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.

Keywords:

• politics of scale
• infrastructure
• development
• colonialism
• new mobilities paradigm

1. Introduction

And just as the transport sector – the old railway over a hundred years ago – opened up Kenya’s only development corridor that has been the anchor of Kenya’s development, the new oil and gas industry represents our opportunity to open up Northern Kenya for expansion and development. (Project Oil Kenya, 2018, timestamp 01:45)

When we are called for a meeting about the LAPSSET, what came to mind after reading the history of my country, I said: ‘This is the second colony’; I said ‘Okay, this is a plan: the resources that the British left in our country are still following and this second time it will be very dangerous. (Rashid,¹ Interview 31 January 2018)

When conducting fieldwork with people living along the planned Lamu Port–Southern Sudan–Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor in early 2018, I was struck by the apparent contrariness of the ways people judged the project, illustrated by the two quotes above. It baffled me that some people would see the LAPSSET as opening up a new world, while for others it constituted a mere barrier to seasonal grazing grounds; that it would mark a road into a bright future for some and into the dark past for others. The two quotes above illustrate the different ways in which history is conscripted either in support of or in the resistance against current infrastructure projects. Making sense of these ostensibly contradictory notions requires a framing of infrastructure projects that appreciates their spatial as well as their historical dimensions.

This article therefore attempts a historical situating of the LAPSSET corridor by juxtaposing it with its closest historical predecessor, the Uganda Railway (UR), which was completed in 1901. Both of the above quotes suggest a continuation, either specifically from the UR or generally from what the British colonisers ‘have left in our country’ – the ruins and debris of the colonial project in Kenya. The UR is one of these leftovers, and probably the one most similar to the LAPSSET in terms of their common ambition to ‘open up’ (see quote above), develop and control areas by way of large-scale infrastructural lines of transport.

In order to trace (dis-)continuities between colonial-era infrastructure projects and contemporary development corridors, I recommend paying particular attention to the ways in which infrastructural lines create scalar hierarchies. I argue for a relational understanding of scale that considers both a structuring of (im)mobilities across space and a structuring of anticipation across time. I suggest that paying attention to the history and politics of scale through the lens of mobility and anticipation contributes to the literature on large-scale infrastructure projects by providing a nuanced way of exploring colonial legacies.

The question of colonial legacies can be problematic. Regarding Kenya’s development agenda as a mere reiteration of imperial practice would mean to impose a Eurocentric interpretation on contemporary African history and subsequently disregard African agency (Burton and Jennings 2007). On the other hand, it would be naïve and dangerous to ignore the many continuities from colonial to postcolonial developmental practices (Nandy 1995). I investigate how the ruins of empire – both material and metaphorical (Stoler 2008) – are durable but do not determine the present; they are persistent but not immutable. This perspective suggests following the concrete trajectories of colonial infrastructures, the traces of violence they have left, their rubble and the way in which it is transformed into building blocks of something new, yet familiar. In places these trajectories run in parallel – for example, I argue that the two infrastructure projects present similar visions of modernity, and mobilise capital at the expense of pastoral mobilities. In other places, however, they bifurcate and differ fundamentally in the scalar hierarchies they create. The analysis of these parallels and forks in the road constitutes a contribution to the small but rapidly expanding literature on mega-infrastructure projects in Africa, and on the LAPSSET corridor in particular.

Several authors have discussed the LAPSSET corridor in relation to Kenya’s colonial history (eg Elliot [2016] and Bachmann and Kilaka [2019] in terms of frontier transformation, or Kochore [2016] in terms of state-building). This article derives its content from a growing literature on analyses of the (colonial) politics of infrastructure (Bachmann and Schouten 2018; Freed 2010; Grace 2013; Graham, Andersen, and Mann 2015; Larkin 2013; Mitchell 2002). In particular, Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio’s (2019) article juxtaposing the LAPSSET corridor with colonial-era infrastructure-led developments in Kenya’s ‘Northern Frontier District’ prompts a critical discussion about the ways in which recent infrastructural projects continue or depart from their colonial predecessors. Enns and Bersaglio recognise several parallels between past and present infrastructures, and conclude that the similarities between the LAPSSET and colonial infrastructure projects are significant, especially in terms of the ‘spatial visions’ they reproduce (Enns and Bersaglio 2019). While I do not fundamentally disagree with this conclusion, I continue the discussion by deepening the conceptual basis of longue durée historical analyses of infrastructure projects, suggesting more attention to discontinuities, particularly in terms of the ‘politics of scale’.

