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| Title: | Slaughter by Steam: Railway Subjugation of Ox-Wagon Transport in the Eastern Cape and Transkei, 1886-1910 |
| Author: | Pirie, Gordon H. |
| Year: | 1993 |
| Periodical: | International Journal of African Historical Studies |
| Volume: | 26 |
| Issue: | 2 |
| Pages: | 319-343 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | South Africa |
| Subjects: | rail transport road transport Development and Technology History and Exploration |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/219549 |
| Abstract: | During the first thirty years of the railway era in South Africa ox wagons continued to link the ports to the growing population concentrations inland. In the Cape, where the main line rail network was largely complete in 1885, transport riding persisted in places where the railway track formed only a sparse lattice over the veld, where the market for the transport of agricultural produce was buoyant, and where climate, pasturage, and topography suited ox and wagon. One such area was on the eastern flank of the Colony. The trunk railways built in the 1870s from East London and Port Elizabeth to the interior left a vast territory open for wagoning. Matters were very different after the opening of three branch-line railways in the early twentieth century. The eastward penetration of railways challenged the last refuge of transport riders at a time when the demand for wagon transport was also threatened by the shrinking peasant economy in the eastern Cape and Transkei. Road-rail competition in the area only subsided at the start of the second decade of the twentieth century. By then the Cape government had resorted to legislation to protect its railway investments. An additional regulation designed to curtail the spread of a cattle disease was the final undoing of ox-wagon transport. Notes, ref. |
