Trains loom large in the narrative of Black South Africans, alien artifacts, metallic centipedes of colonial extraction that carry the weight of colonialism, dislodgment, resilience, and aspiration. In South African cultural production, they function as metaphors and lived realities that intersect with themes of spatial justice, economic migration, and political struggle.

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

Hugh Masekela’s iconic song, Stimela (Coal Train), vividly captures the historical role of trains as instruments of exploitation during colonial and Apartheid South Africa:

There is a train that comes from Namibia and Malawi, There is a train that comes from Zambia and Zimbabwe, There is a train that comes from Angola and Mozambique, … Bringing with them strange men with a strange language … To work on contract in the gold and mineral mines of Johannesburg.

European colonial powers built railways in Africa mainly to extract and export valuable resources—minerals, timber, and agricultural products—from the interior to coastal ports linked to global markets. In the gospel of development (and the romantic memories of unreconstructed supremacist settlers), trains are always good news. Heavy steel meets mobility, turning “unclaimed” and wasted land productive. In South Africa, railway lines connected the mineral-rich interior, notably Johannesburg’s goldfields and Kimberley’s diamond mines, to the coastal ports of Durban and Cape Town.

Trains have never been just a means of transporting goods and people. More than simple tools, trains embody ideology and metaphor; they are as much political and social constructs as they are industrial devices. They carry power, memory, and myth. Beneath the romanticism of trains lies an uglier story—one of extraction, erasure, and infrastructural betrayal.

Where settler states like the US built railways to consolidate national space and craft a mythology of internal expansion (however violent), colonial powers in Africa laid tracks without such fiction. Railways were designed to sever, not stitch. From the Congo to Kenya to the former Transvaal, lines ran from resource-rich areas to ports, bypassing indigenous economies, languages, and ecologies.

It was never about nation-building. Colonial and apartheid rail networks were acts of spatial violence that reinforced and entrenched racial segregation and social hierarchies. Built to connect mines with markets, they bypassed communities considered irrelevant to the extractive economy, creating a “dual economy” where development clustered along rail corridors serving white settlers. At the same time, Black nations were confined to marginalized homelands and segregated urban areas with poor infrastructure access.

In Mongane Wally Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood, trains signify the political and physical mobility essential to resistance against apartheid. They evoke the ruptures in segregated landscapes caused by racialized spatial engineering, but also the possibility of re-connection and social transformation. Trains are metaphors for dislocation, labor migration, and collective political momentum—the very forces that structured apartheid’s geography and continue to shape South Africa’s uneven terrain.

In 2025, something unusual is happening across Africa. Morocco swiftly moves passengers from Tangier to Casablanca at 320 km/h, and Egypt develops Chinese-financed networks across the desert. At the same time, South Africa, with greater financial and industrial capacity than either, remains stuck in the legacy of its colonial infrastructure and routes.

A South African high-speed rail (HSR) corridor, linking Johannesburg and Cape Town via Kimberley and Bloemfontein, could become a test case for spatial rectification if its design incorporated building a green industrial spine.

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

My mother’s older sister lived in Sharpeville, a township outside Vereeniging. My mother grew up in Sharpeville after her family was forcibly removed from Topville, or “Top Location,” as they called it. Sharpeville was “officially” constructed to replace Topville due to “overcrowding” and “illnesses like pneumonia.” But in my family’s telling, the real illness was the apartheid state’s obsession with containment, its refusal to allow Black life to flourish on its own terms. The Topville of their stories was not a slum or a health hazard. It was a place built through self-organization, kinship networks, and quiet defiance, a community shaped by Sunday church services and backyard economies. The removals from Topville began in 1958. The Sharpeville Massacre, which was crucial in changing the course and nature of resistance to apartheid settler colonialism, occurred two years later.

The train I took from Orlando Stadium in Soweto wove through the segregated layout of apartheid. It arrived in Orlando from Johannesburg, dropping off Black workers who then had to navigate the sprawling area of Soweto. From there, it headed to the “Indian” suburb of Lenasia (Lenz), then passed through a series of small white-only towns such as Lawley, Grassmere, Leeuhof, and Duncanville, before reaching Vereeniging.

I remember Vereeniging and its surrounding white suburbs, particularly Three Rivers, as a Stepford-like community of implausible physical and metaphysical whiteness. It was more than just the stern-looking residents. More than anywhere else I had ever been in South Africa, Vereeniging embodied apartheid and its supremacist hierarchy. Vereeniging was an ordered, ethno-Gilead without the costumes—it was as a god with a chosen race envisioned the world.

