The to Railway as a pioneer case of the transfer of technical engineering knowledge overseas to Africa.

Bruno J. Navarro

Interuniversity Center of Science History and Technology

On 31 October 1886, three years after construction work had started on the Tua Line, the official launch ceremony was held for the Luanda-Ambaca railway, the first inland railway that the Portuguese state planned in its vast overseas space. It was the culmination of a long process of reorganization of the Portuguese colonial empire, marked out between the independence of Brazil and the defining of an agenda for the promotion of the African provinces, due to the urgent necessity to promote effective occupation of those territories, just as they had been imposed, by the major European powers at the 1885 Berlin Conference.

To politicians and especially the professional class of Portuguese engineers, the railway emerged as a prodigious symbol of modernity and development, an indispensible tool for strategic territorial ownership (of a region where lines of communication were practically inexistent). It was as well directed to its population, a systematic implementation of the Portuguese state’s administrative machinery, economic use of natural resources – in domestic and foreign trade – , agricultural and industrial revitalization, and above all, the affirmation of Portugal (a small country in peripheral Europe, but in the political center in extensive colonial rule) in the community of nations that disputed influence and power in Africa.

The first stretch, with a distance of 45 km linking Luanda to Funda, was open to exploitation on 1 November 1888. The connection to Ambaca appeared to be, in the spirit of its ambitious mentors, the first stage (353 km) of a more extensive project, whose ultimate goal would be the link to the opposite shore of the continent in Mozambique, in the Zambezi region. Its conception and implementation in the virginal landscape of the overseas province marked the first moment a set of practical and technical knowledge of Portuguese engineering was transmitted, knowledge which essentially resulted from the experience accumulated until that moment in the construction of railways in Portugal. There is no other way to explain the adoption of the narrow gauge (1m gauge, widely used in Portugal and throughout most of Europe), while in Africa, the norm was the use of 1.067m gauge (which would incidentally come to be known as the “African gauge”).

In our communication we will conduct a detailed analysis of all the political, economic, health and technical specificities that were involved in the planning and construction process of the Luanda-Ambaca railway, here understood as the true “tool of the Portuguese empire”, looking, whenever possible, to link the the construction methods employed in similar projects in Portugal. Taking the Tua Line as a reference model for such enterprises, we will look in particularly to the recognition of the solutions found to overcome a set of technical difficulties associated with the railway sections where terrain accidents were more common, namely the rugged mountainous area in the mountain range (including the municipalities of Zenza do Golungo and , as well as and ), in the route from Quisanga to the Luinha Valley.

6 August 2012

Bruno J. Navarro