There’s blood on the tracks

Woman and baby the latest casualties in rising tide of deaths alongside the country’s railway lines

PREGNANT, carrying a baby and allegedly drunk, 32-year-old Nondumiso Zuma was run over by a train last week near Camperdown outside Pietermaritzburg.

Zuma is the fourth person from an informal settlement that has mushroomed alongside a railway line to have been killed by a train this year.

About 100 shacks have sprung up next to the railway line, some within a few metres of the track of the main route between Durban and Johannesburg. Residents say an average of 20 trains pass here daily.

The Sunday Tribune visited the scene of the latest train hit, about a kilometre from a mud, wood and tin shack in which Zuma had been living for the past two years.

An estimated 300 people live in desperate circumstances in the settlement. It is situated in Kwaximba, not far from the Mayibuye Game Reserve, which was officially launched by Deputy Minister of Environmental Affairs Barbara Thomson last week.

Shack dweller Masabatha Matabane said she, Zuma and few friends had been enjoying a “ladies night” at Camperdown Hotel last Friday. She said that after sharing a bottle of vodka, they had all started walking back home along the railway track.

As they got near their homes a freight train came to a stop. They came upon a driver looking around the tracks and under the train.

“He said he believed he had knocked someone, a lady wearing red trousers, but could not find her body,” said Matabane.

Zuma had been wearing red pants. It was after midnight. Matabane phoned to alert a friend. Zuma was not at home.

A small group of neighbours with torches joined the search, but Zuma could not be found. It was only after the goods train had moved on that her broken body was found in a bush near the railway track.

Matabane said she would never forget that moment.

“Nondumiso’s head just hung loose from her torso. Her body was still warm, but she had no pulse. A white bone pierced through the skin below her knee, which was completely dismembered, dangling on a thread of skin.”

Matabane said the sounds of passing trains at night now haunted her.

Zuma had been seven months pregnant. Her boyfriend, Bheko Bongani Madlala, 30, a guard at umkhambathini municipality offices in Camperdown, had been on duty at the time of the incident. An acquaintance broke the news to him just as he was about to knock off duty in the early morning.

“My heart sank with the agony of losing her,” said Madlala, who had been planning for the birth of their baby in June.

Zuma was buried yesterday in her home village in New Hanover.

Transnet Freight Services said an average of 94 people were killed by trains in South Africa each year, which is almost two a week.