will to Die 68).

The train compartment is seen as a refuge for the star-crossed lovers of Linga and Mapula in Themba’s ‘Mob Passion.’ But not until the train compartment has quietened down does it become safe for Linga and Mapula, as it was ‘only when they had passed Maraisburg did those two venture to speak to each other’ (Themba, Requiem for Sophiatown 8). In contrast to the inside space of the train, the danger in ‘Mob Passion’ remains outside the train. Whilst the train is a safe haven for the fated lovers, their view from the train window reveals the protests against apartheid. Their view at Westbury station reports that ‘the atmosphere was tense. Everybody crowded at the windows to see. Everywhere there were white policemen, heavily armed’ (8) before moving on to connect the experiences of commuting as being a powerful driving force for social protests against apartheid as ‘each morning these people quietly rise and with a businesslike manner hurry to their work. Each evening they return to a Devil’s Party, uncontrollably drawn into hideous orgies’ (8). Such protests only manage to temporarily halt the railway mobility system, as ‘all trains from Randfontein were being stopped here and sent back’ from Newclare (13).

The train compartment becomes a space of gendered violence for Themba as he narrates how the tsotsi jumped into the train at Phomolong gave a girl ‘a vicious slap across the face’ before chasing her through the train as she tries to escape (Themba, The Will to Die 60). The tsotsi draws a knife on a male passenger and ‘the blade slit a long cleavage down the big man’s open chest’ (61). The male commuter throws the tsotsi out of the window of the moving train, whose movement continues uninterrupted as ‘only a long cry trailed in the wake of the rushing train’ (61). However, the mode in which this violence of the train is depicted is given an ironic twist as readers learn that this ‘was just an incident in the morning Dube train’ (61), and that the commuters who had witnessed it ‘just remained bleared’ (59). The narrator ironically reports that ‘nothing much happened for the rest of the trip – that is nothing except period pickpocketing and stealing of parcels’ (69).

The commuters are named as ‘the train-using, bus-boarding philosophers’, and they complain that ‘we are not allowed to learn to live together in peace’ (Themba, The Will to Die). The commuter train journey symbolizes, and conscientizes the travelling writer to, the brutality of the apartheid system as ‘all sorts of disgruntledties darted through my brain: the lateness of the trains, the shoving savagery of the crowds’ (57). Themba conveys the horror and efficiency of apartheid through his stylistic innovation of English with the neologism of ‘horrificiency’ (2).

Mobile Figures: Migrants, Commuters, Tsotsis, and Intellectuals

The mobile figures of the migrant and the gangster or tsotsi embody different cultural histories and politics of racialized mobilities because the migrant ‘is only capable of reproducing the restricted forms of movement’ controlled by the apartheid state. In contrast, the gangster or tsotsi ‘moves fluidly’ throughout city space (Bosch Santana 169) with ‘unfettered mobility’ (Morris 88–89). Whilst the Drum writers rejected the mobile figure of the migrant who eventually returns home to the village in the ‘Jim Comes to Joburg’ trope, they instead idealized the mobile urban figure of the tsotsi, who reflects a more ‘permanent relocation’ to the apartheid city (Bosch Santana 173). The tsotsi stood for black, urban resistance to racial oppression in South African cities. However, this rejection of the migrant in favour of the tsotsi is not as clear cut as first appears. The railway texts explored here also reveal the construction of the ambivalent figure of the migrant as a commuter who resides in the margins but works in the city, as well as the mobile figure of the intellectual.

In South Africa, it is the ‘migrant worker’ rather than the flâneur who is the key mobile figure of African modernity (Mbembe and Nuttall 23), and travelling by train is ‘the key image of African urbanity’ (Kruger 74). The mobile figure of ‘the migrant as commuter’ symbolizes the power of the apartheid state. This positioning of the commuter as migrant is revealed in the short stories and reports through the language used to describe them. The railway policeman, Zungu, describes the train passengers as being ‘so much like cattle’ (Mphahlele, In Corner B 15). He further echoes the language of the apartheid classification of separate population groups when he reflects that of ‘many of this species … were often carried away by wrong trains, or the trains carried wrong passengers’ (15). Zungu is ‘contemptuous … [of] these two-legged sheep’ and begins to ‘despise their lack of intelligence’ (15). Passengers are further objectified through comparison to ‘particles’ that are ‘scattered with the onset of night and would reassemble tomorrow and tomorrow, each day forming an organised bundle of unlike disorganized parts – a world on Park Station’ (20). Similar imagery is used in Nakasa’s report, where he describes his fellow passengers as being ‘like mealie bags from a badly loaded lorry’ (38).

