Chapter illustrations ()
Loading image navigation...
No image index could be found for this publication.
Close this Panel
Chapter 1
Introduction Transport Corridors in Africa: Synergy, Slippage and Sustainability
Paul Nugent and Hugh Lamarque
The critical attention and material resources that governments have devoted to transport infrastructure has fluctuated markedly over time. A hundred years ago, colonial regimes were investing in infrastructure to serve the incipient mining industry and the cash crop zones, in an effort to render their colonies economically viable – that is before the onset of the Great Depression forced them back into their shells. In the 1950s, the post-war commodity boom, and the imperative to win the compliance of African subjects, led to unprecedented investments in roads, railways and seaports across the British and French colonies – all in the name of something that came to be labelled as ‘development’.1 Frederick Cooper, ‘Modernising Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept’, in Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (eds), International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays in the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley & London, 1998), pp. 64–92; On seaports, see B.S. Hoyle and D. Hilling (eds), Seaports and Development in Tropical Africa, London, 1970. This provided the infrastructural foundations that post-colonial regimes continued to build upon over the ensuing decades. The one difference was that almost no railways were built after the 1960s, because they had come to be perceived as being prohibitively expensive – although certain key lines were maintained when they were needed by the mining industry or were regarded as an essential lifeline for landlocked countries.2 The Transcamerounais, which is dealt with by Muñoz in this volume, was one important exception. The other was the Chinese-constructed Tazara railway, running from Zambia to the Tanzanian port of Dar-es-Salaam. It was completed in 1975. Jamie Monson, Africa’s Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania, Bloomington, 2011. The slow decay of the Bamako–Dakar railway exemplifies the continental pattern.
After the oil crisis of the mid-1970s, most cash-strapped African governments lacked the resources to do more than mark time. In the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR) functional transport infrastructure may actually have halved.3 Peer Schouten, ‘Roadblock Politics in Central Africa’, Environmental Planning D: Society and Space, 37:5, 2019, 924–41, at p. 933. Oil-rich states like Nigeria invested heavily in infrastructure during the boom, but much of it was centred on the cities. This was especially apparent in Lagos. Donors to heavily indebted countries became increasingly sceptical about the ability of large-scale and costly infrastructural investments to deliver economic transformation. Most donor funding went into supporting road networks, and much was channelled into feeder roads linked to agricultural development projects sponsored by the World Bank. During the heyday of structural adjustment in the 1980s, African governments were pressured to establish the right macroeconomic conditions, to get the agricultural prices right and to scale back on costly public investments. At the same time, they were encouraged to let the private sector take the lead in fostering transport links. The shift was most evident in ports and on the railways where international corporations like Bolloré and Maersk managed to cement their grip.4 Jean Debrie, ‘The West African Port System: Global Insertion and Regional Particularities’, EchoGéo, 20, 2012, 1–11, at pp. 3–4. But this did not necessarily translate into significant fresh investment in the underpinning infrastructure, in a context where donor investment in the transport sector was miserly.5 Sergio Oliete Josa and Francesc Magrinyà, ‘Patchwork in an Interconnected World: The Challenges of Transport Networks in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Transport Reviews, 38:6, 2018, p. 720. It is only since the turn of the millennium that the pendulum has swung back again – and with some force.6 Paul Nugent, ‘Africa’s Re-Enchantment with Big Infrastructure: White Elephants Dancing in Virtuous Circles?’, in Jon Schubert, Ulf Engel and Elisio Macamo (eds), Extractive Industries and Changing State Dynamics in Africa: Beyond the Resource Curse, Abingdon, 2018, pp. 22–40. As we indicate below, African governments have been willing to take on new debts, and new types of debt, in order to achieve their own infrastructural ambitions. It also has had much to do with the willingness of China to finance and construct new infrastructure (Gambino, this volume), which has been matched by a paradigm shift within the World Bank, the European Union (EU) and the African Development Bank (AfDB). Given Africa’s limited contribution to global trade, the revised wisdom is that Africa’s economic potential needs to be ‘unblocked’, which involves tackling a number of geographical challenges and historical legacies that have served to fragment African economies.7 Benno J. Ndulu, ‘Infrastructure, Regional Integration and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa: Dealing with the Disadvantages of Geography and Sovereign Fragmentation’, Journal of African Economies, 15, AERC Supplement 2, 2006, 212–44, at pp. 214–15. In 2010, a World Bank report, explicitly invoking the language of ‘transformation’ (and jettisoning the logic of the once-hegemonic Berg Report), estimated that African countries would need to spend US$93 billion per year (or 15 per cent of GDP) to cover the infrastructure deficit.8 Vivien Foster and Cecilia Briceño-Garmendia (eds), Africa’s Infrastructure: A Time for Transformation, Washington, D.C., 2010. Elliot Berg, who was the driving force behind the 1981 report, which provided the rationale for structural adjustment, had earlier critiqued the transformationist agenda in Ghana. See Elliot J. Berg, ‘Structural Transformation versus Gradualism: Recent Economic Development in Ghana’, in Philip Foster and Aristide Zolberg (eds), Ghana and the Ivory Coast: Perspectives on Modernisation, Chicago & London, 1971, pp. 187–230. Railways are back in vogue, multi-lane continental highways are planned, and large-scale investments are being made in port developments across the continent. Indeed, such has been the infrastructural feeding frenzy that doubts are emerging about the capacity of governments to manage mountains of debt, which are often secured against the expectation of windfalls from natural resources, in the coming years. At the time of writing – as the COVID-19 pandemic pushes the global economy into recession – some of the enthusiasm seems decidedly misplaced. What is abundantly clear is that African governments have channelled resources into infrastructure – with the active compliance of donors and the banks – on an impressive scale. This book therefore comes at an important crossroads where it makes sense to take stock.
The topic of infrastructure in Africa is potentially vast. In this book, we have chosen to narrow the focus to transport corridors – not merely because this is where so much of the spending has been directed, but also because these are precisely where the claims about the transformative potential of infrastructure reside. In tackling this topic, it makes sense to avoid both African exceptionalism and methodological nationalism. There is a tradition of writing about transport corridors in other parts of the world, very largely emanating from the work of economic geographers.9 Jean Debrie and Claude Comtois, ‘Une Relecture du Concept de Corridors de Transport: Illustration Comparée Europe/Amerique du Nord’, Cahiers Scientifiques du Transport, 58, 2010, pp. 127–44. Much of this has been concerned with North America and Europe, but it has also reflected a more recent proliferation of corridors in Asia.10 Nathalie Fau, Sirivanh Khonthapane and Christian Taillard (eds), Transnational Dynamics in Southeast Asia: The Greater Mekong Subregion and Malacca Straits Economic Corridor, Singapore, 2014. It is very noticeable, but not altogether surprising, that Africa has been marginal to most of these discussions. At the present time, much of what is currently available consists of official publications and grey literature generated by institutions involved in rolling out, or otherwise supporting, corridor development. On the academic side, the greater part of the literature has been generated by economists, often with an applied focus on transport and logistics, as well as by economic geographers.11 Ndulu, ‘Infrastructure’, pp. 212–44; César Caldéron and Luis Servén, ‘Infrastructure and Economic Development in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Journal of African Economies, 19, AERC Supplement 11, 2010, pp. i13–i87. The rest of the Social Sciences is drifting somewhat behind the infrastructural wave, with the exception of a body of anthropological literature that addresses what infrastructure means to those who are impacted by it and/or actively engage with it.12 Adeline Masquelier, ‘Road Mythographies: Space, Mobility and the Historical Imagination in Postcolonial Niger’, American Ethnologist, 29:4, 2002, 829–56; Brian Larkin, ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 2013, 327–43; Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox, ‘The Enchantments of Infrastructure’, Mobilities, 7:4, 2012, 521–36; Kurt Beck, Gabriel Klaeger and Michael Stasik, “An Introduction to the African Road”, and other contributions to Gabriel Klaeger and Michael Stasik (eds), The Making of the African Road, Leiden, 2017; and Dimitris Dalakoglou, The Road: An Ethnography of (Im)mobility, Space and Cross-Border Infrastructure in the Balkans, Manchester, 2017. From a political economy perspective, there is also some work emerging on the logic that underpins decisions about what to invest in and where.13 An early marker was laid down by contributions to Fredrik Söderbaum and Ian Taylor (eds), Afro-Regions: The Dynamics of Cross-Border Micro-Regionalism in Africa, Uppsala, 2008. For the political economy of ports, see Hugh Lamarque, ‘Profitable Inefficiency: The Politics of Port Infrastructure in Mombasa, Kenya’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 57:1, 2019, pp. 85–109; Jana Hönke and Iván Cuesta-Fernández, ‘Mobilising Security and Logistics through an African Port: A Controversies Approach to Infrastructure’, Mobilities, 13:2, 2018, pp. 246–60. This provides the potential for a less positivist and much more critical approach to the topic. But clearly this is a subject that cannot properly be grasped from within narrow disciplinary silos. The offerings within this book often reflect a grounding within a specific discipline, but also range more widely. What also makes it distinctive is that it includes contributions from authors who have been directly engaged with the policy domain. While there are inevitably differences in register across the pieces, we believe that the advantages of a catholic approach outweigh the downsides. In this introduction, we seek to convey a sense of emerging themes in the study of transport corridors in Africa, while pointing to certain methodological challenges along the way.
 
1      Frederick Cooper, ‘Modernising Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept’, in Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (eds), International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays in the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley & London, 1998), pp. 64–92; On seaports, see B.S. Hoyle and D. Hilling (eds), Seaports and Development in Tropical Africa, London, 1970. »
2      The Transcamerounais, which is dealt with by Muñoz in this volume, was one important exception. The other was the Chinese-constructed Tazara railway, running from Zambia to the Tanzanian port of Dar-es-Salaam. It was completed in 1975. Jamie Monson, Africa’s Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania, Bloomington, 2011. The slow decay of the Bamako–Dakar railway exemplifies the continental pattern.  »
3      Peer Schouten, ‘Roadblock Politics in Central Africa’, Environmental Planning D: Society and Space, 37:5, 2019, 924–41, at p. 933. Oil-rich states like Nigeria invested heavily in infrastructure during the boom, but much of it was centred on the cities. This was especially apparent in Lagos. »
4      Jean Debrie, ‘The West African Port System: Global Insertion and Regional Particularities’, EchoGéo, 20, 2012, 1–11, at pp. 3–4. »
5      Sergio Oliete Josa and Francesc Magrinyà, ‘Patchwork in an Interconnected World: The Challenges of Transport Networks in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Transport Reviews, 38:6, 2018, p. 720. »
6      Paul Nugent, ‘Africa’s Re-Enchantment with Big Infrastructure: White Elephants Dancing in Virtuous Circles?’, in Jon Schubert, Ulf Engel and Elisio Macamo (eds), Extractive Industries and Changing State Dynamics in Africa: Beyond the Resource Curse, Abingdon, 2018, pp. 22–40. »
7      Benno J. Ndulu, ‘Infrastructure, Regional Integration and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa: Dealing with the Disadvantages of Geography and Sovereign Fragmentation’, Journal of African Economies, 15, AERC Supplement 2, 2006, 212–44, at pp. 214–15. »
8      Vivien Foster and Cecilia Briceño-Garmendia (eds), Africa’s Infrastructure: A Time for Transformation, Washington, D.C., 2010. Elliot Berg, who was the driving force behind the 1981 report, which provided the rationale for structural adjustment, had earlier critiqued the transformationist agenda in Ghana. See Elliot J. Berg, ‘Structural Transformation versus Gradualism: Recent Economic Development in Ghana’, in Philip Foster and Aristide Zolberg (eds), Ghana and the Ivory Coast: Perspectives on Modernisation, Chicago & London, 1971, pp. 187–230.  »
9      Jean Debrie and Claude Comtois, ‘Une Relecture du Concept de Corridors de Transport: Illustration Comparée Europe/Amerique du Nord’, Cahiers Scientifiques du Transport, 58, 2010, pp. 127–44. »
10      Nathalie Fau, Sirivanh Khonthapane and Christian Taillard (eds), Transnational Dynamics in Southeast Asia: The Greater Mekong Subregion and Malacca Straits Economic Corridor, Singapore, 2014. »
11      Ndulu, ‘Infrastructure’, pp. 212–44; César Caldéron and Luis Servén, ‘Infrastructure and Economic Development in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Journal of African Economies, 19, AERC Supplement 11, 2010, pp. i13–i87. »
12      Adeline Masquelier, ‘Road Mythographies: Space, Mobility and the Historical Imagination in Postcolonial Niger’, American Ethnologist, 29:4, 2002, 829–56; Brian Larkin, ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 2013, 327–43; Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox, ‘The Enchantments of Infrastructure’, Mobilities, 7:4, 2012, 521–36; Kurt Beck, Gabriel Klaeger and Michael Stasik, “An Introduction to the African Road”, and other contributions to Gabriel Klaeger and Michael Stasik (eds), The Making of the African Road, Leiden, 2017; and Dimitris Dalakoglou, The Road: An Ethnography of (Im)mobility, Space and Cross-Border Infrastructure in the Balkans, Manchester, 2017. »
13      An early marker was laid down by contributions to Fredrik Söderbaum and Ian Taylor (eds), Afro-Regions: The Dynamics of Cross-Border Micro-Regionalism in Africa, Uppsala, 2008. For the political economy of ports, see Hugh Lamarque, ‘Profitable Inefficiency: The Politics of Port Infrastructure in Mombasa, Kenya’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 57:1, 2019, pp. 85–109; Jana Hönke and Iván Cuesta-Fernández, ‘Mobilising Security and Logistics through an African Port: A Controversies Approach to Infrastructure’, Mobilities, 13:2, 2018, pp. 246–60. »
What is a Transport Corridor?
