THE BIG STORY
for money. The 472-kilometre railway was
completed two years ago, at the cost of $3.2
billion, considered Kenya’s largest single
infrastructure project since independence,
amounting to 5.4 per cent of GDP.
The project’s ostensible benefits
were that it had a much higher capac-
ity than the old ‘Lunatic Line’ that had
served the East African interior for over
a century. Another key selling point was
that freight would be cheaper and faster
to transport, in turn saving the Kenyan
road network the wear and tear caused
by large haulage trucks.
However, these promised benefits were
‘always doubtful’, according to the econo-
mist and public intellectual David Ndii,
who has argued that ‘the railway will
require both state coercion and a massive
public subsidy to stay in business’.^1
Some of the coercive efforts are
already underway: in August 2019, the
government announced that all cargo
destined for Nairobi had to be loaded
directly onto the SGR. Importers baulked
and the order has since been suspended,
underscoring how much Kenyan authori-
ties must be scratching their heads as
they try to make the railway viable.
But this isn’t the only concern. The
SGR construction was implicated in
complaints about racism against African
workers, including segregated workspaces
and highly qualified Africans being rel-
egated to menial jobs, as journalist Paul
Wafula documented in The Standard.
Wafula, who went undercover at the
railway’s headquarters, said he did not
believe the allegations at first.
‘I couldn’t imagine that this could
be happening right here in Nairobi and
yet no-one was talking about it,’ He tells
me. ‘But then I went there and saw it for
myself – Chinese workers being exempt
from security checks but Kenyan workers
having to be searched; Kenyan locomo-
tive drivers who spent their time picking
up garbage and cleaning the premises.’
‘The worst that I saw – which I left out
of the story that was published – was at
the segregated shower area, where the
cargo workers clean up before going
home. There, Chinese workers came in
and cleaned their dogs on the Kenyan
side, which was a huge insult to the
Kenyan workers.’
Elsewhere in Africa, other Chinese
investments are also running into
headwinds.
In Ghana, protesters have opposed
a $10-billion deal that would allowChinese companies to mine bauxite in a
forest reserve, the home of a number of
rare flora and fauna, as well as being the
source of three major rivers that serve
five million people.
In Zambia, there have been anti-Chi-
nese riots as the country edges towards
a sovereign debt crisis – 28 per cent of
which is owned by China.
On top of this, there are regular accu-
sations that Chinese designs in Africa are
neo-colonial: using its economic might to
burden states with debt, all to secure new
markets for Chinese capital.Red scares
China hasn’t always had a bad reputation
in Africa and railways are a core element
of this story. In the 1970s, China funded
and built the TAZAR A railway, linking
copper-rich, landlocked Zambia with the
port of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania.
After the US, UK and Canada refused
to fund it, China provided a $222-million
loan ($3 billion in today’s currency), and
16,000 Chinese workers. Tanzanian
President Julius Nyerere vigorously
defended this large Cold War-era infra-
structure project undertaken by a com-
munist country in Africa. He argued that
African countries, as independent states,
had a right to determine who to associate
with, and what the terms of engagement
should be.
As the New Internationalist reported
in 1973, Joe Lusinde, Tanzania’s trans-
port minister at the time rejected the
claim that China was ‘negatively influ-
encing’ Africa using infrastructure pro-
jects as an insult to the intelligence of
Africans: ‘[The British] sometimes think
of us as being immature young chil-
dren who take everything they are told
without thinking.’ The TAZAR A railway
ended up being, as Nyerere envisioned, a
testament to Global South co-operation.
It is important to note that at the time,
China was poorer, per capita, than both
Tanzania and Zambia.
Much has changed since then. Over
the past four decades, China has lifted
850 million people out of poverty and the
percentage of those in extreme poverty
has fallen from 88 to 1.8 per cent – an
astonishing feat by any standards.
But some things remain the same, such
as anxieties about a ‘red scare’ which char-
acterize a lot of Western reporting on the
modern-day relationship. Since the late
1990s, China has become Africa’s biggest
investment partner. When we consider32 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
Africa should
not be framed
-- nor should
it see itself
-- as a passive
arena where
the intentions
of others are
projected
(Previous page) A guard at the Mombasa
terminus of the Chinese-financed SGR railway.
Saturday is one of the busiest times on the line, as
Kenyans travel from Nairobi to the coast to visit
family.
LUIS TATO/BLOOMBERG/GETTY