Turn to the East: Moving Global Goods in TAZARA’s Dry Port
Jamie Monson
African Studies, Michigan State University
When the TAZARA railway was built in the 1970s with Chinese development assistance, it was called the “Freedom Railway” because it was intended to liberate landlocked Zambia from its dependency on white-settler-ruled states to the south. On the TAZARA line, which stretches from the Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam to the Zambian copperbelt, the primary geography of commodity movement was imagined to be from the interior to the coast, mirroring the patterns of earlier colonial arteries that moved African products into global markets. The terminus at New Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia, therefore, while also functioning as a reception point for shipments of fertilizer and other bulk commodities, was mainly envisioned as a collection point for Zambian mineral resources to be shipped from the mines to the port, and from the port to the sea.
Over the decades since TAZARA’s construction, however, this movement of commodities has developed in unexpected directions. New routes of trade are linking TAZARA to eastern markets, in particular to China and to Dubai. Over time, the railway town of New Kapiri Mposhi has come to look less like a terminus and more like a hub in a complex network of eastern, central and southern African exchange routes. Thus New Kapiri Mposhi is not the “end of the line” at all but a link, where goods shipments that arrive by train from the Indian Ocean are offloaded onto a diverse assortment of transport vehicles including lorries, buses, vans, pickup trucks, bicycles and pushcarts. The spaces of transshipment at New Kapiri Mposhi station are occupied by shipping and forwarding agents, truck drivers and traders. In their midst are teams of railway porters who do the hard physical labor of moving loads from one form of transport to another.
This paper views the inland “port city” of New Kapiri Mposhi through the lens of the railway porters, using ethnographic and oral historical fieldwork carried out during the past three years. The paper argues that porters provide essential labor for transshipment of building materials from China that are shipped via Dubai; for rice from Thailand headed to the Eastern Congo, and (still) for fertilizers destined for agricultural production in a number of inland maize growing regions. TAZARA’s railway porters may occupy a marginal position in the social spaces of work at Kapiri Mposhi station. But they are located at the center of the inland port city, both physically and economically. They have organized themselves into associations that allow them to secure contracts and also to provide social support for their members. These associations thus push back against the precarity of port city casualization. At the same time, as Fred Cooper discovered on the colonial East African waterfront, they stabilize the movement and handling of goods for the railway authority as well as the commodity traders. Ironically then, the social work of porter associational life may undergird the very institutions that profit from the informality of their labor conditions.