Let us begin with a deceptively simple question: namely, what is a transport corridor? This is arguably more complex than addressing the question of what is a city, or even what is a pandemic, for the reason that the object of study has been so heavily shaped by a paradigm in flux. At the most basic level, a transport corridor may be defined as an infrastructural assemblage that connects two or more geographical points across international borders and provides a conduit for the movement of people and goods. Transport corridors do not simply exist in a straightforward empirical sense: there may be cranes, rail tracks and road surfaces to be sure, but even when bundled together these do not a corridor make. It is the level of connectivity that counts, which is why corridors are often described in terms of networks. The problem here is that corridors exist in large part because governments, funders and development experts either believe that they do or that they should exist. The reality is that the should very easily slips into the do, at the same time as what already exists is repeatedly rebranded. This accounts for the often stark contrast between corridors that are described on paper and what actually exists on the ground. Moreover, many of the corridors that are the object of vigorous boosting by national governments, regional economic communities (RECs), donors and investors are characterised less by effortless flows than recurring blockages. Containers pile up at seaports and trucks routinely find themselves stuck in queues at weigh stations and at border crossings. Meanwhile, efforts to patch up the road surfaces that are pummelled by heavy goods vehicles represents constant work in progress as potholes announce themselves in new locations – which is intimately related to a frightening rate of accidents and deaths on the road. In many ways, this could stand as a metaphor for corridor management as a whole, which necessarily tends to be much more reactive than toolkits and official pronouncements might lead one to believe. We need, therefore, to understand what the various institutional actors believe they are doing, but also to have a feel for the realities that are unfolding on the ground – realities that may be following a number of different social and temporal logics. This was, in fact, the starting point for the AFRIGOS project, which provides the backbone to this volume.
The concept of the transport corridor can be understood by approaching each of the signifiers separately. To begin with transport, corridors can only be held to exist in so far as the underlying infrastructure is in a condition, and if there is adequate security, to enable people and goods to move. At the very least, there needs to be a road surface that is motorable. But clearly most corridors consist of other elements as well. There are seaports, inland dry ports, multi-lane highways, navigable waterways and railways – either in existence, currently under construction or being planned. In a functioning multi-modal system, goods are expected to shift from one means of transport to another, according to the balance of affordability and convenience. Multi-modality remains an aspiration in Africa, given that most freight and passenger traffic is still conducted by road and little investment has been channelled into waterways. For example, the Walvis Bay Corridors are entirely dependent on road haulage.1 Plans for a rail link between Grootfontein and Katima Mulilo in Namibia are currently on hold. In the wake of the privatisation of mines in Zambia, the shift in the geographical centre of mining operations and the penetration of the South African trucking business, there has indeed been a pronounced shift from rail to road in the sub-region.2 The Zambian Copperbelt was dependent upon the railways until the 1980s. There has since been a shift to road transport, which has to some extent shifted the financial burden onto the state. Gaël Raballand and Alan Whitworth, Should the Zambian Government Invest in Railways?, ZIPAR Working Paper No. 3, 2012 (Lusaka, Zambia Institute for Policy Analysis and Research). In East and West Africa, there is more in the way of rail, much of it very old, but road transport remains dominant. As Lombard outlines (this volume), the uptake in road transport had reduced the share of the Dakar–Bamako railway to around 10 per cent. Within the East Africa Community (EAC), road accounts for 90 per cent of market share, while along the Northern and Central Corridors specifically rail carried only 6 per cent of the total volume of goods transported around 2016.3 Charles Kunaka, Gael Raballand and Mike Fitzmaurice, How Trucking Services Have Improved and May Contribute to Development: The Case of East Africa, WIDER Working Paper 152/2016, p. 3. The completion of the Mombasa–Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) has altered the picture somewhat. But at the time of writing, financing constraints mean that there are doubts as to whether the line will reach the border and about whether Uganda will be able to continue the line to Kampala and beyond. Tanzania is constructing another SGR along the Central Corridor, which is expected to link up to transport on Lake Victoria; but whether this line would be extended to neighbouring countries equally remains in doubt. Across the Horn, the picture is similar. Although the completion of the Addis Ababa–Djibouti Railway now provides an alternative, many users continue to prefer road transportation because of a number of logistical challenges (Chen, this volume).
In theory, railways are more cost-efficient and environmentally friendly than roads. But there are two fundamental reasons why they do not carry the day. The first is that the fixed costs of establishing a railway are very high, and because they place a very visible burden of debt on government, these have ultimately to be transferred to the users. By contrast, the cost of repairing the damage done to roads by trucking is not borne by users to any meaningful extent, while the financial obligations are less visible and more incremental.4 The ability of roads to adapt to usage was a structural difference with railways that confirmed the ‘superiority of roads over railways’, in the classic account of: Albert O. Hirschman, Development Projects Observed, Washington, D.C., 1967, p. 83. Secondly, the debate on road versus rail has been a highly political one since colonial times.5 See, for example, the origins of the infamous ‘road gaps’ policy in the Gold Coast, G.B. Kay (ed.), The Political Economy of Colonialism in Ghana: A Collection of Documents and Statistics 1900–1960, Cambridge, 1972, pp. 20–25. As Muñoz demonstrates in this volume, it was a significant factor in the lengthy delays to the resolution of Cameroon’s transport dilemmas. In many countries today, like Ethiopia and Kenya, there remain powerful interests that insist on the primacy of trucking, which politicians ignore at their peril. As things stand, therefore, road continues to trump rail.
The corridor signifier is relatively easy to grasp. Within global trade, there is never really a clearly defined start and end point. Proponents of the corridor construct impose a boundedness for reasons of convenience. In other parts of the world, corridors are often taken to include the shipping lanes along which the container traffic moves. But in Africa, the corridor is typically considered to start at the coastal port and to end with a conurbation or a mining cluster. Part of the reason is that there little in the way of short-sea shipping. Possibly because governments and RECs are the ones pushing the agenda, the boundaries tend to be drawn at the jurisdictional limits of the state. Across Africa, there are different types of corridor. The Northern and Central Corridors in East Africa, which begin in Mombasa and Dar es Salaam respectively and extend into the Congolese interior, are classic coast-to-hinterland configurations. This is also true of the Walvis Bay–Lubumbashi–Ndola Corridor, with the difference that it is very much shaped by the demands of the mining industry. The usage of ‘corridor’ to refer to urban-to-urban connections is much less common in Africa, with the one important exception of the Abidjan–Lagos Corridor. Whereas the others run from the coast to the interior, this particular one links multiple cities (and ports) along the littoral (see Nugent, this volume).
Theo Notteboom reminds us that corridors should not be conceived of purely in terms of point-to-point connections and invokes the network metaphor:
A transport corridor is very often viewed as a point-to-point connection. In reality, individual transport corridors are mostly part of extensive transport and logistics networks consisting of a range of corridors, each with specific characteristics in terms of scale, transport modes used, price and service quality. The future development of transport corridors will therefore have to be assessed ever more from a network perspective.6 Theo Notteboom, ‘Strategies and Future Development of Transport Corridors’, in Yann, Alix (ed.), Les Corridors de Transport, Caens, 2012), pp. 289–312 <https://www.faq-logistique.com/EMS-Livre-Corridors-Transport-18-Strategies-Future-Develoment.htm> [Accessed 27 April 2021].
However, a network configuration is only really apparent in Southern Africa where a number of corridors intersect and are expected to feed the three seaports of Walvis Bay, Lobito and Durban. A corridor network might emerge in West Africa if the mooted railway loop is ever completed, but this now seems unlikely. Across the continent, the prevailing pattern is one of a single port serving a transport corridor. This, in turn, leads to a situation of corridor competition rather than complementarity – as is explored in greater detail by Lamarque in this volume. The stakes are high when it comes to making infrastructural investments, and this serves to create something that looks rather more like a zero-sum game than a state of healthy competition. A corridor network could, of course, involve not just connectivity between railways and highways, but also the ports. In 2005, Notteboom and Rodrigue identified the limitations of older models of port development that were premised on single ports operating in close proximity to large cities. They pointed to a process of regionalisation that has led to the emergence of transshipment hubs in remote locations and dry ports and inland terminals in the hinterlands.7 Theo E. Notteboom and Jean-Paul Rodrigue, ‘Port Regionalisation: Towards a New Phase in Port Development’, Maritime Policy & Management, 32:3, 2005, pp. 297–313. In Africa, nodes have been mapped by researchers on the basis of global maritime flows linking to dominant hubs in Europe (Rotterdam) and Asia (Singapore): namely, Alexandria, Durban, Cape Town, Pointe Noire, Casablanca, Lagos, Abidjan (albeit interrupted by years of political crisis).8 César Ducruet, Sylvain Cuyala and Ali El Hosni, ‘Maritime Networks as Systems of Cities: The Long-Term Interdependencies between Global Shipping Flows and Urban Development, (1890–2010)’, Journal of Transport Geography, 66, 2018, pp. 340–55. One might also add Dakar, Lomé and Tema to the list (Lombard, Sylvanus, Byiers and Woolfrey, this volume). Tanger-Med in Morocco is a major transhipment hub. However, although it has been suggested that Durban and a new port at Ngqura/Port Elizabeth have the capacity to perform that role in the future, transhipment operations are for the time being quite limited.9 Hwa-Joong Kim, Jasmine Siu Lee Lam and Paul Tae-Woo Lee, ‘Analysis of Liner Shipping Networks and Transhipment Flows of Potential Hub Ports in sub-Saharan Africa’, Transport Policy, 69, 2018, pp. 193–206. We can also see the beginnings of a spatial reconfiguration of the ports in the shape of inland terminals that are generally under the management of international logistics companies, and the steady growth in the number of dry ports (often under private ownership) where customs clearance for imported goods takes place.10 In 2009, South Africa had six inland terminals but only one dry port at City Deep. Erené Cronje, Marianne Matthee and Waldo Krugel, ‘The Role of Dry Ports in South Africa’, Transport and Communications Bulletin for Asia and the Pacific, 78, 2009, pp. 112–20, at p. 116. The French logistics giant, Bolloré, operates no fewer than 25 inland terminals: <www.bollore-ports.com/en/our-port-expertises/inland-container-depots.html> [Accessed 27 April 2021]; Benjamin Steck, ‘L’Afrique des Ports et des Corridors: Comment Formuler l’Interaction entre Logistique et Développement’, Cahiers de Géographie de Québec, 59:168, 2015, pp. 447–67. Transhipment has had an outsized share in the performance of ill-judged new port investments such as Kribi (Cameroon). But this is at a very incipient stage.
