The Railway Test

In August 2026, Congo's Council of Ministers approved a collaboration convention worth about $1.26 billion to rehabilitate the Dilolo–Sakania line: roughly a thousand kilometres of track running from the Angolan border, across the Congolese copper belt, to the Zambian border. It is good news. Copper and cobalt from Katanga have spent decades travelling thousands of kilometres by road to ports in South Africa, Tanzania and Mozambique. Trucking is slow, expensive, and exposed to every border queue between the mine and the ship. A working railway to the Atlantic cuts that journey from something like forty-five days to under ten. I want to sit with a smaller detail. That line is the Congolese leg of the Lobito Corridor, and the corridor's spine is the Benguela Railway. The Benguela was chartered in 1902, when the Portuguese government granted a ninety-nine-year concession to Sir Robert Williams, a Scottish mining magnate and an associate of Cecil Rhodes. Construction started in 1903. The line reached the Belgian Congo border in 1929. So the flagship infrastructure project of Africa's 2026 critical-minerals moment is a rehabilitation of a route designed in 1902 to move Katanga copper to a European-facing port. The route was correct then, for the people who commissioned it. The question worth asking is whether it is still the route we would draw today, and what it means that we are mostly repairing rather than redrawing. The test Here is a test you can run on any colonial-era African railway, using nothing but a map. Find the two endpoints. One of them will be a mine, an oil field, or a plantation belt. The other will be a port. Draw the line between them and you will notice it runs more or less perpendicular to the coast — inland to seaward — and that it does not stop anywhere particularly useful along the way except to pick up more of the same cargo. Then look for what is missing. Look for lines running parallel to the coast, connecting one colony to its neighbour. Look