Schneider on Monson, 'Africa's Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania'

H-Africa Schneider on Monson, 'Africa's Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania'

Review published on Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Jamie Monson. Africa's Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. xii + 199 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-35271-2.

Reviewed by Leander Schneider (Concordia University)Published on H-Africa (June, 2010) Commissioned by Brett L. Shadle

Tanzania on the Move: A Chinese Railroad Project and Its Impact

Jamie Monson’s book on the 1970-74 construction and subsequent impact of the TAZARA railroad connecting Dar es Salaam on Tanzania’s coast with Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia is bound to garner considerable attention. For many readers, the entry point will likely be the fact that the railway was the product of China’s most visible foray into Africa prior to the much more recent reemergence and intensification of Sino-African relations. While the book’s first seventy pages cater to an interest in this dimension of the story, Monson’s exploration, in the second half of the book, of the railway’s travails since its construction offers the reader a more broad-ranging look at rural livelihood strategies and patterns of mobility in the area around TAZARA’s middle section on the Tanzanian side between the rural centers of Msolwa and Makambako.

Drawing on existing accounts, press reports, Zambian archival materials, and interviews with Tanzanians and some Chinese who worked on the railway, the book assembles an informative account of the project’s history. Especially noteworthy--and noted--are the railway’s prominent political dimensions. On the one hand, the “Freedom Railway” would free Zambia from the transportation stranglehold non-liberated southern Africa held over it. On the other, it was the quintessential showcase project in Africa of South-South cooperation--with a nonaligned, socialist flavor. Referring back to Zhou Enlai’s “Eight Principles” of foreign aid (reproduced in an appendix), Monson documents that the project was supposed to exemplify “China’s unique” and “alternative” approach to development (pp. 34, 37). It bears noting that, sans socialism, this framing of course also acutely resonates with how China’s contemporary engagement with Africa is often officially cast. The title of a 1972 story Monson quotes from the Chinese newspaperRenmin Ribao vividly illustrates the intended image: “They Are True Friends: Stories of Chinese and Tanzanian Workers in Rescuing Each Other” (p. 40).

The magazine’s suspiciously boilerplate account of two workers who save one another’s lives after sequentially encountering an unspecified “danger” and falling into equally unspecified “trouble”--and similarly generic affirmations that emerge from interviews of “friendship” between Chinese and Tanzanian workers and the “modernizing” and “civilizing” impact of railway work on Tanzanian workers’ lives--would perhaps benefit from a more head-on interrogation than the book subjects them to (pp. 8, 68). Monson does note that press stories about solidarity and friendship were in part

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Schneider on Monson, 'Africa's Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania'. H-Africa. 09-29-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28765/reviews/32890/schneider-monson-africas-freedom-railway-how-chinese-development Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Africa produced for Chinese domestic consumption. But what more can be said about these framings and their effects in terms of creating an image of China (and Africa)? The book also offers evidence that relations between the Chinese and Tanzanians working on the railway were not typically close--or always smooth. But here too it would be nice to see a deeper exploration and thematic development of such phenomena as segregated living arrangements and separate seating at film screenings in construction camps, an apparently official ban on sexual relations between Chinese and Tanzanians, labor troubles due to mixed Tanzanian reactions to the expectation of “Chinese” work ethic on the project, and Chinese supervisors’ frustrations with Tanzanian workers who they judged to be “lazy, disobedient, or incompetent” (pp. 58, 57, 62, 37, 51-53, 56). In the end, how “alternative” was China’s approach and practice in development? And what can be said about the structures that shaped the Sino-African encounters around this major infrastructure project? Did the difference with other foreign-funded infrastructure projects largely hinge on the extraordinarily large number of low- wage Chinese workers (estimates show that between thirty thousand and forty thousand Chinese workers supplemented a somewhat greater number of local hires over the duration of the project)-- and did this feature make it a (good) “alternative” model? Asking such questions more explicitly would be particularly rewarding because they are often ignored in official discourse on current Chinese “development” assistance in Africa, which is still asserted to be “different” and unencumbered by (neo)colonial and hierarchical relations.