Finally, the concept of the ‘development corridor’ has gained some traction in Africa, not least after its endorsement by the AU and several RECs in 2008.11 Fourth Annual Meeting of the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa (ICA), held in Tokyo in March 2008. The latter shares many of the same elements as a transport corridor, but has a more explicit spatial referent that is captured in the terminology of the spatial development initiative (SDI). Whereas some transport corridors manifestly serve the extractive industries, RECs have embraced the notion that corridors ought to promote intra-regional trade and build on complementarities between African economies. In that sense, investments in corridors are intended to promote new sites of economic dynamism through a multiplier effect.12 David Simon and Muriel Samé Ekobo, ‘Walvis Bay-Swakopmund: Desert Micro-Region and Aspiring Regional Gateway’, in Söderbaum and Taylor (eds), Afro-Regions, pp. 53–73, at p. 62. Investments are often located away from the main cities, and are expected to contribute to a more balanced form of national and cross-border development.13 Fredrik Söderbaum and Ian Taylor, ‘Considering Micro-Regionalism in Africa in the Twenty-First Century’, in Söderbaum and Taylor (eds), Afro-Regions, p. 1. Special economic zones (SEZs) and industrial parks, which are springing up in a number of countries like Ethiopia, are similarly part of an effort by governments to give private investors an incentive to turn the corridor into an instrument of development. An excellent illustration of how these visions come together is provided by the Nacala Development Corridor, which is expected to run from coal mining concessions in the Tete Province of north-west Mozambique, to connect with a revamped railway line running to the north of Malawi, and then link to a modernised port at Nacala – in the vicinity of which a SEZ was established in 2009. The vision for the corridor turns not merely on mining, but also on the development of modernised agriculture in Mozambique, Zambia and Malawi.14 Republic of Mozambique, The Project for Nacala Corridor: Economic Development Strategies in the Republic of Mozambique – Final Study Report, Maputo, 2015, pp. 16–17; Euclides Gonçalves, ‘Agricultural Corridors as “Demonstration Fields”: Infrastructure, Fairs and Associations along the Beira and Nacala Corridors’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 14:2, 2020, pp. 354–74. A large number of other development corridors are currently mooted or are under construction, despite concerns about their environmental and economic sustainability.15 Bill Laurence, Sean Sloan, Lingfei Weng and Jeffrey A. Sayer, ‘Estimating the Environmental Costs of Africa’s Massive “Development Corridors”’, Current Biology, 25, 2015, pp. 3202–08. The authors list 33 planned or existing corridors. Some are road corridors nesting within the greater Trans-African Highway project (see Oliete Josa and Magrinyà , this volume),16 An example is the Mombasa–Nairobi–Addis Ababa Road Corridor. others are rebranded REC transport corridors (such as the Central Development Corridor in East Africa), while still others seem to be national initiatives linking hinterlands to ports that are intended to join up with neighbouring countries at some unspecified point in the future.17 The Mozambican government launched the Beira Agricultural Growth Corridor with donors and private investors in 2009, and the Mtwara Development Corridor with the AfDB in 2012. See <www.agdevco.com/uploads/reports/BAGC_Investment_Blueprint_rpt19.pdf> and <https://projectsportal.afdb.org/dataportal/VProject/show/P-Z1-D00–021> [both accessed 27 April 2021]. As things stand, the developmental outcomes remain in the future tense, with corridors tending to reinforce enclave effects. Moreover, SEZs and industrial parks have as yet failed to deliver their promised benefits. As Farole and Moberg indicate, this is partly because the choice of locations has been driven by a political calculus and partly it comes down to misplaced assumptions about where comparative advantages reside.18 John Farole and Lotta Moberg, ‘Special Economic Zones in Africa: Political Economy Challenges and Solutions’, in John Page and Finn Tarp (eds), The Practice of Industrial Policy: Government-Business Coordination in Africa and East Asia, Oxford, 2017, pp. 234–51. In so far as these initiatives are intended to boost intra-regional exchange (as opposed to merely maximising overseas exports), their likely success depends on the ease of doing business across borders.
In the light of the above, the task of studying transport corridors throws up a particular set of methodological challenges for researchers. The first is that of bridging the divide between policy and everyday practice. We need to understand the perspectives of those who plan, finance and construct corridors, given that they operate according to specific temporal horizons and understandings about risks and rates of return. But we equally need to focus on those who carry out official functions – such as customs, immigration and security – as well as those who perform outsourced responsibilities such as maintenance and repair. And, of course, we need to pay close attention to the many actors who make use of the corridor – more on this below. Secondly, research has to be flexible enough to observe corridor dynamics from fixed points, such as ports or one-stop border posts (OSBPs), but also to capture the reality of people and goods as they move through space. The perspective of a trucker, a customs officer and an engineer are likely to be very different, not simply because of the work they perform, but because of their quite different fields of vision. Thirdly, there is the challenge of comparing the patterns that play out across corridors. That is, we need to be able to distinguish what is specific to a corridor from that which is more generic. A final set of challenges relates to matters of scale, to which we also return in greater detail below.
 
1      Plans for a rail link between Grootfontein and Katima Mulilo in Namibia are currently on hold. »
2      The Zambian Copperbelt was dependent upon the railways until the 1980s. There has since been a shift to road transport, which has to some extent shifted the financial burden onto the state. Gaël Raballand and Alan Whitworth, Should the Zambian Government Invest in Railways?, ZIPAR Working Paper No. 3, 2012 (Lusaka, Zambia Institute for Policy Analysis and Research).  »
3      Charles Kunaka, Gael Raballand and Mike Fitzmaurice, How Trucking Services Have Improved and May Contribute to Development: The Case of East Africa, WIDER Working Paper 152/2016, p. 3. »
4      The ability of roads to adapt to usage was a structural difference with railways that confirmed the ‘superiority of roads over railways’, in the classic account of: Albert O. Hirschman, Development Projects Observed, Washington, D.C., 1967, p. 83.  »
5      See, for example, the origins of the infamous ‘road gaps’ policy in the Gold Coast, G.B. Kay (ed.), The Political Economy of Colonialism in Ghana: A Collection of Documents and Statistics 1900–1960, Cambridge, 1972, pp. 20–25. »
6      Theo Notteboom, ‘Strategies and Future Development of Transport Corridors’, in Yann, Alix (ed.), Les Corridors de Transport, Caens, 2012), pp. 289–312 <https://www.faq-logistique.com/EMS-Livre-Corridors-Transport-18-Strategies-Future-Develoment.htm> [Accessed 27 April 2021]. »
7      Theo E. Notteboom and Jean-Paul Rodrigue, ‘Port Regionalisation: Towards a New Phase in Port Development’, Maritime Policy & Management, 32:3, 2005, pp. 297–313. »
8      César Ducruet, Sylvain Cuyala and Ali El Hosni, ‘Maritime Networks as Systems of Cities: The Long-Term Interdependencies between Global Shipping Flows and Urban Development, (1890–2010)’, Journal of Transport Geography, 66, 2018, pp. 340–55. »
9      Hwa-Joong Kim, Jasmine Siu Lee Lam and Paul Tae-Woo Lee, ‘Analysis of Liner Shipping Networks and Transhipment Flows of Potential Hub Ports in sub-Saharan Africa’, Transport Policy, 69, 2018, pp. 193–206.  »
10      In 2009, South Africa had six inland terminals but only one dry port at City Deep. Erené Cronje, Marianne Matthee and Waldo Krugel, ‘The Role of Dry Ports in South Africa’, Transport and Communications Bulletin for Asia and the Pacific, 78, 2009, pp. 112–20, at p. 116. The French logistics giant, Bolloré, operates no fewer than 25 inland terminals: <www.bollore-ports.com/en/our-port-expertises/inland-container-depots.html> [Accessed 27 April 2021]; Benjamin Steck, ‘L’Afrique des Ports et des Corridors: Comment Formuler l’Interaction entre Logistique et Développement’, Cahiers de Géographie de Québec, 59:168, 2015, pp. 447–67. Transhipment has had an outsized share in the performance of ill-judged new port investments such as Kribi (Cameroon). »
11      Fourth Annual Meeting of the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa (ICA), held in Tokyo in March 2008. »
12      David Simon and Muriel Samé Ekobo, ‘Walvis Bay-Swakopmund: Desert Micro-Region and Aspiring Regional Gateway’, in Söderbaum and Taylor (eds), Afro-Regions, pp. 53–73, at p. 62. »
13      Fredrik Söderbaum and Ian Taylor, ‘Considering Micro-Regionalism in Africa in the Twenty-First Century’, in Söderbaum and Taylor (eds), Afro-Regions, p. 1. »
14      Republic of Mozambique, The Project for Nacala Corridor: Economic Development Strategies in the Republic of Mozambique – Final Study Report, Maputo, 2015, pp. 16–17; Euclides Gonçalves, ‘Agricultural Corridors as “Demonstration Fields”: Infrastructure, Fairs and Associations along the Beira and Nacala Corridors’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 14:2, 2020, pp. 354–74. »
15      Bill Laurence, Sean Sloan, Lingfei Weng and Jeffrey A. Sayer, ‘Estimating the Environmental Costs of Africa’s Massive “Development Corridors”’, Current Biology, 25, 2015, pp. 3202–08. The authors list 33 planned or existing corridors. »
16      An example is the Mombasa–Nairobi–Addis Ababa Road Corridor. »
17      The Mozambican government launched the Beira Agricultural Growth Corridor with donors and private investors in 2009, and the Mtwara Development Corridor with the AfDB in 2012. See <www.agdevco.com/uploads/reports/BAGC_Investment_Blueprint_rpt19.pdf> and <https://projectsportal.afdb.org/dataportal/VProject/show/P-Z1-D00–021> [both accessed 27 April 2021]. »
18      John Farole and Lotta Moberg, ‘Special Economic Zones in Africa: Political Economy Challenges and Solutions’, in John Page and Finn Tarp (eds), The Practice of Industrial Policy: Government-Business Coordination in Africa and East Asia, Oxford, 2017, pp. 234–51. »
When is a Transport Corridor? Recurring Temporalities
Having dealt with what a transport corridor is, the next question that arises is the point from which one can meaningfully trace its emergence. It is clear that it had already begun to take shape in Europe and North America by the 1970s. As far as the World Bank is concerned, the concept arose in discussions about developing countries somewhat later, and later still with respect to Africa (Cissokho, this volume). What this already underlines is that certain conceptions about the relationship between transport and development have drifted in and out of fashion, often being repackaged in the process. Ironically, the allure of the corridor concept has resided in the notion that what is being unveiled is something fundamentally new. Today, this is reflected in the contention that global connectivity potentially unleashes all manner of synergies that did not previously exist. This is linked in particular to transformations in global shipping and port development that has enabled a prodigious number of containers to be shipped around the world at a much lower cost per unit. But shipping is precisely one of those areas where it pays to take the longer view. For historians, much of the language surrounding investments in transport infrastructure is redolent of the language of post-war developmentalism which was sold as a qualitative leap forward in much the same terms. The difference in Africa was that the infrastructure was supposed to better connect the colonies with the European ‘metropole’, whereas now the focus is much more upon the benefits of increasing trade with East and South-East Asia. It is clearly also the case that many of the projects that are being promoted now build upon infrastructure (notably road and rail) that was established in the colonial period or in the early years of independence.1 Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio, ‘On the Coloniality of “New” Mega-Infrastructure Projects in East Africa’, Antipode, 52:1, 2019, 101–23. See also Johannes Theodore Aalders, ‘Building on the Ruins of Empire: the Uganda Railway and the LAPPSET Corridor in Kenya’, Third World Quarterly, published online 12 March 2020. Hence the Addis–Djibouti Corridor is a direct replacement for a former French colonial railway (Chen, this volume). Again, the Zambezi Valley SDI in Mozambique is effectively a dusted-down colonial project devised by Portugal and South Africa.2 Milissão Nuvunga, ‘Region-Building in Central Mozambique: the Case of the Zambezi Valley Spatial Development Initiative’, in Söderbaum and Taylor (eds), Afro-Regions, pp. 74–89, at pp. 79–80. The Nacala Corridor is similarly based on a much older system of road and rail in Mozambique and Malawi, which was effectively disabled by the RENAMO insurgency four decades ago.
But there is also a case to be made for taking an even longer view. It is interesting to note that a recent report from the Asian Development Bank has pointed to precursors to contemporary transport corridors in South Asia which it dates to Mughal and East India Company initiatives.3 World Bank, The Web of Transport Corridors in South Asia, Washington, D.C., 2018, pp. 27–48. A historic road link between Nepal and Tibet, which was effectively closed in the 1960s, has received a renewed lease of life as a consequence of Chinese investments in a strategic corridor designed to connect East and South Asia. Galen Murton, ‘Trans-Himalayan Transformations: Building Roads, Making Markets, and Cultivating Consumption between Nepal and China’s Tibet’, in Yongming Zhou, Qu Tenglong, and Li Guiying (eds), Roadology: Roads, Space, Culture, Chongqing, 2016, pp. 328–40, at p. 335. Isabella Soi (this volume) similarly points to the historicity of certain trade routes that were important for established kingdoms within the Great Lakes region. Trade brought commodities in and out, but it also conferred revenues on the states that sought to regulate and tax what moved along the routes. During the heyday of the trans-Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades, a number of coastal ports became significant foci of maritime trade in West and East Africa. Some of these, like Mombasa and Luanda, remain important to this day. In the nineteenth century, the links between the interior and the coastal ports were more fully elaborated, both in East and West Africa. In the case of Asante, Ivor Wilks identifies a conscious attempt to develop a system of ‘great roads’ converging on the capital of Kumasi from the coast and the Sahel.4 Ivor Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order, Cambridge, 1975, ch. 1. Guaranteeing a modicum of physical security along the routes was a precondition for trade – as it certainly is today – but they had also to be actively maintained if they were to be serviceable. Challengers to the established order sought to cut the routes and/or to impose their own conditions on traders. For this reason, Peer Schouten observes that there is a prehistory to the modern roadblock in Central Africa – roughly Chad and Central African Republic – in the shape of taxes that were imposed upon people and goods at strategic chokepoints.5 Schouten, ‘Roadblock Politics’, p. 2. A similar logic applied to the ‘protection money’ demanded from the caravans that passed through Harar to Berbera by Somali clans along the route.6 Finn Stepputat and Tobias Hagmann, ‘Politics of Circulation: the Making of the Berbera Corridor in Somali East Africa’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space D, 37:5, 2019, 794–813, at p. 799.
