Colonial and Postcolonial Logistics

This article addresses the logistical aspects of colonial and postcolonial governmental practices and the way in which such practices structured the African territory. In particular, it focuses on Zambia (Northern Rhodesia at time of British domination), a landlocked country located in the centre of Southern Africa, whose historical evolution, since it was conquered at the beginning of the twentieth century, is deeply intertwined with the discovery, extraction and export of copper and with the import of fossil fuel.


In the first part, I introduce the concept of ‘colonial logistics’ intended as the modification and rationalisation of territories for military and political domination, and extraction and export of resources. In the second part of the article I show how, after independence, Zambia dealt with its complex geopolitical entanglement, partially inherited from colonial planning and partially generated by the end of direct forms of imperialism, which required the rerouting of its resources and the rebalancing of uneven territorial structures. The analysis of infrastructure development in postcolonial Zambia illustrates the competing strategies through which imperialist powers attempted to secure a new form of control on Africa and elucidates the role of logistics as a decisive tool to shape the African territory.


Introduction
This article addresses the logistical aspects of colonial and postcolonial governmental practices and the way in which such practices structured the African territory.In particular, it focuses on Zambia (Northern Rhodesia at time of British domination), a landlocked country located in the centre of Southern Africa, whose historical evolution, since it was conquered at the beginning of the twentieth century, is deeply intertwined with the discovery, extraction and export of copper and with the import of fossil fuel.It does so by presenting a series of episodes of Zambian history, from its foundation until the early postcolonial phase.
In the first part of the text, I introduce the concept of 'colonial logistics' intended as the modification of territories for military and political domination, and the extraction and export of resources.Through the observation of Northern Rhodesia, its foundation, its territorial delineation and the first planning of its capital city, the article demonstrates how European states, especially in the early colonial era, did not aim at governing the colonies with the same uniformity and intensity that was applied to their own territories, but rather to define a rational and controllable geography of lines and enclaves in order to efficiently control and exploit African resources.With the goal of efficiency, the logistical governmental mode of colonial power expanded the planetary infrastructure of capitalist accumulation and rearranged new territorial structures and hierarchies at different scales.

Colonial and Postcolonial Logistics Giulia Scotto
The first colonial power to impose its presence on what would become Northern Rhodesia, was a private company, the British South Africa Company (BSAC) led by Cecil John Rhodes.In the second half of the nineteen century, Rhodes and his company's paramilitary forces acquired and ruled over vast African territories reaching from the Cape in the south to the Zambesi river in the north.The Chartered BSAC combined the role of a private enterprise with the legitimation of the Victorian state.It traded with local chiefs for land acquisition, built and owned railways, and extracted and exported metal ores and diamonds toward South Africa's ports. 5[Fig .1]   The oddly shaped territory of Northern Rhodesia, once part of the Lozi and Bemba empires, was the result of infrastructural expansionism, geopolitical contingencies and of the discovery of copper deposits. 6Rhodes's imperial ambition was to expand the 'Rhodesia Railway' to the north, in order to reach the British colonies on the Mediterranean Sea through the envisioned, legendary 'Cape to Cairo Railway' but, after crossing the Zambesi river at the Victoria waterfalls, in 1905, the ambitious mission had to be aborted.Unable to cross German East Africa and the Belgian Congo, the railway was converted into an exporting tool for the copper deposits which were then discovered in the region. 7own to some of the oldest civilisations, since the invention of the telegraph and the telephone, copper had become the most needed non-precious metal for electrical and communication wiring.In the early colonial era, military expeditions and private industrial companies, both supported by Western governments, conquered and acquired African territories and administered, exploited and controlled them through the construction of railways and roads, the planning of urban settlements and military outposts, the arrangement of plantations, mines, and reserves, and the management of trading and exporting.This 'imperialism of free trade' 2 , as it was defined by Gallagher and Robinson, was not aiming at imposing direct political control on the conquered land, but at its exploitation through military and paramilitary violence.
My thesis is that the hybrid nature of colonial administration merged the martial and the neoliberal characters of logistics, producing a governmental strategy that I define as 'colonial logistics'.Colonial logistics is about imposing rationality and efficiency on the unpredictable and the uncontrolled -wild lands, savage people and inefficient processes -in order to transform nature into a resource for commodity production and capital accumulation. 3lonial logistics produced specific spatial and social relations at the local, regional and continental scales.