The railway’s subsequent history is one of ups and downs. Plagued by technical and economic problems, the railway never reached its intended cargo or passenger capacity and its performance fluctuated significantly, requiring boosters in the form of Chinese, American, and Swedish aid packages at various points. Monson’s main interest, however, is in how the presence of TAZARA affected the surrounding areas in the railway’s Tanzanian middle section, the “passenger belt.” Here, TAZARA interacted with other significant developments: the author highlights Tanzania’s “villagization” program of the early 1970s and economic liberalization from the late 1980s. The former project sought to make use of the new transportation infrastructure by establishing a number of new settlements and expanding others along the railway; in the mid-1970s, such population concentrations around the railway could also serve the purpose of guarding the line against feared acts of sabotage from southern African counter-liberation forces. From the late 1980s, economic liberalization contributed to rural de-agrarianization and diversification of livelihood strategies in Tanzania as elsewhere: the railway, argues Monson, afforded people the mobility increasingly necessary in such circumstances, and hence made its corridor attractive for in-migration.

This point is well taken and nicely illustrated through the life stories Monson reports. It is difficult, however, to gauge the scale and dimensions of TAZARA’s impact on this front. In terms of migration, Monson shows local ward population growth rates that seem to indicate a positive correlation of population growth rates and proximity to the railroad (a map would have been helpful here to illustrate this correlation). But what did this translate to in terms of absolute numbers of people who moved near the railroad? In terms of the railway’s economic significance for small-scale commerce in the passenger belt, the book’s central evidence, besides several life stories, is “parcel receipts” that record the movement of smaller bundles of goods on the railway (the book is less interested in large, commercial shipments). While the figures reported offer only a 1998-2000 snapshot, they seem to suggest that the railway was, at least in the late 1990s, an important means of transport in the corridor: a total of 33,829 parcels were shipped from five stations over the period. But this evidence is again hard to read with respect to the importance of such movements of goods without population

Looking at the data in some more detail, it is also striking just how many of the shipments originating in the corridor were destined for Dar es Salaam and, to a lesser extent, the major transportation hub of Makambako where the railway meets the Dar-Songea road and TAZARA’s competitor project, the American-built TANZAM highway. The only exception to this pattern is goods shipped from Makambako (i.e., the road access point) to other settlements in the corridor (with the exception of tomatoes, very little is shipped from Makambako to Dar). Insofar as Monson stresses TAZARA’s importance in terms of facilitating livelihood strategies that did not just target the large market of Dar es Salaam, but were built on intra-regional mobility, flexibility, and exchange, these data do not support her thesis. Indeed, intra-corridor shipments of thirteen different categories of goods from the five stations other than Makambako for which figures are reported are most frequently zero, with only a handful of exceptions in the double digits. Even if we take one of the larger numbers, twenty “small parcels” of maize shipped from Ifakara (recent population of 48,300) to Mlimba (recent population of 34,800) over the 1998-2000 period, it does not, on the face of it, suggest very intense small-scale, intra-regional trading networks. The point that these data do suggest is that where there is a road, little moves on the railway. The vast majority of movements of goods on the train fall into two categories: goods moving to Dar es Salaam from stations that do not have a good road connection; and goods moving from Makambako (with good road access) to other stations that have no road access. Notwithstanding the increased mobility and access to transport that the railway did then provide within its corridor, is this a vindication of those 1960s studies that declared the railway to be uneconomical and prompted Western donors to withdraw their support? Would roads have served the rural areas better? While Monson’s study of how TAZARA affected local lives in its corridor does not set out to address this evaluative question, the reader wonders whether the aid and effort expended on TAZARA in the end created something of a white elephant lumbering from Dar through the Selous Game Reserve all the way into Zambia’s interior.

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Citation: Leander Schneider. Review of Monson, Jamie, Africa's Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania. H-Africa, H-Net Reviews. June, 2010. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25748

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