There’s a well-known catchphrase – “Cape to Cairo” – that has spawned numerous books and piqued the imagination of countless travellers of the African continent. The phrase’s origins are of imperial nature, birthed out of an 1874 proposal by English journalist Edwin Arnold that sought to discover the origins of the Congo River. This project was later taken up by imperialist Cecil Rhodes, who envisioned a continuous railway of British-ruled territories that stretched from the North to the South of the continent.
Today’s independent African states have built railways of their own – such as the Tanzania-Zambia railway constructed in 1975 as Zambia sought to eliminate economic dependence on white-minority rule in Zimbabwe and South Africa. However, a large number of railway networks and stations on the African continent have colonial origins, and even though the “Cape to Cairo” railway never came to be, railways on the African continent tell the stories of architecture used to further imperial ambition, and of urban development that forever changed how certain settlements functioned.
