Steel versus Asphalt: The Politics of Infrastructure in Post-Independence East Africa

Abstract

On the 1st of August 2017, I step on an old Chinese train in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The aim of my trip was not simply to reach Kapiri Mposhi, the Zambian city which lies at the other end of the tracks, but to be on that train, to be in the in-between space of infrastructure in order to understand how it operates and what are the consequences of its presence on the territories we were crossing. During the following 64 hours we climbed mountains, we crossed plains, natural reserves, deserts, marshes, woods, tunnels, bridges, villages, cities and one national border. My first-class wagon was crowded with “Musungu” (white in Swahili) tourists going to inner Tanzania for a safari tour or heading to the South of Zambia to see the Victoria Falls. But many other people were sitting on that train with their bulky luggage. Unlike me, they all had a destination. Most of them, with their sacks, boxes, baskets, backpacks and matrasses would step off the train before the end of the line. I had been reading about that train before I ever stepped onboard, I knew the answer to many of the questions we usually don’t even ask ourselves while traveling. I knew that the railway was a project envisioned by Zambia and Tanzania right after their independence to emancipate themselves from white colonial domination, I knew that the project was built by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the 1970s, I knew its symbolic and political significance but there were also many things I didn’t know, many things that are not written in books. I had to be there, I had to experience them or, to say it with Bruce Robbins’s words, I had to breathe the “smell of infrastructure”, (Robbins, 2007) to experience the freezing temperature of the Iringa region, the 16 hours delay, the changing rhythm of the train and the noise of the breaks before entering the stations. From my window seat, I kept on staring at the landscape and at the highway which runs almost parallel to the railway. The road keeps on changing in size, width and materiality, but it is always the same road: the TANZAM highway. I had been reading about the highway too, I knew that it was originally built to convey British troops to the German front during World War I, I knew it was paved for the first time thanks to the World Bank and other western donors, I knew a lot but I knew nothing about that road before being there. I didn’t know the dust, the potholes and the variety of vehicles which can be found on the highway, the changing colours of the landscape and its silence at night. The steel lines of the tracks and the asphalt strip of the road are now part of the palimpsest of the territory like rivers, hills and lakes have been long before the train arrived (Corboz, 1983). They created a new geography and defined a new territorial structure. They affected the patterns of mobility, of urbanization, of production and consumption. In our everyday life, we rarely experience infrastructure with this level of awareness, it is merely an instrument we use to reach places or to send goods. Infrastructure resides in a “naturalized background” (Edwards 2003), it is always out of focus. Walter Benjamin wrote that architecture is the prototype of artwork we experience in a state of distraction (Benjamin 2008). If this is true of Architecture, it is even more true of infrastructure.