Sunday & Monday, 1-2 June 1986: An Overnight Train Trip to an Historic Border Town

June 2, Noon, Mafikeng railway station

My trip to Zimbabwe started out last night with a slow, overnight train to Mafikeng (also spelled Mafeking), near the Botswana border.  

My compartment mate on the train, Hans, a chubby, sloppily-dressed Afrikaner was on his way to gamble at the Mabatho casino in the Bophuthatswana quasi-independent homeland (bantustan).  Hans is a mechanic and works in some of the black homelands and townships.  Thus, he is around blacks more than the average white South African.  He sees some violence and anti-white hostility among the blacks he comes in contact with. 

At age 26, Hans is wondering what his future will be here.  He’s done his two years of mandatory military service but is still subject to call-up in the event of a crisis.  He worries there may be a revolution by the end of the year.  I pointed out that the whites have most of the guns, so it doesn’t seem feasible that blacks would try to start an armed revolution.  

Is Hans being overly-paranoid?  Not necessarily when one looks closely at the deep divisions across the political spectrum – from the neo-Nazi AWB that wants to create an all-white state within South Africa, to the young black hooligans who are burning down the townships because they feel there is nothing to lose at this point. 

Mafikeng railyard, 2 June 1986.  Steam locomotives getting serviced and awaiting assignment.

The train, pulled by diesel-electric locomotives, arrived in Mafikeng around 5:00AM.  Since the train for Botswana and Zimbabwe doesn’t leave until 2:00 this afternoon, I checked my bags at the station and have been exploring a bit of the town.  The biggest attractions for me are the steam locomotives puffing around the rail yards.

Freight train headed north into the Mafikeng station on 2 June 1986 pulled by a Class 25NC 4-8-4 steam locomotive with a Class 35 cylindrically-shaped tender.  You have to be a train aficionado to appreciate this sort of trivia, aka “train porn”.   

Mafikeng itself is pretty much a nothing place.  It is now technically part of Bophuthatswana.  Its historical claim to fame dates to the 1899-1900 siege of the town by Boer commando forces during the Second Boer War.  The town’s British defenders, led by Robert Baden-Powell, held out for 217 days before the siege was finally lifted giving British Forces in South Africa a needed morale boost.  Powell became a national hero and later founded the Boy Scouts.