The TAZARA railway has assumed almost iconic status as a symbol of the first heroic stage of China’s involvement in Africa and an ideologically inspired symbol of anti-imperialist solidarity, in contrast with today’s more pragmatic and market-driven Chinese engagement with the continent.

That was certainly how it was seen at the time it was built in the early 1970s. China came forward to build the railway and fund it with a US$450m loan after western donors – including the World Bank and the UN – rejected initial approaches to back the project.

The news was greeted with alarm in the West. The Wall Street Journal warned that ‘the prospect of hundreds and perhaps thousands of Red Guards descending upon an already troubled Africa is a chilling one for the West’. One US Congressman luridly described it as a ‘great steel arm of China thrusting its way into the African interior’.

The saga of the railway’s construction seems an almost archetypal tale of voluntarist Maoist heroism. It took only five years to build and was finished ahead of schedule in 1975. Before construction work began, 12 Chinese surveyors travelled for nine months on foot from Dar es Salaam to Mbeya in the Southern Highlands to hack a path for the railway through the bush. Later some 50,000 Tanzanians and 25,000 Chinese toiled on the actual construction.

But the railway’s later economic and structural decay is often also seen as a parable of wider political and economic changes. The fall of the white supremacist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa reopened the Zambian copper belt’s earlier established rail and road links to the south, which TAZARA was intended to circumvent, and so lost it much of its profitable traffic.

Economic changes in Tanzania also increased the economic pressures on the railway, at the same time as its Chinese sponsors were withdrawing from their earlier African involvement. And the dissolution of the Ujamaa villages planned and located along the route as part of Nyerere’s own brand of socialist vision only seemed to confirm the view of the railway as an inevitably decaying and predictably run-down relic of an earlier age.

But Jamie Monson’s engaging and empathic study challenges these easy assumptions – and without merely rehabilitating the myths of an earlier period. She has drawn on the first-hand experiences of the engineers and labourers both Chinese and African who actually built the railway, as well retrieving and recounting the life-histories of the villagers, farmers and traders along its route who used it creatively as an opportunity to transform their own lives.

Though the Chinese working on the project had little social contact with their African fellow-workers, the experience of working on the railway did transform the lives of the local workers it employed. But, Monson finds, the influence was not ideological as the Wall Street Journal had feared – or at least not in the way it feared.

The most lasting effect on those involved was through the example of what Monson calls ‘the values of modernity and progress through the practice of self-discipline and hard work’. Modernity was experienced ‘not just through handling machinery in the foundry but in the form of working for a wage, a new experience for many of the young recruits, and following a work routine that was organised into hourly shifts’.

But the railway did not only transform the lives of those who helped to build it. In the most stimulating and engaging section of her work Monson looks at the ‘ordinary train’ – the slow stopping train which on alternate days stopped at every station carrying local passengers and freight.

In particular she looks at the middle section of the railway in western Tanzania, between Msolwa and Mbeya. With a team of researchers, between 1998 and 2003 Monson studied how the railway made it possible for those living along its route to transform their lives. The team interviewed residents and passengers, observed daily life, and even collected and studied detailed passenger-parcel receipts.

As she concludes; ‘Conventional assessments of TAZARA, which rely on large-scale, international and transregional indicators rather than small-scale, everyday traffic in goods and people, are typically unfavourable. But local traders, farmers, and workers use the railway in many ways to improve their lives, and an analysis of these railway-platform markets suggests that the standard assessments overlook something real and important...We found that TAZARA has been an important resource for the development of a thriving entrepreneurial economy along the route from Kilsoa to Mbeya, in southern Tanzania. Today TAZARA connects local communities and provides farmers with the physical, social, and economic mobility they need to contend with rural Africa’s unpredictable economic conditions. And its successes – though unanticipated and hard to measure with any precision – may suggest some important lessons for economic development elsewhere’.

A typical story is that of Balista Kidehela, who finished primary school in Mbingu at the age of 16 and began trading in retail goods. He left the village to seek a better life in Dar es Salaam. But after three years, finding it hard going as a young man with few resources, he came back to Mbingu and stayed with his uncle while he built up his own business, trading along TAZARA.

He traded together with his wife, who took bananas from Mbingu to sell in Dar es Salaam. There she would buy wholesale consumer goods and bring them back to Mbingu, where Balista would sell them retail in a small shop.

He now has a small farm where he grows crops and keeps some livestock, and has launched into a new business – photography. ‘In this way’ he explains, ‘when I combine all these things together; farming, livestock raising, photography and small-scale trading, I have the certainty of knowing that one way or another, tomorrow when I wake up I will be well’.

As well as physical mobility, Monson shows how the railway empowers local people to move from one resource, product or occupation to another in response to the fluctuations and uncertainties typical of a rural economy.

This flexible creativity is all too often ignored or smothered by the grand narratives of urban elites, whether the centralising left or the global ‘free-market’ right. And the railway which enabled all of this would never have been created or survived if subjected to the narrow criteria of official ‘market profitability’.

Ironically however the TAZARA Railway, once the showpiece of the early heroic phase of Sino-Tanzanian relations, looks likely to be rescued from the state of disrepair into which it had gradually fallen to become a key link in one of the most ambitious projects of China's new African strategy.

After years of under-investment and mounting competition from road transport had brought the rail link to the verge of financial and structural collapse, it is now being rehabilitated by Chinese firms as a key link between two of China's Special Economic Zones [SEZs]. One in Chambishi, in Zambia’s copper belt, centres on a US$250 million anchor investment in a copper smelter, and is promoted as creating up to 60,000 jobs through duty and tax incentives for Chinese firms.

The other SEZ is in Dar es Salaam where China has already invested in the modernisation and extension of the port. But this reconstructed TAZARA will link up in Zambia with the Benguela line crossing Angola to the Atlantic coast, and which China is also reconstructing. The two lines together will create a first-ever functioning east-west corridor across the continent.

If the new line is not dominated by the large-scale long-distance traffic to the exclusion of the local initiatives that Monson brings to life for her readers, it could indeed bring ‘important lessons for economic development’ across the whole continent.

* Stephen Marks is research associate and project coordinator with Fahamu's China in Africa Project.
* (ISBN 978-0-253-35271-2)
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