Abstract
This article examines political dimensions of the train metaphor in selected Southern African poems, some of them in English translation. Exploring work by Mongane Serote, B.W. Vilakazi, Demetrius Segooa, Phedi Tlhobolo, Thami Mseleku, Jeremy Cronin, Alan Lennox-Short, Anthony Farmer, Freedom T.V. Nyamubaya, Abduraghiem Johnstone and Mondli Gwala, the argument shows some of the ways in which the technological character of trains and railways is made to carry a message of political insurrection and revolution. The author shows that the political potential of the railway metaphor builds on the general response to railways evident in poems indebted to traditional African praise poetry. The article also demonstrates that political contention within different strands of the Southern African liberation movement could also find expression using the railway metaphor.
Highlights
Hierdie artikel ondersoek politieke aspekte van die treinmetafoor in ’n verskeidenheid Suider-Afrikaanse gedigte, sommiges in Engelse vertaling
Die skrywer toon aan dat die politieke potensiaal van die spoorwegmetafoor voortbou op die algemene reaksie ten opsigte van spoorweë wat in gedigte voorkom wat uit tradisionele Afrika-pryssange voortspruit
Railways have infiltrated the sensibility of Southern Africans in different ways
Summary
Railways have infiltrated the sensibility of Southern Africans in different ways. The title of this article is borrowed from a long poem of the same name by Mongane Wally Serote, too long to include here in full, in which the idea of the express train becomes a cognitive metaphor for the revival of the hopes and aspirations of the dispossessed in South Africa, and worldwide. The political or revolutionary metaphor adds a further, specialised range of implication which emphasises the train as a means of mass transportation or mobilisation; as belonging to a different mode of technology (signifying a changed and more powerful mode of political action); and as the most effective means of moving people collectively to somewhere completely different, speedily, reliably and efficiently. In this way the train develops into a compelling rhetorical figure presaging powerful movement towards a new socio-political order
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