Sources
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88

 
TAZARA ... a journey by rail through world-history © KJS / 2009
The Controller
CHAPTER 49



1 I knew this one … He was working downstairs of my legal office in Johannesburg which had moved from Primrose building in Fraser Street to Corporation Building, the first Town Council offices. Downstairs was a newspaper, the RAND MAIL, and the clang of its printing press echoed harshly through the building. There was only one manual type of telephone in the building. It was situated on the first floor near the back entrance, overlooking the MAIL offices.
At that time, my son earned some pennies in his capacity of office-boy. His main duty was to answer the telephone. Many a time he shouted down to this gentleman that he was wanted on the phone, and out he would run, coat off and cigarette-holder in mouth, to pound upstairs. I also used to invite him to different functions that I organised so that he could meet people he was interested in. No one had an idea that the presiding genius in the dingy editorial rooms would prove the twentieth century genius of crime-stories …

However, it seemed that he had developed already then sort of a detective nose for a reporter’s scoop … by train!

And I am calling him upstairs again!

Edgar Wallace is speaking:

23 I was covering the Boer War for the LONDON DAILY MAIL, thereby securing a world scoop on the signing of the peace treaty at Vereeniging with a flair and ingenuity that has still to be matched, I think.
Lord Kitchener had gone to great lengths to keep secret the peace deliberations, barring correspondents from the camp and placing armed guards and barbed wire around the compound.
I befriended one of the guards who happened to be in earshot of the proceedings. Deploying an early variety of cheque-book journalism, I persuaded the man to carry three handkerchiefs — red (signifying nothing happening), blue (making progress) and white (treaty about to be signed). To the bemusement of my colleagues, I took to making frequent train trips to and from Pretoria, a line which conveniently passed close to the wire of the peace encampment.
One crisp May evening in 1902, as the up train passed the camp, the guard emerged to blow his nose vigorously with a white handkerchief. I had this exclusive and, true to form, a prearranged, encoded method of transmitting the news to London. I merely sent one line „Have bought you 1000 Rand Collieries 40s 6d“ which indicated to the excited editors of the DAILY MAIL that peace was „absolutely assured“.

1 „Ohm“ Kruger was an exile in far-off Switzerland.
The Boer War was over.
The old pioneering days were over
Queen Victoria was dead
Rhodes was dead.

Our mines were dead!

Whilst white men had killed each other, hundred thousand black men had drifted away during the past three years — back to their Kraals or into the towns.
It had not been their war. And it had not been their mines.
The white man had allured the black man.
The white man had threatened the black man.
When the white man had to do something more important than to take care of the mines, the black man re-started his life where it had been uncoupled.
When the white man called again, the black man stayed in the kraal.
Without black labour-force no functioning mines.
Without functioning mines no Johannesburg.
The white man conceived an idea:
He called the yellow man.

There had been a few Chinamen in Johannesburg before the mass importation began. They were mainly small tradesmen, and how they ever managed to reach the city and secure licences was a mystery, in view of the Boers’ hostility to the black and yellow races.
There was a small wood-and-iron corner shop owned by two Chinamen near our house in De Villiers Street, and children were always warned never go near to it. Because Chinamen, so the adults said, ate chickens’ nests and little girls! Also, they were apt to do one down over change.
Now strange, high-pitched Chinese voices rang through the streets and on squares where weirdly gowned pigtailed men celebrated their strange festivals.
They had rare occasions to celebrate. They were sent down into the mines to do hand-drilling in the rock. To drive forty-eight inches into the rock face was their daily task, with a bonus of one penny per inch thereafter.
Far down there in the depths of the earth, the sweat shone on their yellow bodies, and in their scanty working garb of ragged trousers it was impossible to tell one man from another.
However, no sooner were they established on the Rand than they started to grow restless. They were men in a totally strange land, thousands of miles from their kinsfolk, and their only recreation was card-playing and gambling. And what gamblers they were! Sometimes a man owed his fellow-gambler several months of pay-ticket still to be earned. Sometimes, despairing of meeting his debt, he committed suicide.
A few had brought books and paint brushes and lacquer with them, and whiled away long hours painting fine miniatures. But inevitably boredom began its deadly work. There was much breaking of bounds, thieving, assaulting of both Europeans and natives — and finally, murdering.
The murders became so widespread that something like a reign of terror set in from Krugersdorp to Boksburg. A special jail on the East Rand — called the Cindarella jail — was set aside for Chinese criminals.
As the crime wave grew, extra police were stationed at danger spots, and compound police, some of them Chinese, and boss-boys had to control the gangs of workers with semi-military discipline. They were marched like soldiers from the compounds to the headgears of the mines, and back again.
As the tally of murdered Europeans grew, a wave of hate against both the Chinese and the mines mounted. „Down with the gold mines!“ was the feeling. As usual gold was at the bottom of all the trouble.
There was a great to-do overseas as well, not on account of the crimes that were being committed, but because of the „modern slavery“ which, the British Press declared, was practised on the mines. Feeling ran so high that the British Government lost the election in 1905, and this in turn cast a gloom over Johannesburg.
By 1906 the white bosses felt they could never control the yellow men properly. And something happened that helped them to come to a decision. The great experiment had lasted five years. There was no doubting its success in saving the mines, and at long last it began to have a wonderfully salutary effect on the Africans loafing in their kraals. Gradually they began to realise what the consequences to themselves would be if the mines had to rely permanently on imported labour. For the simple native had now caught the white man’s craving for material goods. But to buy them he must have money — and where could he earn money quicker than on the mines?
He was compelled, therefore, to bestir his lazy bones and get back to the mines before all the job was taken for good by the strange little yellow men from a land he had never heard of.
Besides, suppose the yellow man — now teeming over the Rand in their thousands — should take it into their pigtailed heads to acquire African wives? Better go back to the mines and get to work before it was too late!
The repatriation was gradual. The strangest scene of all was enacted on the veld when the yellow men burnt the remains of those who had died on that alien soil. Then they collected the ashes from the funeral pyres, packed them in carefully labelled urns, and carried them home to the relatives in distant China in obedience of Confucian Law.
No one was sorry to see the Chinamen go. But the fact remained that in the years they had laboured on the Reef, the value of the gold yield had doubled. In 1903 the mines gave up fifteen and a half million pounds worth of precious metal. In 1909 the value of the yield was thirty million, eight hundred thousand pounds …


It would take almost seventy years before the Chinamen would return to Africa …
… then with hammer and sickle,
… and after a further thirty years as Mr. Moon’s new tailors …

We are rolling ahead!

Valid is the spoken word!




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