Colonial propagandists, who were inclined to posit a sharp break with the past, were dazzled by feats of engineering, such as the Chemin de fer Congo-Océan, by which Europeans imposed their stamp on the continent, as well as on the African subjects whose labour was required to realise them. But we know that in the early twentieth century, many existing transport routes gained a second life as colonial infrastructure. Hence the ancient livestock trade route to Berbera was first valorised by the British, who channelled meat supplies towards Aden, and was then embedded when the Italian army constructed a motorable road in 1941.7 Luca Ciabarri, ‘Biographies of Roads, Biographies of Nations: History, Territory and the Road Effect in Post-Conflict Somaliland’, in Klaeger and Michael Stasik (eds), The Making, pp. 116–40, at p. 120. The continuities were obvious in the case of lake transport, but they are also apparent when it comes to roads. Some road projects undoubtedly represented something novel because they were tied to new developments in mining and cash crop production.8 Libbie Freed, ‘Conduits of Culture and Control: Roads, States and Users in French Central Africa, 1890–1960’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin Madison, 2006. But many were superimposed upon something that embodied a greater historicity. Existing routes were widened, straightened and flattened to facilitate the circulation of wheeled transport, but they connected the same places – most notably urban settlements and port towns. Contemporary transport corridors today connect up segments of existing roads and stretches of rail that were established in the colonial period. In this we can discern longer cycles of decay as well as moments of retrofitting.9 Cymene Howe, Jessica Lockrem, Hannah Appel, Edward Hackett, Dominic Boyer, Randal Hall, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Albert Pope, Akhil Gupta, Elizabeth Rodwell, Andrea Ballestero, Trevor Durbin, Farès el-Dahdah, Elizabeth Long and Cyrus Mody, ‘Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit and Risk’, Science, Technology and Human Values, 41:3, 2016, pp. 547–65. Much as stripping back the layers of an actual road reveal many different moments of construction, and multiple patch-ups, corridors may be seen as the accretion of so many older iterations of construction, maintenance and repair. If we start to conceive of transport corridors as explicitly modernist constructs that cover over the traces of their own pasts, we can also arrive at a more nuanced appreciation of how infrastructure actually works and is related to by local actors. Part of the reason why so many corridor interventions fail is that they are put into effect with a wilful ignorance of this history.
 
1      Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio, ‘On the Coloniality of “New” Mega-Infrastructure Projects in East Africa’, Antipode, 52:1, 2019, 101–23. See also Johannes Theodore Aalders, ‘Building on the Ruins of Empire: the Uganda Railway and the LAPPSET Corridor in Kenya’, Third World Quarterly, published online 12 March 2020. »
2      Milissão Nuvunga, ‘Region-Building in Central Mozambique: the Case of the Zambezi Valley Spatial Development Initiative’, in Söderbaum and Taylor (eds), Afro-Regions, pp. 74–89, at pp. 79–80. »
3      World Bank, The Web of Transport Corridors in South Asia, Washington, D.C., 2018, pp. 27–48. A historic road link between Nepal and Tibet, which was effectively closed in the 1960s, has received a renewed lease of life as a consequence of Chinese investments in a strategic corridor designed to connect East and South Asia. Galen Murton, ‘Trans-Himalayan Transformations: Building Roads, Making Markets, and Cultivating Consumption between Nepal and China’s Tibet’, in Yongming Zhou, Qu Tenglong, and Li Guiying (eds), Roadology: Roads, Space, Culture, Chongqing, 2016, pp. 328–40, at p. 335. »
4      Ivor Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order, Cambridge, 1975, ch. 1. »
5      Schouten, ‘Roadblock Politics’, p. 2. »
6      Finn Stepputat and Tobias Hagmann, ‘Politics of Circulation: the Making of the Berbera Corridor in Somali East Africa’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space D, 37:5, 2019, 794–813, at p. 799. »
7      Luca Ciabarri, ‘Biographies of Roads, Biographies of Nations: History, Territory and the Road Effect in Post-Conflict Somaliland’, in Klaeger and Michael Stasik (eds), The Making, pp. 116–40, at p. 120. »
8      Libbie Freed, ‘Conduits of Culture and Control: Roads, States and Users in French Central Africa, 1890–1960’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin Madison, 2006. »
9      Cymene Howe, Jessica Lockrem, Hannah Appel, Edward Hackett, Dominic Boyer, Randal Hall, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Albert Pope, Akhil Gupta, Elizabeth Rodwell, Andrea Ballestero, Trevor Durbin, Farès el-Dahdah, Elizabeth Long and Cyrus Mody, ‘Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit and Risk’, Science, Technology and Human Values, 41:3, 2016, pp. 547–65. »
Scales (1): Institutional Actors
Although scale has become a contested concept within critical geography, it seems indispensable when grappling with the complexities of transport corridors – not least because it is a framing that key actors are themselves guided by. Moreover, it is the slippage between interventions at different scales that frequently explains why there is such a mismatch between grandiose visions and mundane realities.
The transport corridors that are unfolding across Africa are, at the most fundamental level, intended to facilitate access to global markets. But they are also embedded in other visions that extend well beyond the remit of corridor authorities. In the case of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) investments in infrastructure are solicited by African governments and delivered by Chinese companies, as part of an ambitious agenda whose origins clearly lie outside the continent (Gambino, this volume). Although corridors could be folded into the BRI agenda, they were almost incidental to the underpinning rationale. And while Africa was not originally envisioned as part of BRI, projects have been added to it in a manner that suits all the main parties (Chen, this volume). At the same time, there are the continental initiatives that are intended to link different regions through infrastructure. As Oliete Josa and Magrinyà explain (this volume), the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) formulated the Trans-African Highways (TAH) initiative as far back as the 1970s. In recent times, it has underpinned the African Regional Transport Infrastructure Network (ARTIN) and the African Union’s Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA).1 The remit of PIDA is far wider than transport infrastructure and includes ICTs, energy and trans-boundary water resource management. <www.au-pida.org/pida-history/> [Accessed 27 April 2021]. These plans for pursuing continental integration through connective infrastructure bring together the AU, the various RECs, the AfDB, the EU, donor countries and African states. The various transport corridors map onto this larger infrastructural agenda, but African countries also advance their own preferences while often paying lip-service to continental and regional plans.
National governments organise their bureaucratic functions according to a very particular sense of scale. The presidency and core ministries in the capital city decide on what the national priorities are, which opens up a field of potential contestation. Ministries of transport are often weak relative to ministries of finance and of planning, and each of these may be bypassed by presidential secretariats that are intent on bringing infrastructural projects to fruition with minimal delay (Muñoz, this volume). Who negotiates the deal with the Chinese delegation is typically revealing about where the balance of power resides within the structures of government at any given moment. Then there are those agencies that enjoy a degree of operational autonomy from the core ministries – this typically includes the port and the revenue authorities (including customs), which often fight their own turf wars.2 Lamarque, ‘Profitable Inefficiency’, pp. 98–99. Their role in collecting revenue, or making revenue collection possible, lends them a voice and often an enhanced capacity to block and deflect unwelcome changes. By contrast, while decentralisation theoretically permits sub-national bodies a degree of latitude to set priorities, this generally does not extend to national infrastructure projects. The question of adequate compensation for land that may be requisitioned to build a port or a railway is typically one of the points of friction, especially as resident populations often bear the additional inconvenience associated with long periods of construction.3 This is true of LAPPSET. Charis Enns, ‘Infrastructure Projects and Rural Projects in Northern Kenya: The Use of Divergent Expertise to Negotiate the Terms of Land Deals for Transport Infrastructure’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 46:2, 2017, pp. 358–76; and Ngala Chome, ‘Land, Livelihoods and Belonging: Negotiating Change and Anticipating LAPSSET in Kenya’s Lamu County’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 14:2, 2020, pp. 310–31. Hassan K. Kochore, ‘The Road to Kenya? Visions, Expectations and Anxieties Around New Infrastructure Development in Northern Kenya’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 10:3, 2016, pp. 494–510. The speculation and outright scams surrounding compensation claims is also a factor in the equation.
As members of one or more of the overlapping RECs, African countries have signed up to regional protocols that formally commit them to the freedom of movement of people and goods along the corridors. In theory, the agendas of national governments and the RECs are perfectly aligned, but in practice governments sign up to far more than they are willing or able to implement. The REC secretariats are chronically underfunded and have limited capacity to pressure governments to honour their commitments. Like the AU, the RECs formally respect national sovereignty, but seek to persuade and cajole national governments to take their obligations seriously. Goods that are produced within the RECs that have established customs unions are permitted to cross borders free of duty, subject to local content provisions, while those that come from outside are covered by a common external tariff (CET). The harmonisation of tariffs is supposed to place member states on a level footing, but also to enhance commerce between member states. Some countries have negotiated ‘temporary’ exemptions for strategic commodities, and these have proved difficult to remove. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which is in the process of being rolled out, is supposed to align with the existing free trade provisions of the RECs and to scale them upwards. But, given the difficulties experienced by RECs, it remains to be seen whether a continental authority would be better placed to secure compliance.
Some of the greatest challenges have arisen from a proliferation of non-tariff barriers. This includes a range of fees that are levied at the border, notably for rights of transit, but also innumerable hurdles encountered on the road (Byiers and Woolfrey, this volume). One of the most persistent challenges has been the proliferation of roadblocks thrown up by a range of agencies, typically in the name of road safety or national security. These are extreme in the DRC,4 Schouten, ‘Roadblock Politics’, pp. 10–14. but they are also ubiquitous in Kenya and Ghana, whose governments are formally committed to regional integration. Along the Abidjan–Lagos Corridor, sub-units of Nigerian customs and immigration compete in the establishment of their own roadblocks (Nugent, this volume). Corridor management authorities are typically skeleton bodies with staff seconded from national ministries that have a greater or lesser input from the private sector. Their ability to shape the behaviour of governments is therefore even more limited than that of the RECs. In West Africa an additional difficulty is that the Francophone countries are members of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and of l’Union Économique et Monétaire Ouest-Africaine (UEMOA). Despite the efforts to harmonise the rules, divergences between them – for example over axel load limits – have culminated in misunderstandings and frequent stoppages. Some of the same complications occur in the Great Lakes where a number of countries are members of the East African Community (EAC) as well as COMESA.
Along the corridors themselves, officials often enjoy a degree of operational autonomy that enables them to exploit the complexities of scale and the lack of alignment between institutional actors. Officials ignore and blunt official dictats that are not to their liking and find ways of carrying out their functions in accordance with their own understandings of ‘business as usual’. Although the latest directive often cascades down to the local police station or customs post, its efficacy is often limited and short-lived, as there is a keen appreciation that follow-ups are unlikely and after some time it will probably be forgotten5 José-María Muñoz, Doing Business in Cameroon: An Anatomy of Economic Governance, Cambridge, 2018, pp. 158–62.. The officials who formally do the work of government at the local level have adopted their own conventions, which are often worked out in tandem with the freight forwarders, truckers, traders and road builders who are present along the corridor. These conventions persist because they are relatively predictable – although they do not necessarily work for everyone or to the same degree – and those who are newly arrived are quickly inducted into the rules of the game. As Thomas Bierschenk indicates, such innovations should not necessarily be treated as corruption, disobedience or collusion because the reality is that policies that issue from the centre are often impractical as they stand.6 Thomas Bierschenk, ‘Sedimentation, Fragmentation and Normative Double-Binds in (West) African Public Services’, in Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (eds), States at Work: Dynamics of African Bureaucracies, Leiden & Boston, 2014, pp. 221–45, at p. 241. Nevertheless, the workarounds that local actors fashion lead to a situation where the mismatch between the theory surrounding the corridor and the everyday realities is never actually bridged – and in some cases becomes even starker as time passes. This underlines a crucial finding, which is that the cumulative effects of actions taken by officials at the lowest scales often outweigh the impact of regional and national decision-makers who notionally call the shots.