In contrast to the figure of the commuter, the mobile figure of the intellectual who moves around the spaces of Sophiatown and Johannesburg searching out stories also emerges in these texts. These ‘intellectuals’ were called ‘clevers’ or ‘situations’ (as in ‘situations vacant’) by tsostis, and ironically embraced these labels that ‘marked their in-between condition between white and black society’ (Kruger 72). The different forms of mobility reveal complex relations of mobility and proximity in their writings.

Nat Nakasa describes himself as ‘a wanderer’ without a permanent home address who enjoys walking around Johannesburg (4). This walking around the city is a form of resistance to the structures of apartheid, and he contrasts it to how most Africans rushed to be home at the end of the day on the ‘dozens of long brown trains [that] whined out of town’ (5). His walking around the city is contrasted to the passivity associated with the railway mobilities. When Nakasa reports on the trains in ‘Must We Ride … Do Disaster’, he travels alongside the commuters to offer a credible narrative. Despite distancing himself from these railway commuters, his credibility is reinforced through the investigative research he conducts on the train, as he explains that he ‘travelled on several other trains during the morning and afternoon peak hours’ (39). Themba’s report ‘Terror in the Trains’ similarly begins by explaining how ‘we went to see for ourselves’ the experiences of commuting by railway (Themba, The Will to Die 68).

Themba describes in his report that upon arrival at Park Station ‘people were already beginning to stream in’, and he goes on to explain how he joined the commuters as he ‘moved through the barriers, down the steps, and into the swarms’ (Themba, The Will to Die 68). He recounts how he ‘wanted to see how the people in this thick mass boarded’ the trains (68). This participant observation of the train travel positions Themba on the platform alongside the commuters but as separate from them. He describes how even as the train was departing, ‘men and women were … squeezing for all they were worth to get in’ and confidently reports that ‘the same thing happened with train after train’ (68-69).

Given the dangerously overcrowded train compartments, Nakasa reports that ‘I couldn’t help wondering anxiously what would happen if a train like “the five-to-seven” were ever to be involved in an accident’ (38). The report ends with Nakasa ironically juxtaposing the answers he received from a public representative of the South African Railways company, Mr Nel van der Merwe, and information he had sourced from official publication, The South African Railway News. These sources are the voice of the railway system and its apartheid structure. They provide statistical information on the railway summarizing that ‘during the week days some seventy trains carry passengers’ and during the morning rush hour ‘trains carrying workers … leave the suburbs at the rate of about 16 per hour’ (Nakasa 39). His sources confidently declare that ‘train accommodation for these passengers has proved reasonably successful’ (40). This perspective of the railway system bears no resemblance to the experience of the commuters that Nakasa has investigated, and he ends his report with the simple, ironic statement of ‘so there we stand’ (40).

Conclusion

This article has explored how apartheid’s racialized railway mobilities were a key site of repression and resistance in the transitional decade of the 1950s in South Africa. Whilst public transportation systems such as the railway were important for the increased repression of the apartheid system, the daily experiences of travelling were mobilized in resistance movements and protest writing.

The liminality of an emerging black urban subjectivity has been explored here through the liminal space of the railway’s train stations, platforms, and compartments, and these mobilities are embodied and experienced through the different mobile figures of the railway’s passengers as imagined in these texts associated with Drum magazine. Whilst critical attention to the train in South African literature has predominantly focused on poetry (Jones; McClintock; Wright), this article contributes to the growing work on the railways that considers train travel from interdisciplinary perspectives grounded in cultural analysis (Fraser and Spalding Trains, Culture and Mobility; Fraser and Spalding Transnational Railway Cultures; Spalding and Fraser) in order to show how the racialized railway mobility system, their mobile public spaces and mobile figures, are imagined in the development of the Anglophone short story in South Africa.

Whilst the racialized railway mobilities were the subject of these writings, the authors were equally mobile figures who roamed the space of the city while they navigated their place within the nation. Whilst this protest writing focused on the repressive racialized railway mobilities as the inspiration for resistance, their mobilization of public transport in their writings equally depended on the cultural mobilities of the English language and its literatures. The short story, as both a ‘liminal genre’ (Achilles and Bergman 4) and a genre ‘in motion’ (Owen), was mobilized to become a form of social protest in 20^th century South Africa and continues to be a defining genre of South African Anglophone literature to this day (Sandwith, Fasselt, and Soldati-Kahimbaara).

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Sarah Gibson

Sarah Gibson is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Communication and Media in Society [CCMS] at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She previously worked at the University of Surrey and at Lancaster University in the UK. Her research interests focus on the New Mobilities Paradigm, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory.