After the romance, rails remain : the Cape to Cairo railway as imperial infrastructure in Southern Africa, 1889 - 1967

Abstract

The Cape to Cairo Railway, so the romance goes, was a grand British project to conquer, capitalise and ‘civilise’ Africa. Cecil Rhodes’ companies constructed railways into what later became Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The connection to Cairo was never completed, but the extant rail tracks remained when the Cape to Cairo romance vanished after the First World War. This thesis aims to deconstruct the romanticisation of the Cape to Cairo Railway with an ‘on the ground’ history of the railways in Bechuanaland, Northern and Southern Rhodesia. The thesis seeks to answer the questions ‘For what purposes was the Cape to Cairo Railway used between 1889 and 1967, and what does this tell us about imperial infrastructure and empire? How did users shape, co-create or possibly appropriate the railways?’ To do so, this thesis studies the railway from the construction until the system’s split during the period of decolonisation. Inspired by infrastructure studies, this thesis places use and users at the centre of the story. It identifies four groups of users – owners, operators, workers, customers – and examines what each group did with the railways. Based primarily on sources of the railway companies and the colonial administrations, the dissertation traces the actions of these groups, how they used the railways and what that tells us about their agency. The thesis uncovers that the role of the railways in the colonisation in Southern Africa was predominantly shaped by their imperial owners, but the process was ambivalent and contingent. Other users constantly negotiated and contested the railways in idiosyncratic ways, conforming, evading or sometimes challenging the planned purposes of the owners. The extent to which users were able to influence railway operations was largely racialised and changed over time. Overall, this thesis is a call for caution from romanticising master narratives. Infrastructure does not by pure existence achieve (political) purposes; it is determined by its users.