 
1      The remit of PIDA is far wider than transport infrastructure and includes ICTs, energy and trans-boundary water resource management. <www.au-pida.org/pida-history/> [Accessed 27 April 2021]. »
2      Lamarque, ‘Profitable Inefficiency’, pp. 98–99. »
3      This is true of LAPPSET. Charis Enns, ‘Infrastructure Projects and Rural Projects in Northern Kenya: The Use of Divergent Expertise to Negotiate the Terms of Land Deals for Transport Infrastructure’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 46:2, 2017, pp. 358–76; and Ngala Chome, ‘Land, Livelihoods and Belonging: Negotiating Change and Anticipating LAPSSET in Kenya’s Lamu County’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 14:2, 2020, pp. 310–31. Hassan K. Kochore, ‘The Road to Kenya? Visions, Expectations and Anxieties Around New Infrastructure Development in Northern Kenya’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 10:3, 2016, pp. 494–510. The speculation and outright scams surrounding compensation claims is also a factor in the equation. »
4      Schouten, ‘Roadblock Politics’, pp. 10–14. »
5      José-María Muñoz, Doing Business in Cameroon: An Anatomy of Economic Governance, Cambridge, 2018, pp. 158–62. »
6      Thomas Bierschenk, ‘Sedimentation, Fragmentation and Normative Double-Binds in (West) African Public Services’, in Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (eds), States at Work: Dynamics of African Bureaucracies, Leiden & Boston, 2014, pp. 221–45, at p. 241. »
Scales (2): The States, Corporations and Small Fish
Factoring in scale is especially important for understanding the role, influence and physical presence of private sector actors along the corridors. It is a commonplace observation that the relationship between the African state and capital has been reconfigured during the 1980s and 1990s under the regime of structural adjustment. The reality that political elites could actually benefit from the logic of ‘privatisation’ is well-established.1 Fredrik Söderbaum and Ian Taylor, ‘Competing Region-Building in the Maputo Development Corridor’, in Söderbaum and Taylor (eds), Afro-Regions, pp. 35–52. But the withdrawal of the state has also been much exaggerated. Although African governments do not implement many infrastructural projects directly, they do finance many of them and, as importantly, they underwrite the external loans. In many countries such as Kenya, it is the politicians that have been keen to accelerate infrastructural projects, in the belief that this will play well with voters. As Lombard and Sylvanus both indicate (this volume) ports also occupy an important place in national imaginaries. In Ghana, the decision to roll out three new transport corridors from Tema to the North may be seen as a revival of the vision of achieving economic transformation through infrastructural development that Kwame Nkrumah had once championed – even if the Akuffo-Addo government belongs to the competing political tradition. In Ghana, like Kenya, promising roads and railways is part of the currency of national politics – and because it depreciates rapidly, new projects constantly have to be conceived. At the same time, nothing has been done to develop transport along the Volta Lake, which would be key to a functioning multi-modal transport network. Paradoxically, it would require much less capital investment to accomplish, but the crux is that it would yield a correspondingly lower political dividend.
The gatekeeping role that particular branches of the bureaucracy perform also has an important bearing on what gets built where, but also defines who gets to build it and under what terms and conditions. Corporate actors therefore have a vested interest in cultivating long-term relationships with the most important branches of the bureaucracy, while remaining on good terms with powerful interest groups on an everyday basis. Playing the long game, large corporate players are often prepared to take on loss leaders, such as creaking parts of rail links, in order to remain in the larger contest. Needless to say, the mutual embeddedness of corporate actors and gatekeepers frequently means that the transport configurations are not necessarily the economically optimal ones.
Two dominant perceptions about what has unfolded over the past 20 years each contain an element of truth, but need to be nuanced. The first is that states have essentially rolled over and allowed corporate capital to assume control over transport infrastructure where the juiciest pickings are to be found. While it is true that there has been a concentration of capital in global shipping over recent decades, there has also been fierce competition between companies over access to port facilities. The intrusion of Dubai Port World (DPW), the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) and China Merchant Holding International (CMHI) has reduced some of the earlier dominance of Bolloré and Maersk.2 Debrié, ‘West African port’, p. 4. This has enabled governments to play a range of actors off against each other (Lombard, this volume).3 When DPW won the contract to run the Berbera port, the state-owned Ethiopian Shipping and Logistics Services Enterprise (ESLSE) was cut in on the deal. Warsame M. Ahmed and Finn Stepputat, Berbera Port: Geopolitics and State-Making in Somaliland, Rift Valley Institute Briefing Paper, Nairobi, 2019, p. 4. While governments have been willing to lease container terminals to shipping and logistics companies, port authorities (PAs) have retained overall oversight. Governments have generally preferred joint ventures to outright privatisation. For example, Tema remains a public port under the control of the Ghana Ports and Harbour Authority (GPHA). In 2004, GPHA granted Meridian Port Services (MPS) the contract to build and operate a container terminal, which was opened three years later. As Brenda Chalfin underlined a decade ago, the GPHA was careful to retain a grip over the port, and this picture has not changed significantly since then.4 Brenda Chalfin, ‘Recasting Maritime Governance in Ghana: The Neo-Developmental State and Port Governance in Tema’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 48:4, 2010, pp. 573–98. In 2019, the first phase of the container port expansion was completed, with the second phase to follow in 2020. Crucially, MPS was to be jointly owned by GPHA itself (30 per cent), APM Terminals (a subsidiary of A.P. Moller/Maersk on 35 per cent) and Bolloré (35 per cent) – although the GPHA stake was effectively halved in 2016 when additional shares were issued without its knowledge.5 The scandal was unravelled in Andrew Weir, ‘How Vincent Bolloré Won Control Over Ghana’s Biggest Port”, Africa Confidential, 62:7, 2021 <www.africa-confidential.com/article/id/13322/SPECIAL_REPORT_How_Vincent_Bollor%C3%A9_won_control_of_Ghana%E2%80%99s_biggest_port> [Accessed 28 July 2021]. Consortia such as this one involving the partnering of competitors are not unusual. A similar shareholding arrangement among Bolloré, APM and Cameroonian interests prevailed in the company that operated Douala’s container terminal from 2003 to 2019. Governments have also shown their willingness to flex their muscles in relation to both ports and railways. An illustration is that of the Doraleh Container Terminal in Djibouti which was constructed and operated by DPW, only for the government to expel the company, alleging that it had acquired the concession through bribery.
The second perception is that China has cornered the market in infrastructure by tying concessionary financing to the award of contracts. While it is true that Chinese companies have often been awarded important construction contracts, they have not, in most cases, secured the concessions to run the container terminals. When it comes to new railway projects, the Chinese role is much more visible. But Brautigam notes that China has actually only financed four ‘greenfield’ railway projects.6 Deborah Brautigam, ‘Chinese Loans and African Structural Transformation’, in Arkebe Oqubay and Justin Yifu Lin (eds), China-Africa and an Economic Transformation, Oxford, 2019, pp. 129–47, at p. 140. Of these, the Kenyan SGR is the one that has received the most attention. The Djibouti–Addis Ababa railway was a Chinese project, but Chen (this volume) points to the fact that the second main line to the north was contracted to a Turkish company. In the case of the Central Corridor railway, the first sections were awarded to a Turkish/Portuguese consortium. And finally, the Dakar–Bamako railway is an instance of retrofitting an existing railway rather than constructing something from scratch. In reality, the Chinese presence would appear to be far more important lower down the food-chain, notably in the construction of roads and highways that connect urban centres or address urban transportation – and are often not the product of Chinese financing.7 Thierry Pariault, ‘China in Africa: Goods Supplier, Service Provider rather than Investor’, Bridges Africa, 7:5, 2018, no page. When it comes to the infrastructure that is strung out along the corridors, it is also important to recognise the presence of other actors. In the case of the Kazangula bridge across the Zambezi River, for example, the bulk of the funding came from the Japanese development agency, JICA, while the contract was awarded to Daiwoo, a South Korean company. The Nacala Corridor is effectively a joint venture between Vale (a Brazilian mining company), Mitsui (the Japanese multinational) and the Mozambican state. In general, African companies lack the capacity to compete for major contracts to construct or to manage large infrastructure projects – with the exception of South African players like Transnet. They tend to feature more in the construction and maintenance of roads, where the award of contracts is no less murky.
Moving to transport itself, there is less concentration of capital in road haulage than in ports and railways. Across Southern Africa, there are a number of international logistics companies that operate across the region. These handle the export of minerals, notably from the Copperbelt. In South Africa itself, Vilikazi identifies seven large logistics companies that operate vertically integrated businesses across Southern Africa, but also a significant number of smaller companies. This is significant in a context where South Africa exports a range of commodities to its neighbours.8 Thando S. Vilikazi, ‘The Causes of High Inter-Regional Road Freight Rates for Food and Commodities in Southern Africa’, Development Southern Africa, 35:3, 2018, pp. 388–403, at p. 392. Interestingly, he points to the growing domination of a small group of larger businesses in Mozambique as well. In East Africa, the consolidation of a small number of large companies in Kenya, operating modern fleets of trucks, contrasts with the picture in other countries, most notably Tanzania.9 Kunaka, Raballand and Fitzmaurice, How Trucking Services Have Improved. In West Africa, the trucking industry is more highly fragmented. While transport unions are relatively influential, especially in the Francophone countries, they are made up of a large number of small operators. The bilateral agreements over division of the transit traffic is an instrument that is intended to protect their interests (Byiers and Woolfrey, this volume).
Across the continent, the cost of trucking is relatively high because of the lack of a back-load and regulations that prevent cabotage (that is, the carrying of goods in another country). Moreover, the powerful interests that coalesce around road haulage at the national level make it unlikely that this will change any time soon. Another major cost lies in delays at border crossings and the bribes demanded at roadblocks. Here, it is the limitations to the exercise of power by transport unions and logistics companies that is displayed. In West Africa, the Borderless Alliance has worked together with RECs to underline the downstream consequences of these practices, but with uneven results. TradeMark East Africa (TMEA) is a different beast because it is funded by donors and co-ordinates the delivery of corridor infrastructure like OSBPs. But it also makes the case for open borders, exploiting its excellent access to government. The functioning OSBPs in East Africa, many of which have been implemented through TMEA, have managed to significantly reduce border crossing times10 Paul Nugent and Isabella Soi, ‘One-Stop Border Posts in East Africa: State Encounters of the Fourth Kind’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 14:3, 2020, p. 9. – unlike in West Africa – but roadblocks and police corruption have proved less easy to resolve. Among the users of the various corridors, some of the most hard-worked are the drivers themselves, who bear much of the risk and inconvenience for meagre remuneration.
The corridors are, of course, intended to serve as a conduit for trade, and again there are quite different scales where this plays out. China has become the most important trading partner for African countries. But apart from the large-scale importers and exporters, corridors have also helped to spawn a range of other actors. Many African traders make it their business to source their goods directly from China or Dubai. In a fascinating account, Haugen reveals how traders either share containers or fill their own containers using logistics agents based in southern China who, in turn, source goods directly from the factories. The agents channel the goods through the Chinese port which, at any given time, are less likely to entail physical inspections.11 Heidi Østbø Haugen, ‘The Social Production of Container Space’, Society and Space, 37:5, 2019, pp. 868–85. The traders typically employ their own clearing agents in African ports who cultivate close relations with customs authorities. These containers may travel to inland cities or they may be opened close to the port where individual traders can collect their own share of the consignment. Many own their own stores, but also operate as wholesalers to smaller traders who will purchase the goods and transport them by road to their final destination. The financial margins reside in the intricacies of packing and unpacking containers, the subtleties of customs valuations and in the size of the truck loads plying the transport corridors. All these actors work the system as best they can – which entails minimising risks and being able to adapt to sudden shifts in prices and demand – while exploiting the infrastructure and logistics that is controlled by corporate business. What this also means is that many of the most important users of corridor infrastructure are small-scale enterprises, with petty traders at one end of the spectrum and larger merchants at the other end. Their interests do not necessarily align with those of corporate capital, but they are just as likely to diverge with those of domestic manufacturing interests. The latter often have an interest in reducing competition from neighbouring countries, whereas the livelihoods of traders depend on the flow of goods in infinitely variable quantities. The port and the road therefore reveal, in very sharp relief, the very different configurations of economic power along each of the corridors.