Some authors in the field of infrastructure studies have already introduced scale as an essential dimension of this analysis that regard roads as ‘scaling devices’ (Harvey and Knox 2015, p. 14) or as technologies with the ability to create ‘new scales of existence’ (Green, Harvey, and Knox 2005, p. 806). How exactly particular scalar hierarchies are ‘achieved’ (Latour 2005, p. 185), however, remains largely underexplored. In this paper, I suggest that the ‘politics of scale’ emerge from the structuring of relations of (im)mobility across space, as well as relations of anticipation across time. Based on this, I juxtapose the LAPSSET corridor and the UR using the previously established categories – (im)mobilities, anticipation and scale. In reference to Stoler’s (2008) thoughts on ‘imperial debris’, I conclude that the LAPSSET utilises much of that debris but uses it to construct a different scalar structure, one which is less about clear hierarchies and hard lines between colony and empire, and more about diffuse and ‘seamless’ relations – at least in aspiration. First, however, I provide a summary of both the LAPSSET corridor and the UR.

2. Impermanent ways

2.1. The UR

‘The whole problem of the development of East and Central Africa […] all resolve themselves into the all-important and overshadowing question of transport and communication’.

- Sir Gerald Portal, 1894 (quoted in Hill 1949, p. 120)

In the early years of British colonial dominance in East Africa, the area today known as Kenya was mainly perceived as an inconvenient obstacle in the path to Uganda. To the Europeans, the land between the coast and Lake Victoria seemed to be wild and uncivilised, while Uganda was important geopolitically due to its position at the source of the Nile and its people were generally regarded as superior compared to those of their neighbouring countries (McDermott 1893, p. 106). Around the end of the nineteenth century, Germany had evolved to become a significant challenge to British rule in East Africa and threatened to incorporate Uganda into their ‘sphere of influence’. The British government was concerned that Germany would literally ‘make their road’ (McDermott 1893, p. 107) to Uganda before them; the only solution was seen in beating the Germans to it, building a railroad to Uganda and thus laying claim to it. The timely completion of the railway was thus seen as an essential condition to consolidate the British ‘sphere of influence’ (Gunston 2004).

The construction of the railway from 1896 to 1901 was afflicted with several challenges from the beginning: a sceptical public in Britain that was reluctant to cough up the money for a project whose benefits were largely elusive; a challenging topography; resistance by certain tribes, particularly the Kamba and Nandi (Hill 1949, p. 202 f.); and the notorious ‘man-eating lions of Tsavo’, only one among the many dangers faced by the coolies (workers from British India employed under extremely harsh conditions to build the railway).² Despite these challenges, the railway was finished in 1901. While it was never able to shake off its image as the ‘lunatic line’, it was also seen as a necessary precondition for all of Britain’s colonial projects in the region. Edward Grigg credited the railway for being the ‘beginning of all history in Kenya’ (quoted in Hill 1949, p. v); and he continued: ‘it is the railway which created Kenya as a Colony of the Crown’.