Vereeniging is part of the Vaal Triangle, the metaphorical heart of industrial South Africa, where the apartheid government created and nurtured its ambitions for industrial independence. The establishment of Sasol and Iscor—two iconic symbols of the apartheid industrial complex—transformed this region into the center of a coal-based manufacturing value chain that made South Africa both the continent’s most industrialized country and one of the world’s biggest carbon emitters. The first railway to Vereeniging arrived in 1892, connecting the Cape and Johannesburg via Bloemfontein, an essential infrastructure development that channeled imported goods, mining equipment, and labor into the interior mining areas, enabling efficient resource extraction and industrial activities. The old trains carried more than freight; they carried the smell of coal, the sting of iron in the air, and the unspoken knowledge that the line served somewhere else’s wealth.

The first Cape-Johannesburg line was a carbon artery. Coal-fired steam locomotives hauled machinery, chemicals, and migrant labor north to the goldfields, and sent bullion, diamonds, and manufactured goods south to the ports. Every kilometer was built to feed an energy-and carbon-intensive economy: from the collieries of Vereeniging to the blast furnaces of Iscor, the line linked extraction to combustion, and combustion to export. The smoke was not only in the air; it was embedded in the economic logic, in the way value moved out and left little behind.

The main rail corridor from Cape Town to Johannesburg still passes through landscapes marked as much by absence as by presence. Under apartheid, those absences were often by design. Passenger services on trunk lines seldom stopped in or near Black townships, while branch lines were oriented toward mines, grain silos, and white-owned farming towns. Where stations did exist in Black settlements, they were typically under-serviced, freight-only, or deliberately under-invested, reinforcing patterns of exclusion documented in transport planning archives from the 1960s and 1970s.

A HSR line could follow that same path but run on a different fuel and a different idea. Powered by renewable energy, wind from the Cape coast, solar from the Karoo, it could transport people and goods without the plume of coal dust trailing behind. Its stations could anchor new industries in green manufacturing, agro-processing, and clean logistics. But changing the power source is not the same as changing the power relations. A sleek, solar-powered train can still move inequality at high speed. Whether this new line becomes a green spine for shared prosperity or just a cleaner engine for old patterns will depend on who it stops for, and who it speeds past.

Today, many of the gaps remain. Between the Cape Winelands and the Vaal Triangle lie dozens of intermediate towns, De Aar, Beaufort West, Hanover, Colesberg, Springfontein—whose rail-dependent economies have contracted sharply since the 1980s. In De Aar, once the country’s largest marshalling yard, railway employment fell from more than 3,000 jobs in the early 1980s to under 400 by the late 2000s. Beaufort West’s railway depot closed in the 1990s, leaving road freight and tourism as the main employers. Farm mechanization has reduced seasonal labor demand across the Karoo, while the diversion of high-value freight from rail to the N1 and N12 highways has hollowed out sidings and goods sheds along the route.

In the periurban zones of Bloemfontein, Kimberley, and the Vaal, informal settlements now extend along service roads and railway verges without access to affordable, reliable passenger trains. Small towns such as Brandfort and Luckhoff have experienced population stagnation or decline, functioning mainly as commuter dormitories for nearby cities or as welfare-dependent service points. These settlements were once the labor reservoirs, freight hubs, and seasonal markets that supported the colonial and apartheid economies. Currently, they are situated mainly outside the post-1994 growth hubs, bypassed by both national logistics corridors and metropolitan development plans.

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

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

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

Done well, the line would do more than shorten journeys between two cities. It could bind together the fractured body of South Africa—stitching its skipped-over towns into a shared future of economic life and social vitality. Done poorly, it could harden the very exclusions it has the power to undo.

In a country where geography is biography, and memory is place-based, mobility has always been political. Apartheid criminalized Black movement. Democracy promised freedom of movement, but delivered dangerous taxis, slow buses, and long waits. Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow explores the ambivalence of train imagery in the postapartheid urban milieu, where trains represent flux and identity disruption. Here, railways narrate the complex rhythms of migration and urban instability, signalling both connection and rupture within evolving community landscapes.

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

South Africa is not ideal for HSR because it is vast. It is ideal for HSR because it is broken. Not in some abstract developmental sense. But in the most literal, cartographic sense, the country’s geography is fractured, deliberately. Colonialism structured its provinces and cities to be apart. Apartheid engineered its cities and neighborhoods, its peoples to be separate. Apart from the land, separate from each other, disconnected from power. Colonialism and apartheid were not just racial regimes; they were spatial projects. They redrew space to institutionalize separation, then laid the tracks and paved the roads to enforce it. What this left behind is not just distance, but discontinuity. A landscape full of skipped-over towns, labor-sending zones, and ghost lines of movement that never made sense to begin with.

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

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

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

This is not about speed. It is about direction.