Rhodesia Railway
Like many other modernist tendencies, logistics in its various forms found broader application in the colonies.Colonialists' first ally was the railway or 'the permanent way' as it was often called.In 'Railway Imperialims', Ronald Robinson observes how 'the railroad was not only the servant but also the principal generator of informal empire; in this sense imperialism was a function of the railroad'. 4 drawing straight lines of steel, European engineers could impose their order on the unfriendly African landscape, control times and distances within unknown territories, and define a new geography of lines, points, nodes, axes, and cities they could understand and control.By 1913 the new settlement included a post office, a veterinary office, three mills for grinding maize and other grains, two lime kilns, a mission school serving the farmer's community, a government school, several shops, a small hotel, a rifle club and a sports' club.In the same year, the BSAC developed a simple master plan to control the growth of the township. 13The railway and the dirt track running parallel to it -named 'Cairo Road' in memory of Rhodes's imperialist vision -constituted Thanks to the efficiency of the railway and the stable growth of the price of copper, the mining industry of the Copperbelt flourished and the railway line became the economic backbone of the colony.
Most urban settlements, industries, and economic activities developed within a narrow area along the rail line while the sparse population lived of subsistence agriculture in the less accessible provinces. 8 1924 the territories acquired by the BSAC through agreements with local chiefs were sold to the British government, who assumed administrative responsibility over Northern and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe), and Nyasaland (now Malawi). 9 order to encourage European migration to Northern Rhodesia, the Colonial Office decided to set aside plots of land for exclusive European use.
The most fertile, productive and accessible swaths of land -mainly along the railway and around the mines -were designated as 'Crown Land' and could be purchased by white settlers.Africans were not allowed to permanently reside on Crown Land and had to relocate to the 'native reserves'.The reserves soon became overcrowded and shortages of land and food pushed the African population to migrate towards the mining and urban areas seeking wage labour. 10 order to limit the flow of migration, the administration determined that only single African male workers were allowed to temporarily live around cities and mines but despite the limitation, the demographic imbalance between the urban and the rural areas kept on growing. 11The divide between  His own philosophy, was a mixture of 'Fabian socialism, nineteenth-century liberalism, Christian morality and idealisation of the communal values of Zambia's pre-capitalist past'. 18Kaunda's domestic politics was characterised by socialist-oriented authoritarianism, which led to the creation of a state monopoly for manufacturing and trading companies, and the acquisition of 51% of the mining companies' shares. 19At the same time, beyond political ideology, he maintained opportunistic and pragmatic foreign relations with Britain, the USA, the Communist Bloc, and the non-aligned movement.
In the year of its independence, Zambia was the third larger copper producer in the world (after the Congo and Chile), and exported between 50,000 and 60,000 tonnes of Copper a month.Copper constituted over 90% of Zambian export and almost 50% of government revenue. 20During the 1960s, thanks to the high price of copper, Zambia was rated one of the most prosperous countries in Sub-Saharan Africa but its little-diversified economy depended heavily on copper price fluctuation and on its ability to negotiate favourable trading agreements with neighbouring countries in order to maintain the flow of copper and fuel. 21roughout colonial domination and during the first year of Kaunda's government, all of the copper export and ninety-five percent of imports had been shipped via railway through the British controlled territories to the ports of South Africa, but after Southern Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of the main axis of a linear gridded master plan expanding for two miles along the railway. 14Logistic and storage spaces were located towards the rail line while the main public buildings and services sprang up along Cairo Road.White colonists also settled within the gridded structure while African workers lived in compounds south of the town.the commercial core of the city. 15iginally deployed for military settlement, the grid became the preferred device for the structuring of new colonial settlements.The quintessence of all ordering structures, it was broadly used by colonisers as an instrument of space rationalisation.It recreated a known and recognisable environment and its compact layout provided feelings of urbanity and protection against the unfamiliar African landscape.With its image of scientific rationality, the grid, a non-figurative configuration with clear internal rules, can be read as the representation of the modern. 16The exemplary grid of Lusaka's first master plan, in contrast to to the organic shapes of the existing local settlements, evokes the colonial administration's self-proclaimed civilising mission.