2.2. The LAPSSET corridor

The LAPSSET corridor encompasses a network of highways and oil pipelines, and potentially a railroad, to connect a new industrial harbour at Lamu with Ethiopia and the newly developing oil fields in Turkana, as well as with South Sudan (LCDA 2017). Browne (2015) describes the LAPSSET as ‘a project in search of a rationale’. This rationale may well be found not in a concrete objective, but rather as an aspiration for modernity and development in the broadest sense. It therefore constitutes a significant part of Kenya’s Vision 2030, and as such was meant to help ‘Building Africa’s Transformative and Game Changer Infrastructure to Deliver a Just and Prosperous Kenya’.³

The LAPSSET’s particular relevance furthermore rises from its geopolitical implications, both regionally and globally. Regionally, the LAPSSET corridor is expected to establish and secure Kenya not only as an important link to overseas trade, but also as part of a ‘land bridge’ connecting the continent from the east coast to the west coast (Enns, 2017). While spearheaded by the LAPSSET Corridor Development Authority (LCDA) under the government of Kenya, the LAPSSET project aims at joining different interests arising from regional as well as private business (Browne 2015). Initially, Uganda was meant to be included in the LAPSSET project, but in early 2016 the government of this landlocked country changed plans and decided to export its estimated 6.5 billion barrels of oil through a pipeline via Tanzania (Perey 2016), echoing the struggle for control over the access to resources and thus regional geopolitical dominance between British and German East Africa.

The LAPSSET corridor also constitutes a focal point for global geopolitical struggles. China’s involvement, particularly the construction of the port in Lamu, could be regarded as an extension of the ‘maritime silk road’. Simultaneously, Europe and the USA also have shown interest in the LAPSSET as a way to balance the ‘Sino–Kenyan economic bond’ (Browne 2015, p. 70). This reflects the increasing attention that large-scale or ‘mega’ infrastructure projects receive in international development discourses, sometimes referred to as Africa’s ‘infrastructure renaissance’ (Vhumbunu 2016) – a phrasing that invokes the past and questionable glory of colonial infrastructure projects.

Different elements of the corridor are currently at various degrees of completion: the industrial harbour in Lamu is currently partly completed; a new road now connects Isiolo and Moyale; and Tullow Oil has begun its operation at several drill sites in Turkana. However, the LAPSSET’s key raison d’être – the seamless integration of all components that constitute it – is not yet achieved.

3. Methodology

This article is based on two different sets of material. The analysis of the UR is based on historical documents, transcripts of speeches made in parliament before and during the construction of the railway, and a critical examination of the extensive work by Mervyn Frederick Hill (1949). The investigation of the LAPSSET corridor is based on fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2018 along the planned route of the corridor between Isiolo and Lokichar. This stretch of the corridor was selected because, at the time of research, it displayed the highest degree of uncertainty regarding the precise route and nature of the infrastructure project. As the aim of the research was to investigate different and often competing ways of imagining the future, an area with as yet little to no physical manifestation of the LAPSSET project was assumed to offer the broadest canvas onto which hopes and fears could be projected. The research was designed following the principles of mobile ethnographies (eg Coleman and Hellermann 2011; Gooch 2008) and included walking interviews as a central methodological tool (Evans and Jones 2011).

In addition to extensive ethnographic field notes, a total of 116 interviews were analysed using qualitative data analysis software, and following an inductive–deductive approach to coding (Kuckartz 2014, p. 69). Most of the interviews included in this text were conducted with Samburu pastoralists and settled Samburu in Isiolo County in early 2018. The interview data comprises a mixture of group interviews (particularly when engaging with groups of village elders and women), ‘walking interviews’ (mostly young herders) and individual interviews. Most interviews were conducted in English and Swahili, or – with the help of a translator – in Samburu and other local languages. Names of interviewees have been changed to ensure anonymity.