It is also important to recognise that because corridors run through African borderlands, they also have a significant impact on the populations that reside there. In East Africa, part of the rationale for the OSBPs is that they should also benefit small-scale cross-border traders. On the Uganda/Kenya border, the authorities have sought to simplify the processes of making customs declarations in an effort to encourage traders to use the facilities rather than plying the many unapproved routes – in a context where cross-border trade underpins the livelihoods of many people.12 Nugent and Soi, ‘One-Stop’. In West Africa, there has been much less progress on OSBPs, but the corridors often run through thickly populated border regions – especially along the Abidjan–Lagos Corridor. As Nugent (this volume) indicates, small-scale traders exploit the corridor in discrete segments because of the many disincentives to crossing multiple borders. Lomé continues to serve as a focus for Ivorian and Ghanaians traders who buy cloth, much of which is imported from China, that is transported back along the corridor by companies that specialise in this business.13 On the changing patterns of the cloth trade, see Nina Sylvanus, Patterns in Circulation: Cloth, Gender and Materiality in West Africa, Chicago & London, 2016. In addition, revolving markets link traders across borders and over considerable distances. Because there is money to be made from such trade, border towns have tended to grow faster than the national average, especially in West Africa.14 OECD/SWAC, “Population and Morphology of Border Cities,” West African Papers, No. 21, Paris, 2019, pp. 21–33. This means that corridors have also served as a conduit for migrants in search of greener pastures. Even where the border towns themselves are not the primary focus, as in Southern Africa, migrants use the very same border crossings as the trucks. Although the RECs are formally committed to freedom of movement of people, this has been controversial in South Africa in recent years. It is highly telling that when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2021, South Africa closed all the borders that were associated with migration, and only allowed vehicles transporting essential goods to pass along trucking routes. In general, the potential for transport corridors to advance cross-border regionalism, in a manner which includes borderlanders, remains largely untapped.
 
1      Fredrik Söderbaum and Ian Taylor, ‘Competing Region-Building in the Maputo Development Corridor’, in Söderbaum and Taylor (eds), Afro-Regions, pp. 35–52. »
2      Debrié, ‘West African port’, p. 4. »
3      When DPW won the contract to run the Berbera port, the state-owned Ethiopian Shipping and Logistics Services Enterprise (ESLSE) was cut in on the deal. Warsame M. Ahmed and Finn Stepputat, Berbera Port: Geopolitics and State-Making in Somaliland, Rift Valley Institute Briefing Paper, Nairobi, 2019, p. 4. »
4      Brenda Chalfin, ‘Recasting Maritime Governance in Ghana: The Neo-Developmental State and Port Governance in Tema’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 48:4, 2010, pp. 573–98. »
5      The scandal was unravelled in Andrew Weir, ‘How Vincent Bolloré Won Control Over Ghana’s Biggest Port”, Africa Confidential, 62:7, 2021 <www.africa-confidential.com/article/id/13322/SPECIAL_REPORT_How_Vincent_Bollor%C3%A9_won_control_of_Ghana%E2%80%99s_biggest_port> [Accessed 28 July 2021]. Consortia such as this one involving the partnering of competitors are not unusual. A similar shareholding arrangement among Bolloré, APM and Cameroonian interests prevailed in the company that operated Douala’s container terminal from 2003 to 2019.  »
6      Deborah Brautigam, ‘Chinese Loans and African Structural Transformation’, in Arkebe Oqubay and Justin Yifu Lin (eds), China-Africa and an Economic Transformation, Oxford, 2019, pp. 129–47, at p. 140. »
7      Thierry Pariault, ‘China in Africa: Goods Supplier, Service Provider rather than Investor’, Bridges Africa, 7:5, 2018, no page. »
8      Thando S. Vilikazi, ‘The Causes of High Inter-Regional Road Freight Rates for Food and Commodities in Southern Africa’, Development Southern Africa, 35:3, 2018, pp. 388–403, at p. 392. Interestingly, he points to the growing domination of a small group of larger businesses in Mozambique as well. »
9      Kunaka, Raballand and Fitzmaurice, How Trucking Services Have Improved. »
10      Paul Nugent and Isabella Soi, ‘One-Stop Border Posts in East Africa: State Encounters of the Fourth Kind’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 14:3, 2020, p. 9. »
11      Heidi Østbø Haugen, ‘The Social Production of Container Space’, Society and Space, 37:5, 2019, pp. 868–85. »
12      Nugent and Soi, ‘One-Stop’. »
13      On the changing patterns of the cloth trade, see Nina Sylvanus, Patterns in Circulation: Cloth, Gender and Materiality in West Africa, Chicago & London, 2016. »
14      OECD/SWAC, “Population and Morphology of Border Cities,” West African Papers, No. 21, Paris, 2019, pp. 21–33. »
Financial Sustainability
The final theme that needs to be raised is that of sustainability because it underpins many of the fundamental debates about transport infrastructure: such as the merits of road versus rail and the desirability of port/corridor competition. There are in fact two inter-related issues at stake here. The first is whether the infrastructural commitments that have been made are likely to deliver a rate of return that will enable them to pay for themselves, whether in the immediate future or over the long term. The second is whether African governments are in a position to commit further to ambitious plans for corridor development without incurring crippling levels of debt.
As far as the first is concerned, funding institutions have generally taken a sanguine view about investments on the basis that it is necessary to address the infrastructural deficit that acts as a dead-weight on Africa’s development. On the back of years of economic growth, the argument is that Africa needs to anticipate rising demand well in advance. Hence, there has generally been financial and moral backing for the development of African ports that are often relatively close neighbours. Competition between ports tends to be regarded by economists in a positive light because it notionally drives efficiency.1 Theo Notteboom, César Ducruet and Peter de Langen (eds), Ports in Proximity: Competition and Coordination among Adjacent Seaports, Abingdon & New York, 2009. As things stand, there is little evidence that this is actually happening. Some African ports are undoubtedly more efficient than others, but a recent World Bank report indicates that none of them fare well from international comparisons.2 Martin Humphreys, Aiga Stokenberga, Matias Herrera Dappe, Atsushi Limi and Olivier Hartmann (eds), Port Development and Competition in East and Southern Africa: Prospects and Challenges, Washington, D.C., 2019. The accent has therefore tended to shift to what needs to be done to address structural inefficiencies rather than considering the possibility that coastal countries risk over-extending themselves. The COVID-19 pandemic delivered a sharp shock, which was reflected in an immediate decline in global shipping. Although this may be a temporary effect, a global recession is likely to have a significant impact on international trade in the longer term. Many countries in Africa face the prospect of a serious, and possibly prolonged economic downturn, which is likely to deliver a further blow to the continent’s trade with the rest of the world. This has palpable consequences for port developments. It has been suggested that this moment might provide an occasion to build intra-regional trade rather than trying to prise a way into global value chains – something that could even help to nurture cross-border regions.3 Andrew Mold and Anthony Mveyange, “Trade in Uncertain Times: Prioritising Regional over Global Value Chains to Accelerate Economic Development in East Africa”, Brookings, 15 April 2020 <www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2020/04/15/trade-in-uncertain-times-prioritising-regional-over-global-value-chains-to-accelerate-economic-development-in-east-africa/> [Accessed 27 April 2021]. It is doubtful that it would make much of a difference to the viability of the ports, however, and it would depend on making additional investments in order to redress the lack of connectivity between transport corridors. Following some years in which governments have been banking on port investments to deliver economic transformation, it seems more likely that countries will be stuck with investments that will fail to pay their way. In the case of railways, the early evidence from the SGRs in Kenya and Ethiopia/Djibouti is that they are already struggling to break even. Of course, where they entirely cannot deflect the costs, governments may choose to subsidise rail,4 Kenya has imposed a railway development levy on imported manufactured goods, which passes some of the costs onto consumers. but this would come at the cost of other important public goods such as education and health. What all of this underlines is the tension inherent within a form of regionalism that hangs on the vagaries of national politics.
As far as the second issue is concerned, the overall levels of public debt began to rise in a worrying fashion well before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the World Bank, the average public debt increased from 40 to 59 per cent of GDP, while the number of countries entering debt distress had increased to 18, between 2000 and 2018.5 Francisco G. Carneiro and Wilfried A. Kouame, ‘How Much Should African Countries Adjust to Curb the Increase in Public Debt?’, World Bank Blogs, 3 February 2020 <https://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/how-much-should-sub-saharan-african-countries-adjust-curb-increase-public-debt> [Accessed 27 April 2021]. Whereas Africa had previously been indebted to multilateral institutions, notably the IMF and World Bank, new forms of indebtedness have arisen in the shape of non-concessionary private sector loans (typically repayable at much higher rates of interest), Eurobonds (incurred in foreign currency) and domestic bond issues.6 Chukwuka Onyekwena and Mma Amara Ekeruche, ‘Is a Debt Crisis Looming in Africa?’, Brookings, 10 April 2019 <www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2019/04/10/is-a-debt-crisis-looming-in-africa/>. [Accessed 27 April 2021]; James C. Mizes, ‘Who Owns Africa’s Infrastructure’, Limn <https://limn.it/articles/who-owns-africas-infrastructure-2/> [Accessed 27 April 2021]. As far as bilateral debts are concerned, Africans have borrowed heavily from China in order to finance infrastructural development, but opacity on the part of the main Chinese lenders means that the details are obscure.7 Ian Taylor and Tim Zajontz, ‘In a Fix: Africa’s Place in the Belt and Road Initiative and the Reproduction of Dependency’, South African Journal of International Affairs, 27: 3, 2020, p. 287. Indeed, the Jubilee Debt Campaign estimated that China accounted for around 20 per cent of all African government debt in 2018.8 Yun Sun, ‘China and Africa’s Debt: Yes to Relief, No to Blanket Forgiveness’, Brookings, 20 April 2020 <www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2020/04/20/china-and-africas-debt-yes-to-relief-no-to-blanket-forgiveness/>[Accessed 27 April 2021]. At a time when the continent was experiencing years of impressive growth, the inclination of governments was to go for broke. This meant that when commodity prices tumbled in 2014, African countries – and especially oil producers – found themselves severely exposed. The pandemic merely brought matters to a head. According to the latest IMF data, five African countries have accumulated debts at over 100 per cent of GDP, and 13 have debts of more than 70 per cent. Of the major RECs, SADC has the greatest problem, with an average indebtedness of 70.1 per cent of GDP, whereas the EAC average is 54 per cent and that of ECOWAS is 42 per cent.9 IMF Data Mapper <www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GGXWDG_GDP@AFRREO/ZMB/NGA> [Accessed 27 April 2021]. With the exception of Nigeria, the oil-producing countries have incurred the greatest debt burden. But it is equally clear that a number of the countries that have been investing most heavily in infrastructure – notably Djibouti (104 per cent), Mozambique (125 per cent), Zambia (110 per cent),10 For the Zambian case, see Tim Zajontz, ‘The Chinese Infrastructural Fix in Africa: Lessons from the Sino-Zambian Road Bonanza’, Oxford Development Studies, published online 21 December 2020, DOI: 10.1080/13600818.2020.1861230 [Accessed 19 March 2021]. Ghana (68 per cent), Namibia (67 per cent) and Kenya (65 per cent) – are recording some of the highest levels of indebtedness. Tanzania (40 per cent) and Ethiopia (57 per cent) have fared somewhat better. It is true that there is a great deal of infrastructural expenditure, including power generation, that is not directly related to transport, but this varies by country.11 According to World Bank estimates of infrastructural financing needs, less than a quarter would be required for transport, whereas 40 per cent would be required for power generation. But clearly some of what is covered under ICTs relates directly to transport corridors. Foster and Briceño-Garmendia (eds), Africa’s Infrastructure, Overview at p. 7.
Before the pandemic broke, there had already been some debate about what action might be needed to mitigate the impact of indebtedness. Chen observes that China itself had already written off significant amounts of debt before 2018. In the case of the Addis–Djibouti railway, she recalls that China cancelled some of the Ethiopian loans and extended the repayment period for others.12 Yunnan Chen, ‘Countries Facing COVID-19 Debt Need Flexible Financing: Lessons from China’, ODI Blog 14 April 2020 <www.odi.org/blogs/16842-countries-facing-covid-19-debt-need-flexible-financing-lessons-china> [Accessed 27 April 2021]. In 2020, there were various responses to the reality that African countries faced the prospect of having to default. The IMF cancelled six months of debts owed by 19 African countries, the G20 countries agreed a debt freeze until the end of 2020, while China cancelled interest-free loans that would mature at the end of the year (a small percentage of the total). China’s response has been distinctly cautious, and this may well signal a more guarded approach to infrastructure financing in the years to come.
