This captivating anthology of 40 railway poems of South Africa is a unique piece of Africana that gives a social, industrial and sometimes personal history of the country from an unusual perspective.
The author, Laurence Wright, cherishes vivid memories of trains and rail journeys from his earliest days, and says his inspiration for the book was both personal nostalgia and his interest in the mysterious bond that exists between people and trains.
In Stimela: Railway Poems of South Africa, he reaches out to the ordinary person. “All levels of people, from deep rural to high powered urban communities, have some experience of railways,” says Laurence. The poems are gleaned from a huge variety of sources and are written by people from all walks of life. But they have one thing in common: a deep emotional response to South African rail, and especially the romance of steam.
While some of these poets are well known and widely-published authors, others are ordinary people writing about everyday things. For Laurence this is a primary purpose of his anthology: “People need to discover the poetry in what they do.” He describes how some of the poems are simply about the experience of a train journey, a farewell to a loved one on a lonely platform or an ode to a particular locomotive.
The anthology carries poems by many of South Africa’s best-known poets. “It is striking how many first order South African poets have written about railways,” says Laurence. Prominent poems include Cullen Gouldsbury’s Rhodes’s Dream, Rudyard Kipling’s Bridge Guard in the Karoo, Edgar Wallace’s The Armoured Train, Guy Butler’s The Parting, Sydney Clouts’s Karoo Stop and Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali’s Men in Chains.
All written in the 20th century, the poems cover a wide variety of subjects: Rhodes’s dream of a Cape to Cairo rail route; sociological commentary on how the railways introduced South Africa to modernity; historical insight into how the railways impacted on troop mobility during the Boer War; poems celebrating railway engineering and machinery; and personal anecdotes and poems about railways as a way of life.
There is something for everyone in Stimela, from the woman reflecting on her days as a young wife living at a railway siding, to fans of the legacy that steam locomotives left us, to well-read war historians. This book will set you dreaming of the clackety-clack of rolling steel and the sounds and smells of steam, oil and burnt coal echoing across the Karoo plains.
Story published in March 2009, Country Life
Picture Credit: A 15F locomotive near Abbotsdale. copyright to Michael F. Allen