4. Infrastructure as imperial debris

The history of imperialism is interwoven with the history of technological developments and proliferation to the degree that one can hardly be told without the other (Headrick 1981, p. 4). Accordingly, the relationship between the ‘new’ imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and technology has received considerable academic attention, especially in terms of large-scale infrastructure projects. Within this literature, different aspects of colonial infrastructure are emphasised: its geographical power to create ‘colonial spaces’ (van der Straeten and Hasenöhrl 2016, p. 364) or ‘imperial landscapes’ (Garrido 2016, p. 94), or its fundamental role in providing the ‘Tools of Empire’ (Headrick 1981), or the ‘tentacles’ (Headrick 1988) along which it exerts control. Headrick describes how ‘Western technologies’ – such as steamships, guns, canals and, prominently, railroads – were necessary preconditions for colonial rule, as they answered the above-quoted ‘all-important and overshadowing question of transport and communication’ (Hill 1949, p. 120). Stoler (2008, pp. 200–2001) accordingly suggests regarding imperial duress in terms of these durable but mutable infrastructural formations: ‘the breadth of corridors in which people can move, the virtual barriers by which they are cordoned off, the kinds of infrastructure to which they have access, and the preemptive racialized exclusions and exemptions in which they live’. This section lays out a conceptual foundation for understanding the relationship between the imperial debris of colonial infrastructures and current developmental infrastructure projects.

Apart from the utilisation and mobilisation of resources, infrastructure projects also harness considerable imaginative power. So prominent is the role of technology and infrastructure for the imperial project that the roads, railways and shipyards seem to embody the empire itself (Davies 1988, p. 3), which is often imagined as an ‘imperial machine’ (Said 2003, p. 44). Furthermore, it is commonly argued that infrastructure technologies not only made the imperial project possible but also provided it with moral justification as the ‘torchbearers upon the path of progress’ (van der Straeten and Hasenöhrl 2016, p. 361). These ‘tentacles of progress’ (Headrick 1988) thus produced a powerful image of what it meant to be ‘civilised’ or modern. As Paul Edwards (2003) notes: ‘To be modern is to live within and by means of infrastructures’. Lastly, another aspect of colonial infrastructures, which is important for the argument in this text, is its implication in the creation of hierarchies. Below, I argue that infrastructural relations imply not only relations of power (Headrick 1981, p. 83) but also contested scalar relations (Harvey and Knox 2015, pp. 15–16) that define the identity of both empire and colony.

From this brief discussion, three fundamental aspects of colonial infrastructure can be established: its capacity to mobilise matter and ideas; its role in the creation of particular ways of anticipating modernity; and its ability to (un-)make scalar hierarchies. In the rest of this section, I will discuss these aspects of colonial infrastructure in more depth, in order to establish a conceptual framework in which the question of colonial legacies between the LAPSSET corridor and the UR can be answered.

4.1. Structuring mobilities

In an epilogue to the famous Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling (Kipling 1920) describes a military parade, a formidable line made up of animals, men and machinery to be reviewed by the Viceroy of India. The visiting Amir of Afghanistan appears very impressed by this display of discipline and force, and wonders how such control over the otherwise erratic movement of animals is possible. An officer answers:

‘They obey, as the men do. Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant, and the sergeant his lieutenant […], who obeys the Viceroy, who is the servant of the Empress. Thus it is done’.

In the words of Edward Said, this story depicts imperial might as displayed and embodied by the capabilities to mobilise ‘human material, material wealth, knowledge, what have you’ (Said 2003, p. 44) along a ‘monstrous chain of command’ (Said 2003, p. 45) spanning from the Empress Victoria to a mule in India. In the following discussion, I regard these branches of the imperial machine quite literally as the technologies of transport and communication that are necessary to have the mule walk where Queen Victoria wishes.

Maintaining that infrastructures lay out how things move through space seems a trivial point to make. However, unpacking the way in which infrastructures not only mobilise but also create frictions and barriers (Enns 2018; Sheller and Urry 2016), and the power geometries (Graham et al. 2015) through which mobility and fixity are negotiated, complexifies the conceptualisation of infrastructural power over mobility. It suggests attention to the tension between stable moorings and fluid mobility. This tension is one of the main concerns of the new mobilities paradigm (Enns 2018; Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006; Sheller 2014). Underlying the relationship between mooring and flow is a particular understanding of relationality, in which every relation always constitutes both a connection and a disconnection. The question of how this tension is resolved in particular instances is fundamentally political, in the sense that its resolution is negotiable and may create winners and losers. As Hagar Kotef (2015, p. 54) puts it: ‘The free movement of some limits, hides, even denies the existence of others’.