It seems very likely that the more ambitious plans for linking corridors will have to be put on ice and that some infrastructural projects will be suspended or abandoned altogether. This would, of course, fit perfectly with a historical oscillation between caution and enchantment about the transformative potential of infrastructural investments. Indeed, today’s stalled projects will provide the material for tomorrow’s retro-fit. But it would appear that we may well have witnessed the end of a cycle – both of thinking and of financing. In future, one imagines that funding to cover the ‘infrastructure deficit’ will become much less readily accessible. It may well be that the enchantment with big infrastructure is itself beginning to fade as funders and governments alike are forced to weigh up priorities. While electrification, urban sanitation and water supply cannot be avoided, it may well be that transport corridors slip down the list of priorities or are repackaged to serve these agendas. At the time of writing, however, it is too early to tell whether we are witnessing something more profound than a temporary blip.
Transport corridors are elusive because they represent models for the way the world works, but are simultaneously embodied in material objects and immaterial flows. Capturing these complexities has been one of the principal challenges for AFRIGOS, but also for the composition of the current volume.
As indicated in the preface, this book brings together chapters that have arisen directly from the AFRIGOS project and others that were specifically commissioned with a view to achieving a more rounded coverage of continental trends while capturing the dynamics of particular regions and specific corridors. The contributors cover a spectrum that runs from conventional academia to those with a closer relationship to policy. The contributors hail from very different disciplinary backgrounds, and partly for that reasons they draw on distinct types of data that capture realities in very different registers and at very different scales – including material from World Bank, EU and national archives in Africa and Europe; statistics and reports issued by international agencies, development banks and national governments; interviews and informal interactions with actors engaged in construction, corridor management and border control; and, finally, engagements with the everyday users of corridors like small-scale traders and the general public. Some of the corridor actors are unlikely to ever meet, whereas others encounter each other on a regular basis and work collectively to reproduce and actualise a discourse surrounding what corridors are and ought to be.
Most of the contributions to the volume speak to at least one other chapter directly – and often several at once – and this has helped to inform our decisions about the structure of the book as a whole. First of all, there are chapters that are explicitly historical in focus. Sidy Cissokho explores the genealogy of the corridor concept within the World Bank. He tracks the emergence of the contemporary instantiation of the transport corridor as a conceptual synthesis that combines a traditional focus on transport with one that is directed to the facilitation of trade. The manner in which corridors are laid across older spatial logics is taken up by Isabella Soi in her account of the historicity of topography of trade and transport routes, and the rivalry between them, across East Africa and the Great Lakes region. This encourages us to think more deeply about how some colonial infrastructure built on some of what was already in existence. In his contribution, José-María Muñoz brings a different historical lens to bear in his detailed account of the wrangling between the World Bank, bilateral donors and segments of the Cameroun government bureaucracy over the realignment of the former colonial Douala–Yaounde line during the 1970s. The evolution of continental transport planning after independence also features prominently in the comparative discussion of European and African transport policy and financing by Sergio Oliete Josa and Francesc Magrinyà. Whereas Cissokho focuses on the role of the World Bank, they highlight a range of other international actors and fora where corridor policy has been forged. Whereas their focus is largely on the European Union, Elisa Gambino provides a detailed account of how African transport corridors have also been folded into the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative – further underlining the multivalence of the corridor concept.
A number of contributions address aspects of competition: notably between ports/corridors and between modes of transport. Port competition is a topic that is squarely addressed by Bruce Byiers and Sean Woolfrey, who point out that despite the large number of ports in West Africa, competition has not reduced the costs to end-users – in part because of the monopolistic hold of a handful of large logistics corporations. The substantial investments in upgrades to ports inevitably are based on future projections and a large amount of guesswork. As Jérôme Lombard indicates, the Senegalese corridor strategy has been premised on increasing the flows through the port of Dakar which, with respect to the transit trade to Mali, involves competition with the ports of Abidjan, Lomé and Tema. Distances, operating costs and security are among the main factors determining the choices that economic operators make. In the case of the transit trade with Ougadougou, the chapters by Nina Sylvanus and by Byiers and Woolfrey both indicate the success with which the port of Lomé has competed with Tema and Abidjan – which is also the source of a certain amount of civic pride. As Paul Nugent indicates, the port of Lomé continued to attract small traders from as far afield as Abidjan until the border closures that came with the COVID-19 pandemic. While many of the contributions focus on West Africa, Hugh Lamarque provides a comparable account of the high-stakes rivalry between the ports of Mombasa and Dar es Salaam – and the Northern and Central Corridors that they serve. Like Byiers and Woolfrey, he points to the array of interests that cluster around the operation of the ports and corridor management – underlining the point that the quest for greater efficiency is far from being the only factor in the equation.
When it comes to road and rail competition, Lombard indicates that road has trumped rail in the Senegambia – although, like Muñoz and Byiers and Woolfrey, he points to ongoing plans to rehabilitate the railways. Although rail is once more promoted as a viable alternative to road, notably in East Africa and the Horn, Yunnan Chen and Lamarque signal that questions remain about their financial viability. Among road transporters, there is often resistance to anything that smacks of favouritism – as has been amply demonstrated by resistance to government efforts to favour the SGR in Kenya. Byiers and Woolfrey also point to the ways in which port competition is closely bound up with struggles for control over trucking between transporters in Burkina Faso, Togo and Ghana. This has been a recurring feature along the East and Southern African transport corridors as well.
A number of contributions address corridor financing and construction – notably the chapters by Cissokho, Muñoz and Oliete and Margrinyà. As Gambino and Chen both demonstrate, the Chinese state has become important as a financier of African corridor infrastructure, but Chinese companies also play a key role in construction – often enabling African governments to bring their own pet projects to fruition. As Gambino indicates, this is true in different ways of the SGR between Mombasa and Nairobi and the Lamu port project. In a complementary chapter, Chen focuses on the role of Chinese and Turkish actors in the construction of the Djibouti–Addis Ababa railway that has been central to Ethiopian plans for redressing its landlocked status. While there is abundant evidence that African governments have been able to advance their priorities, Lamarque points to some of the problems that arise when neighbours more or less consciously undermine each other’s position. Nugent reveals how the lack of consensus has played out differently along the Abidjan–Lagos Corridor where Nigerian protectionism reduced trucking to a trickle and then to nothing as the border with Benin was unilaterally closed since 2019. The manner in which vested interests cluster at the national level often means that policy interventions are thwarted at the corridor level. Where corridor management authorities exist, they tend to be toothless.
Finally, the volume pays some attention to the everyday users of the corridor. Unfortunately, the original plan for a chapter specifically on trucking in Southern Africa did not come to fruition – although a number of chapters do allude to the hardships associated with being on the road and the frustrations of being stuck at border crossings. Lombard observes that while populations living along a corridor are supposed to reap many of the rewards, they also have also been left to deal with the downsides. Along the busiest corridor routes, such as along the Northern Corridor, accidents and deaths caused by heavy trucks are a daily hazard. The neglect of secondary roads is another corridor effect that rural populations are forced to put up with. Border populations who use segments of the corridors are often subjected to everyday harassment and are forced to pay a range of bribes at the crossing points. Whereas in East Africa, there has been a conscious effort to encourage small-scale traders to make use of OSBP facilities, this has scarcely been seen as a priority along the Abidjan–Lagos Corridor. This particular corridor perhaps demonstrates the greatest mismatch between the grand designs at the continental level and what plays out on the ground. While it sometimes seems that official discourse has the miraculous capacity to conjure corridors into existence, the stark reality of border blockages can about a much-needed reality check.
 
1      Theo Notteboom, César Ducruet and Peter de Langen (eds), Ports in Proximity: Competition and Coordination among Adjacent Seaports, Abingdon & New York, 2009.  »
2      Martin Humphreys, Aiga Stokenberga, Matias Herrera Dappe, Atsushi Limi and Olivier Hartmann (eds), Port Development and Competition in East and Southern Africa: Prospects and Challenges, Washington, D.C., 2019. »
3      Andrew Mold and Anthony Mveyange, “Trade in Uncertain Times: Prioritising Regional over Global Value Chains to Accelerate Economic Development in East Africa”, Brookings, 15 April 2020 <www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2020/04/15/trade-in-uncertain-times-prioritising-regional-over-global-value-chains-to-accelerate-economic-development-in-east-africa/> [Accessed 27 April 2021]. »
4      Kenya has imposed a railway development levy on imported manufactured goods, which passes some of the costs onto consumers. »
5      Francisco G. Carneiro and Wilfried A. Kouame, ‘How Much Should African Countries Adjust to Curb the Increase in Public Debt?’, World Bank Blogs, 3 February 2020 <https://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/how-much-should-sub-saharan-african-countries-adjust-curb-increase-public-debt> [Accessed 27 April 2021]. »
6      Chukwuka Onyekwena and Mma Amara Ekeruche, ‘Is a Debt Crisis Looming in Africa?’, Brookings, 10 April 2019 <www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2019/04/10/is-a-debt-crisis-looming-in-africa/>. [Accessed 27 April 2021]; James C. Mizes, ‘Who Owns Africa’s Infrastructure’, Limn <https://limn.it/articles/who-owns-africas-infrastructure-2/> [Accessed 27 April 2021]. »
7      Ian Taylor and Tim Zajontz, ‘In a Fix: Africa’s Place in the Belt and Road Initiative and the Reproduction of Dependency’, South African Journal of International Affairs, 27: 3, 2020, p. 287. »
8      Yun Sun, ‘China and Africa’s Debt: Yes to Relief, No to Blanket Forgiveness’, Brookings, 20 April 2020 <www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2020/04/20/china-and-africas-debt-yes-to-relief-no-to-blanket-forgiveness/>[Accessed 27 April 2021]. »
9      IMF Data Mapper <www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GGXWDG_GDP@AFRREO/ZMB/NGA> [Accessed 27 April 2021]. »
10      For the Zambian case, see Tim Zajontz, ‘The Chinese Infrastructural Fix in Africa: Lessons from the Sino-Zambian Road Bonanza’, Oxford Development Studies, published online 21 December 2020, DOI: 10.1080/13600818.2020.1861230 [Accessed 19 March 2021]. »
11      According to World Bank estimates of infrastructural financing needs, less than a quarter would be required for transport, whereas 40 per cent would be required for power generation. But clearly some of what is covered under ICTs relates directly to transport corridors. Foster and Briceño-Garmendia (eds), Africa’s Infrastructure, Overview at p. 7. »
12      Yunnan Chen, ‘Countries Facing COVID-19 Debt Need Flexible Financing: Lessons from China’, ODI Blog 14 April 2020 <www.odi.org/blogs/16842-countries-facing-covid-19-debt-need-flexible-financing-lessons-china> [Accessed 27 April 2021]. »
Bibliography
Aalders, Johannes Theodore, ‘Building on the Ruins of Empire: the Uganda Railway and the LAPPSET Corridor in Kenya’, Third World Quarterly, published online 12 March 2020
Ahmed, Warsame M. and Stepputat, Finn, ‘Berbera Port: Geopolitics and State-Making in Somaliland’, Rift Valley Institute Briefing Paper, Nairobi, 2019.
Beck, Kurt, Klaeger, Gabriel and Stasik, Michael, ‘An Introduction to the African Road’, and other contributions to Gabriel Klaeger and Michael Stasik (eds), The Making of the African Road, Leiden, 2017.
Berg, Elliot J., ‘Structural Transformation versus Gradualism: Recent Economic Development in Ghana’, in Philip Foster and Aristide Zolberg (eds), Ghana and the Ivory Coast: Perspectives on Modernisation, Chicago & London, 1971, pp. 187–230.
Bierschenk, Thomas, ‘Sedimentation, Fragmentation and Normative Double-Binds in (West) African Public Services’, in Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (eds), States at Work: Dynamics of African Bureaucracies, Leiden & Boston, 2014, pp. 221–45.
Brautigam, Deborah, ‘Chinese Loans and African Structural Transformation’, in Arkebe Oqubay and Justin Yifu Lin (eds), China–Africa and an Economic Transformation, Oxford, 2019, pp. 129–47.
Caldéron, César and Servén, Luis, ‘Infrastructure and Economic Development in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Journal of African Economies, 19, AERC Supplement 11, 2010, pp. i13–i87.
