Building on the ruins of empire: the Uganda Railway and the LAPSSET corridor in Kenya

Abstract

This article explores colonial (dis-)continuities between the planned Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) development corridor and the Uganda Railway (UR). The historical approach to infrastructure studies highlights the effects of large-scale infrastructures beyond their immediate material impact, and reveals their potential power to structure mobilities, historicities and politics of scale. With reference to relational theories, it is argued that the two projects gain their respective significance not only through their ability to connect distant places, but also by blocking and severing other competing ways of being mobile. Particularly, both infrastructure projects create technologies enabling easier and faster flow of capital and commodities but limit previously prevalent mobilities practised by caravans and semi-nomadic people in the region. Both projects, furthermore, produce particular ways of remembering the past and anticipating the future. The article identifies a major discontinuity in the politics of scale they respectively imply: while the UR aimed at producing a clear scalar hierarchy between empire and colony, the LAPSSET alleges to dissolve hard boundaries between scalar instances. This article is based on qualitative data collected during fieldwork along the proposed route of the LAPSSET corridor, as well as archive work regarding the UR.

The Making and Unmaking of a Megaproject: Contesting Temporalities along the LAPSSET Corridor in Kenya

“…In the context of this paper, the concept of temporalities does not only refer to anticipated futures, but importantly also to memories of the past (Appadurai 2013:288). A megaproject such as the LAPSSET Corridor does not only connect the drill sites in Lokichar with a port in Lamu, but also connects a particular past defined by marginalisation, division and destitution (for a more elaborated account of the historical trajectory of colonial as well as post‐independence marginalisation of northern Kenya, see for example, Jabane 2016; Kochore 2016) with a particular future of seamless connectivity, unity, and economic potential of capitalist production (Aalders 2020; Enns and Bersaglio 2020). By nourishing the “fantasy of rationality and new beginnings” (Bach 2011:100), megaproject visions point at a future radically different to the present, be it a future marked by alleviation of hardship, or of increased opportunities.…”

“…This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on infrastructural megaprojects by exploring how communities across Northern Kenya engage in stabilising or unsettling a megaproject and its spatio‐temporal imaginaries. The question, “what makes a megaproject?”, has been investigated from a plurality of positions: megaprojects have been discussed in connection to risk (Flyvbjerg et al 2003; see also World Bank 2019); future‐making (Müller‐Mahn 2020); capitalist expansionism (Kanai 2016; Zhang 2017); colonial legacies (Aalders 2020; Enns and Bersaglio 2020; Kimari and Ernstson 2020); peace‐ and state‐building (Bachmann and Schouten 2018; Stepputat and Hagmann 2019; Uribe 2019); and reconfiguration of state spaces (Demissie 2017; Mayer and Zhang 2020; Ong 2003), to name but a few. In addition, critical scholarship has pointed to the constellations of capital and state interests that drive the current rush of large infrastructure projects across the global South, and have in addition exposed the severe forms of exclusion and dispossession that they produce (Li 2018; Tsing 2003; Uribe 2017).…”

Drawing together: making marginal futures visible through collaborative comic creation (CCC)

“…These infrastructures are synonymous with modernity itself and thus antithetical to the past they seek to overcome -as Edwards (2003:2) notes, "To be modern is to live within and by means of infrastructures". Just as mega-infrastructures tend to monopolise means of transport (Aalders, 2020), the universal vision of modernity produced by infrastructures conceals and destructs other, potentially competing, ways of drawing timelines between past, present, and future.…”

“…Alesina et al, 2011). Not only were infrastructures instrumental in the creation of colonial empires (Headrick, 1981;van der Straeten and Hasenöhrl, 2016), but also they often continue colonial impositions of lines of transport and communication onto landscape and people (Aalders, 2020;Enns and Bersaglio, 2019).…”

“…Data availability. The comics can be accessed under the DOI https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.30864.97289 (Aalders et al, 2018) as well as via the link https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ 340789302_Hadithi_za_LAPSSET_Collaborative_Comics (last access: 1 December 2020) (Aalders et al, 2018).…”