Infrastructures and the configuration of (im)mobilities they produce are therefore connected to questions of justice (Sheller 2018). This article takes up Enns’ (2018) suggestion to ‘mobilise research on Africa’s development corridors’ in order to show ‘new patterns of spatial inclusion and exclusion and mobility and immobility along new corridor routes in Africa’ (Enns 2018). More than the mechanics of inclusion and exclusion, Sheller describes ‘colonial regimes of movement’ (Sheller 2018, p. 41) that manifest not only in terms of mobility and fixity but also in particular classifications and evaluations of different forms of mobility. On the one hand, (hyper-)mobility is associated with capitalist modernity and progress, while fixity, isolation and seclusion (particularly in terms of market access) are thought to be outdated and underdeveloped. On the other hand, ‘excessive’ mobilities that are not structured by centrally planned infrastructures, such as nomadism, are often produced as ‘irrational’ (Sheller 2018, p. 41) or ‘unruly’ (Kotef 2015, p. 26). This distinction between modern (ie infrastructured) and primitive mobility implicates an important temporal dimension in addition to the spatial dynamics of movement and fixity discussed so far.

4.2. Structuring anticipation

Uneven (im)mobilities portend not only particular lines of movement in space but also particular timelines – ways of remembering the past and anticipating the future. Arjun Appadurai describes how the future is not a distinct and inaccessible elsewhen but is produced as a ‘cultural fact’ through practices of imagination, aspiration and anticipation (Appadurai 2013, pp. 286–299).⁴ The ‘capacity to aspire’, however, is not distributed equally (Appadurai 2004). While everyone has individual hopes and dreams, according to Appadurai, the capacity to conscribe means to achieve these dreams, and the ability to map out pathways to reach them is contingent upon relative privilege. Continuing his proclivity for spatial metaphors, Appadurai uses geographic language to describe the capacity to aspire and calls it a ‘navigational capacity’ (Appadurai 2004, p. 69).

Building on Jasanoff and Kim’s (2015) work on ‘Dreamscapes of Modernity’, Müller-Mahn (2019) expands on these geographic images and connects the capacity to aspire explicitly to the planning and construction of development corridors. He argues that the maps, technical drawings and digital renderings that anchor anticipated futures in the present are ‘foreign blueprints’ (2019, p. 3) that produce a particular promise of modernity through infrastructure that does not coincide with the imagination of the inhabitants. This ‘promise of infrastructure’ (Appel, Anand, and Gupta 2013) or its ‘enchantment’ (Harvey and Knox 2012) with notions of speed, political integration, economic potency and modernity constitute infrastructures not only as pathways to different places but also as gestures towards particular futures. The future that infrastructure corridors such as LAPSSET or the UR point towards is characterised by a particular version of what it means to be ‘modern’ and ‘developed’ (Edwards 2003). They create particular ‘spaces of possibility’ (Graham et al. 2015), which are about not only the places that can be accessed through infrastructure but also particular futures that become (un)imaginable through them. However, infrastructural futures are not merely imposed upon an impassive population. Van der Straeten and Hasenöhr emphasise the need to recognise ‘the fullness of system interactions and actors, not just the (colonial) “system builder” at the top’ (2016, p. 374).

The two vectors towards an elsewhere along the physical road and an elsewhen along the metaphorical path of development are interwoven. Elliot (2016; see also Greiner 2016) analyses emerging ‘economies of anticipation’ along the LAPSSET corridor that materialise as land speculation, and intersect with conflicts between first settlers and wealthy ‘newcomers’. The anticipation of ‘what’s to come’ is quite literally related to the anticipated mobility of goods, people, investments, etc.