Carneiro, Francisco G. and Kouame, Wilfried A. ‘How Much Should African Countries Adjust to Curb the Increase in Public Debt?’, 3 February 2020 <https://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/how-much-should-sub-saharan-african-countries-adjust-curb-increase-public-debt> [Accessed 19 March 2021].
Chalfin, Brenda, ‘Recasting Maritime Governance in Ghana: The Neo-Developmental State and the Port of Tema’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 48:4, 2010, pp. 573–98.
Chen, Yunnan, ‘Countries Facing COVID-19 Debt Need Flexible Financing: Lessons from China’, ODI Blog, 14 April 2020 <www.odi.org/blogs/16842-countries-facing-covid-19-debt-need-flexible-financing-lessons-china> [Accessed 19 March 2021].
Chome, Ngala, ‘Land, Livelihoods and Belonging: Negotiating Change and Anticipating LAPSSET in Kenya’s Lamu County’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 14:2, 2020, pp. 310–31.
Ciabarri, Luca, ‘Biographies of Roads, Biographies of Nations: History, Territory and the Road Effect in Post-Conflict Somaliland’, in Gabriel Klaeger and Michael Stasik (eds), The Making of the African Road, Leiden, 2017, pp. 116–40.
Cooper, Frederick, ‘Modernising Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept’, in Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (eds), International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays in the History and Politics of Knowledge, Berkeley & London, 1998, pp. 64–92.
Cronje, Erené, Matthee, Marianne and Krugel, Waldo, ‘The Role of Dry Ports in South Africa’, Transport and Communications Bulletin for Asia and the Pacific, 78, 2009, pp. 112–20.
Dalakoglou, Dimitris, The Road: An Ethnography of (Im)mobility, Space and Cross-Border Infrastructure in the Balkans, Manchester, 2017.
Debrie, Jean, ‘The West African Port System: Global Insertion and Regional Particularities’, EchoGéo [online], 20, 2012, no page: http://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/13070.
Debrie, Jean and Comtois, Claude, ‘Une Relecture du Concept de Corridors de Transport: Illustration Comparée Europe/Amerique du Nord’, Cahiers Scientifiques du Transport, 58, 2010, pp. 127–44.
Ducruet, César, Cuyala, Sylvain and Hosni, Ali El, ‘Maritime Networks as Systems of Cities: The Long-Term Interdependencies between Global Shipping Flows and Urban Development (1890–2010)’, Journal of Transport Geography, 66, 2018, pp. 340–55.
Enns, Charis, ‘Infrastructure Projects and Rural Projects in Northern Kenya: The Use of Divergent Expertise to Negotiate the Terms of Land Deals for Transport Infrastructure’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 46:2, 2017, pp. 358–76.
Enns, Charis and Bersaglio, Brock, ‘On the Coloniality of “New” Mega-Infrastructure Projects in East Africa’, Antipode, 52:1, 2019, pp. 101–23.
Farole, John and Moberg, Lotta, ‘Special Economic Zones in Africa: Political Economy Challenges and Solutions’, in John Page and Finn Tarp (eds), The Practice of Industrial Policy: Government-Business Coordination in Africa and East Asia, Oxford, 2017, pp. 234–51.
Fau, Nathalie, Khonthapane, Sirivanh and Taillard, Christian (eds), Transnational Dynamics in Southeast Asia: The Greater Mekong Subregion and Malacca Straits Economic Corridor, Singapore, 2014.
Foster, Vivien and Briceno-Garmendia, Cecilia, Infrastructures Africaines: Une Transformation Impérative, Paris, 2010, p. 202.
Freed, Libbie, Conduits of Culture and Control: Roads, States and Users in French Central Africa, 1890–1960, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin Madison, 2006.
Gonçalves, Euclides, ‘Agricultural Corridors as “Demonstration Fields”: Infrastructure, Fairs and Associations along the Beira and Nacala Corridors’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 14:2, 2020, pp. 354–74.
Harvey, Penny and Knox, Hannah, ‘The Enchantments of Infrastructure’, Mobilities, 7:4, 2012, pp. 521–36.
Haugen, Heidi Østbø, ‘The Social Production of Container Space’, Society and Space, 37:5, 2019, pp. 868–85.
Hirschman, Albert O., Development Projects Observed, Washington D.C., 1967.
Hönke, Jana and Cuesta-Fernández, Iván, ‘Mobilising Security and Logistics through an African Port: A Controversies Approach to Infrastructure’, Mobilities, 13:2, 2018, pp. 246–60.
Howe, Cymene, et al., ‘Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit and Risk’, Science, Technology and Human Values, 41:3, 2016, pp. 547–65.
Hoyle, B.S. and Hilling, D., (eds), Seaports and Development in Tropical Africa, London, 1970.
Humphreys, Martin, et al. (eds), Port Development and Competition in East and Southern Africa: Prospects and Challenges, Washington DC, 2019.
Josa, Sergio Oliete and Magrinyà, Francesc, ‘Patchwork in an Interconnected World: The Challenges of Transport Networks in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Transport Reviews, 38:6, 2018, pp. 710–36.
Kay, G.B. (ed.), The Political Economy of Colonialism in Ghana: A Collection of Documents and Statistics 1900–1960, Cambridge, 1972.
Kim, Hwa-Joong, Lam, Jasmine Siu Lee and Lee, Paul Tae-Woo, ‘Analysis of Liner Shipping Networks and Transhipment Flows of Potential Hub Ports in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Transport Policy, 69, 2018, pp. 193–206.
Kochore, Hassan H., ‘The Road to Kenya? Visions, Expectations and Anxieties Around New Infrastructure’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 10:3, 2016, pp. 494–510.
Kunaka, Charles, Raballand, Gael and Fitzmaurice, Mike, How Trucking Services Have Improved and May Contribute to Development: The Case of East Africa, WIDER Working Paper 152/2016.
Larkin, Brian, ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 2013, pp. 327–43.
Lamarque, Hugh, ‘Profitable Inefficiency: The Politics of Port Infrastructure in Mombasa, Kenya’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 57:1, 2019, pp. 85–109.
Laurence, Bill, Sloan, Sean, Weng, Lingfei and Sayer, Jeffrey A., ‘Estimating the Environmental Costs of Africa’s Massive “Development Corridors”’, Current Biology, 25, 2015, pp. 3202–08.
Masquelier, Adeline, ‘Road Mythographies: Space, Mobility and the Historical Imagination in Postcolonial Niger’, American Ethnologist, 29:4, 2002, pp. 829–56.
Mizes, James C., ‘Who Owns Africa’s Infrastructure’, Limn <https://limn.it/articles/who-owns-africas-infrastructure-2/> [Accessed 27 April 2021].
Mold, Andrew and Mveyange, Anthony, ‘Trade in Uncertain Times: Prioritising Regional over Global Value Chains to Accelerate Economic Development in East Africa’, 15 April 2020 <www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2020/04/15/trade-in-uncertain-times-prioritising-regional-over-global-value-chains-to-accelerate-economic-development-in-east-africa/> [Accessed 19 March 2021].
Monson, Jamie, Africa’s Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania, Bloomington, 2011.
Muñoz, José-María, Doing Business in Cameroon: An Anatomy of Economic Governance, Cambridge, 2018.
Murton, Galen, ‘Trans-Himalayan Transformations: Building Roads, Making Markets, and Cultivating Consumption between Nepal and China’s Tibet’, in Yongming Zhou, Qu Tenglong and Li Guiying (eds), Roadology: Roads, Space, Culture, Chongqing, 2016, pp. 328–40.
Ndulu, Benno J., ‘Infrastructure, Regional Integration and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa: Dealing with the Disadvantages of Geography and Sovereign Fragmentation’, Journal of African Economies, 15, AERC Supplement 2, 2006, pp. 212–44.
Notteboom, Theo, ‘Strategies and Future Development of Transport Corridors’, in Yann Alix (ed.), Les corridors de Transport, Caens, 2012, pp. 289–312.
Notteboom, Theo, Ducruet, César and de Langen, Peter (eds), Ports in Proximity: Competition and Coordination among Adjacent Seaports, Abingdon & New York, 2009.
Notteboom, Theo and Rodrigue, Jean-Paul, ‘Port Regionalisation: Towards a New Phase in Port Development’, Maritime Policy & Management, 32:3, 2005, 297–313.
Nugent, Paul, ‘Africa’s Re-enchantment with Big Infrastructure: White Elephants Dancing in Virtuous Circles?’, in Jon Schubert, Ulf Engel, and Elisio Macamo (eds), Extractive Industries and Changing State Dynamics in Africa: Beyond the Resource Curse, Abingdon, 2018, pp. 22–40.
Nugent, Paul and Soi, Isabella, ‘One-Stop Border Posts in East Africa: State Encounters of the Fourth Kind’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 14:3, 2020, pp. 433–54.
Nuvunga, Milissão, ‘Region-Building in Central Mozambique: the Case of the Zambezi Valley Spatial Development Initiative’, in Frederik Söderbaum and Ian Taylor (eds), Afro-Regions: The Dynamics of Cross-Border Micro-Regionalism in Africa, Uppsala, 2008, pp. 74–89.
OECD/SWAC, ’Population and Morphology of Border Cities’, West African Papers, No. 21, Paris, 2019.
Onyekwena, Chukwuka and Ekeruche, Mma Amara, ‘Is a Debt Crisis Looming in Africa?’, Brookings, 10 April 2019 <www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2019/04/10/is-a-debt-crisis-looming-in-africa/>. [Accessed 27 April 2021].
Pariault, Thierry, ‘China in Africa: Goods Supplier, Service Provider Rather than Investor’, Bridges Africa, 7:5, 2018, no page.
Raballand, Gaël and Whitworth, Alan, Should the Zambian Government Invest in Railways?, ZIPAR Working Paper No. 3, 2012, Lusaka, Zambia Institute for Policy Analysis and Research.
Republic of Mozambique, The Project for Nacala Corridor: Economic Development Strategies in the Republic of Mozambique – Final Study Report, Maputo, 2015.
Schouten, Peer, ‘Roadblock Politics in Central Africa’, Environmental Planning D: Society and Space, 37:5, 2019, pp. 924–41.
Simon, David, and Ekobo, Muriel Samé, ‘Walvis Bay–Swakopmund: Desert Micro-Region and Aspiring Regional Gateway’, in Frederik Söderbaum and Ian Taylor (eds), Afro-Regions: The Dynamics of Cross-Border Micro-Regionalism in Africa, Uppsala, 2008, pp. 53–73.
Söderbaum, Fredrik and Taylor, Ian (eds), Afro-Regions: The Dynamics of Cross-Border Micro-Regionalism in Africa, Uppsala, 2008.
Steck, Benjamin, ‘L’Afrique des Ports et des Corridors: Comment Formuler l’Interaction entre Logistique et Développement’, Cahiers de Géographie de Québec, 59:168, 2015, pp. 447–67.
Stepputat, Finn and Hagmann, Tobias, ‘Politics of Circulation: The Making of the Berbera Corridor in Somali East Africa’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space D, 37:5, 2019, pp. 794–813.
Sun, Yun, ‘China and Africa’s debt: ‘China and Africa’s Debt: Yes to Relief, No to Blanket Forgiveness’ <www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2020/04/20/china-and-africas-debt-yes-to-relief-no-to-blanket-forgiveness/> [Accessed 19 March 2021].
Sylvanus, Nina, Patterns in Circulation: Cloth, Gender and Materiality in West Africa, Chicago & London, 2016.
Taylor, Ian and Zajontz, Tim, ‘In a Fix: Africa’s Place in the Belt and Road Initiative and the Reproduction of Dependency’, South African Journal of International Affairs, 27: 3, 2020, pp. 277–95.
Vilikazi, Thando S., ‘The Causes of High Inter-Regional Road Freight Rates for Food and Commodities in Southern Africa’, Development Southern Africa, 35:3, 2018, pp. 388–403.
Weir, Andrew, ‘How Vincent Bolloré Won Control Over Ghana’s Biggest Port’, Africa Confidential, 62:7, 2021 <www.africa-confidential.com/article/id/13322/SPECIAL_REPORT_How_Vincent_Bollor%C3%A9_won_control_of_Ghana%E2%80%99s_biggest_port> [Accessed 28 July 2021].
Wilks, Ivor, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order, Cambridge, 1975.
World Bank, The Web of Transport Corridors in South Asia, Washington DC, 2018.
Zajontz, Tim ‘The Chinese Infrastructural Fix in Africa: Lessons from the Sino-Zambian Road Bonanza’, Oxford Development Studies, published online 21 December 2020, DOI: 10.1080/13600818.2020.1861230 [Accessed 19 March 2021].