In Africa, the Race for Critical Minerals Is Recreating Colonial Models

Last month, Burundi and Tanzania signed an agreement with two Chinese state-owned companies to construct a new railway to ports on the Tanzanian coast. This will be landlocked Burundi's first railway, and its primary use will be exporting minerals, specifically nickel. At a cost of more than $2 billion, it is just the latest major infrastructure project financed by an outside power to be announced in Africa.

These days, coverage of major infrastructure projects like these are usually framed in terms of the emerging geopolitical competition for minerals, which is not necessarily inaccurate. The U.S. and China, for instance, are each currently financing railways linking copper mines in Central Africa with ports on opposite sides of the continent. But there is more to these developments than geopolitical competition: Large-scale infrastructure projects built and planned across the African continent, which have attracted billions of dollars in investment in recent years, are essentially replicating colonial models of infrastructure, in turn recreating economic and trade relations-and their associated inequities-from a bygone era.

Most colonial economies in Africa were extractive in a straightforward sense. Raw materials like copper, gold, rubber and timber were extracted and shipped to Europe to support the economies of colonizing powers. Infrastructure was therefore built to connect mines and plantations to ports, rather than to other locations on the continent. The basic goal was to get raw materials from the interior to the coast as quickly and cheaply as possible.

It is easy to see a similar economic logic operating today. On the other side of the continent from Tanzania and Burundi, mining giant Rio Tinto is building a new railway in Guinea. At the cost of $6.2 billion, the nearly 400-mile-long TransGuinean Railway Corridor will connect the enormous planned Simandou iron ore mine with a newly built port on the Atlantic coast. Other planned projects have the same rationale. The proposed 900-mile-long Trans-Kalahari Railway in Botswana and Namibia, with an estimated cost of around $9 billion, would be used to transport coal from mines in Botswana to the Namibian port of Walvis Bay for export.

These are all new ventures, but other planned infrastructure projects build on colonial-era blueprints in a more literal sense. One of the biggest infrastructure projects announced in Africa in recent years is the Lobito Corridor, which is being financed to the tune of $2.3 billion by the U.S., European Union and African Development Bank. The corridor will expand the existing railway between Angola and the Copperbelt region in Central Africa, with the goal of transporting 2 million tons of minerals every year for export to Europe and North America. That is essentially what the corridor was originally built to do during the colonial era, although the original railway never successfully competed with other rail links to these mines and was eventually destroyed in the 1970s during the Angolan Civil War, ironically by a U.S.-backed rebel movement.

The same economic logic, alongside geopolitical competition, explains why China has promised $1 billion to upgrade the Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority, or TAZARA, Railway, which was originally built by China in the early 1970s and links the Copperbelt to Dar es Salaam on the Tanzanian coast. The project is part of China's Belt and Road global development initiative, and as with the other railways projects, the expanded line will primarily be used to export minerals.

In fact, China's willingness to finance the TAZARA Railway also signals a change in its investment strategy in Africa. In 2011, China agreed to finance a new passenger and freight railway to link Kenya's two largest cities, Nairobi and Mombasa, a project that was completed in 2017. However, that line was supposed to be the first stage in a bigger network across East Africa. And that plan has not been realized because China declined to build the planned extension of the railway to Uganda's capital, Kampala, leaving Uganda to sign a contract with a Turkish company to undertake the work in 2024. That reflects a shift in China's infrastructure investment in Africa from a mix of projects that included the provision of public goods-like roads, stadiums and rail links between population centers-toward a greater emphasis on extractive infrastructure.

Of course, railways built primarily for mineral exports are not unique to Africa. The Pilbara region in northwestern Australia-the epicenter of the world's iron ore industry-has three rail lines that do nothing besides transport vast quantities of the metal from mines to the coast. Two of these lines are even owned by companies building similar railways in Africa: Rio Tinto and Fortescue Metals. The difference, however, is that these are not the only major infrastructure projects in Australia.

The kind of infrastructure that is built can have lasting legacies. In Zambia, for instance, most urban centers and road infrastructure are still grouped along the railway built 120 years ago to connect mines in Congo with ports in South Africa, even though the railway itself is now hardly used. As a result, a map showing the location of urban centers in Zambia in the 1930s is still largely accurate.

Another legacy is the low level of trade between countries on the continent. African countries export far more to countries outside the continent than to neighboring ones. High transport costs or non-existent routes impede intra-African trade, so the economies of many African countries remain orientated to exporting primary resources to outside the continent. Meanwhile, the lack of industrialization throughout much of Africa means there is little domestic demand for minerals.

The infrastructure deficit and the problems this causes are widely recognized. In 2013, the African Union launched the Africa Integrated Railway Network Project, which aimed to construct a high-speed network connecting capital cities across the continent by 2033, the first stage of which would alone require more than 10,000 miles of track. Almost none of that project has been built, however, as the planned railways have failed to attract funding, and very few, if any, of the planned connections will be completed by 2033.

Instead, investment continues to pour into roads, railways and ports linked to mining for export. That is perhaps better than no investment at all, and it may open up new and unanticipated opportunities for the countries in which they are built. Yet, this infrastructure will shape the future direction of trade in African countries for decades to come. For now, that means that African trade will continue to be externally orientated and support economies based on extraction.

Cover photo:  In Africa, the Race for Critical Minerals Is Recreating Colonial Models