Zambia 1964-1965
In the late 1950s, the possibility of maintaining good post-independence economic relations and the Congo, since its independence in 1960, was facing acute political tentions and Angola was still under Portuguese colonial rule. 27 This provisory solution proved inefficient; the cost of the air-lift was too high and a big quantity of oil was consumed by the heavily loaded planes.
Furthermore, only a few months after the UDI, the unsurfaced and poorly engineered Great North Road became impassable. 29e closing of the border with Southern Rhodesia, the consequent lack of fuel and the stack of copper waiting to be shipped out of the country required a prompt and durable solution.Kaunda and Nyerere envisioned a double long-term answer to Zambia's isolation: an oil pipeline and a railway.
Both infrastructures would run almost parallel to the Great North Road and connect Zambia to the Indian Ocean at Dar es Salaam.The pipeline had to supply oil to the mines while the 'freedom railway', as it was often called, would guarantee the flow of copper with the minimum need to import fuel and vehicles.
Independence (UDI) of 1965, Zambia was forced to secure a new outlet to the sea. 22The selfproclaimed independence of the Rhodesian white minority, condemned by Britain and unanimously by the United Nations, entailed a complete embargo on goods to and through the country. 23The UN Company), the historical industrial partner of the two Rhodesias during the colonial era. 32e railway project, on the other hand, had been dismissed by various western donors as uneconomic and unnecessary.After the refusal of Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union, in 1967 the People's Republic of China unexpectedly offered to build the rail link while the World Bank, adverse to the railway construction, but willing to participate in solving the crisis, granted loans to improve different sections of the Great North Road, renamed Tanzam Highway. 33ig.5]

Postcolonial logistics
Funding for the pipeline was raised by a consortium of Italian banks and offered to Zambia and Tanzania on soft-loan terms 34 while the engineering was carried out by SNAM PROGETTI, an affiliat of ENI.ENI, which promptly understood the commercial potential of decolonisation, started investing tion', 38 provided loans and assistance to low-income countries in order to 'foster an environment conducive to private foreign investment'. 39e project of the highway was divided into sections, each of which was the object of separate calls for bids for engineering and construction.This procedure was intended to 'enable smaller contractors to compete with larger firms and thereby help ensure competitive pricing'. 40Most of the contractors were foreign companies that imported machinery and experts and made little use of local labour.

Construction moved slowly towards the Indian
Ocean.Some observers noted at the time that the highway construction sites were used by western donors and by the World Bank to control the Chinese operation in Tanzania and Zambia. 41e improvement of the Great North Road was the less spectacular of the interventions along the Dar es Salaam transport corridor; the highway didn't require any secondary infrastructure and followed an existing road.However, after Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence and the rerouting of traffic toward Tanzania, the flow of trucks increased and the cities and the rural areas along the road became more and more linked to urban regions along the Rhodesia Railway.
After two years of negotiations and three years of surveys, the construction of the railway began Salaam. 44The unforeseen use of the railway as a small-scale logistic device radically changed the life of people living along the corridor.

African Cold War
L'independence, c'est de bien calculer les interdependences.(Tjibauou, 1996) 45 The spectacular and intrepid construction of the railway was widely reported in the Chinese and international media where it was advertised as the The trains of the Rhodesia Railway, departing from Port Elizabeth or Durban, would stop in Wankie (Southern Rhodesia) to collect coal, and then proceed to the north.Once they reached the Copperbelt, coal was unloaded and used to activate the mining engines while copper was loaded and shipped southward to South Africa and Mozambique and from there to the whole world.[Fig.2]

Fig. 3 :
Fig. 3: Lusaka old town, view from the north, about 1950.Source: George Kay, A Social Geography of Zambia.(London: University of London Press, 1971).

'
coloured' and white became a territorial and an urban issue, solved, at a different scales, with the definition of new borders and racial enclaves.The north-south orientation of the Zambian urbanisation pattern reflected the political and economic dependence of Northern Rhodesia on Southern presence of various private British companies in the most strategic areas of Africa convinced the British government to renounce to colonial sovereignty and negotiate the conditions for independence.17

In 1964 ,
Kenneth Kaunda, leader of the nationalist movement from the early 1950s, became the first president of Zambia with the support of the United National Independence Party (UNIP).

[Fig. 3 ]
In 1931 the colonial government of Northern Rhodesia decided to relocate its capital from Livingston to a more central location.Lusaka, which in 1931 had a population of four hundred and seventy Europeans, was chosen for its favourable position and pleasant climate.In 1935 a new master plan for the expansion of the capital city to the East of the existing settlement was developed by the British architect S. D. Adshead.The new capital was planned as a colonial, therefore racially divided, garden city of tree-lined boulevard and big plots for the Europeans' villas.Lusaka Old Town survived as

Fig. 4 :
fighting for freedom in Mozambique and Rhodesia.25Zambia found itself surrounded by enemy territories; the only accessible route toward the sea were the Benguela railway, running through the Congo and Angola, and the Great North Road, a dirt track passing through Tanzania.