4.3. Structuring scale

Both mobilities and anticipations can be understood relationally as (dis)connections between here and there, and the past, present and future, respectively. Consequently, I suggest a relational understanding of scale as a product of mobilities and anticipations, rather than a natural order of things. The fundamental assumption of relational scale is that it is not ontologically fixed, but socially produced (Brown and Purcell 2005, p. 609) through relational material practices (Ramasar 2014) and forms (Law 2004). This means to consider relational practices not as something apart from scalar practices, but rather as constitutive of them. In this sense, the British Empire as described above could only be present as an empire on a global level as long as it was able to maintain the relational practices and artefacts (telegraph lines, command structures, steamboats, etc.) that presented the empire globally by structuring movement and imaginations accordingly.

As Anna Tsing (2005, p. 88 ff.) points out, globality in this sense is not only about extensive geographical presence, but is fundamentally about defining and generalising knowledge: ‘The globe is a node for the expression of universal logic’. Relations that weave scalar instances are therefore not constituted by any relation whatsoever, but specifically by those that allow universals ‘to travel with at least some facility in the world’ (Tsing, 2005, p. 89). I suggest that this ‘travelling’ is not metaphorical but requires actual movement of people, objects, capital and ideas about the past and the future through space, and is therefore related to infrastructures that allow and structure these mobilities.

Connected to relational scale is the idea of the ‘politics of scale’ (Swyngedouw 1997). If scale is contingent on a relational meshwork, it follows that scale is negotiable and thus political in the sense that different actors compete with each other to establish opposing scalar hierarchies. The presence of the British Empire as a global entity depended on its local presence through administrative personnel, tax collectors, soldiers, etc, ie the stability of the ‘monstrous chain of command’ (Said 2003, p. 44) mentioned above. In Kipling’s story, this chain affords control over the mobility of people, animals and things; it is able to impress the Amir of Afghanistan with a compelling vision of modernity and establishes a scalar hierarchy along its route from the seat of a global empire in Westminster to a ‘local’ mule somewhere in India.

The following sections further explore the UR and the LAPSSET corridor through the relationship between the (infra)structuring of mobility, anticipation and – combining the first two – the politics of scale. Using this analytical matrix serves the purpose of establishing a nuanced perspective on the colonial legacies.

5. How LAPSSET and the UR structure mobilities

The previous section argued that relations possess a vexing ambiguity, as they always create both connections and disconnections. I first explore how the LAPSSET corridor and the UR structure mobilities by affording some movements while restricting others.

As I have discussed before, if Britain was to establish an ‘imperial machine’ whose tendrils penetrated East Africa, infrastructural relations into these lands were indispensable. Notably, paving the way for the empire entailed not only the creation of relations but also – and maybe even principally – the cutting of existing infrastructural relations (mainly caravans that were dominated by Swahili and Arab traders).⁵ One of the expected benefits of the UR was the anticipated disruption of caravan routes that had dominated trade in the area for centuries – ‘iron roads, not jogging porters’, as Winston Churchill (1909, pp. 23–24) urged. During the hearing of the funding bill for the UR in 1896, Lord Salisbury argued that ‘Caravans will cease to be profitable and therefore will cease to exist’ (Hill 1949, p. 137). Ostensibly, this would mean a deadly blow to slavery that depended in no small part on caravans. However, it also had the additional – and likely decisive – benefit that controlling the railway was expected to create a monopoly of transport under British control. As the same Lord Salisbury had stated during a speech five years prior: ‘‘Now the peculiarity of a railway, […] is that where it is once laid it kills every other mode of locomotion that formerly held the same ground’ (Hill 1949, p. 54). The ruins of empire are themselves built upon what the imperial project has ruined. In this case, it also means the ruination of caravan economies and existing pastoralist modes of mobility.

At least to some degree, the LAPSSET seems to have that effect as well, as most pastoralists seem to encounter it as an obstacle rather than a relation (Enns 2017, 2018). Interlocutors interviewed in areas along the corridor stressed the difficulties the LAPSSET would pose to the herding of animals. Not only is the road itself an obstacle, but also the cars on it, moving at high speed, are obstacles. As one of my research assistants translated the concerns of a young Samburu herder:

What they understand is that the LAPSSET – they know that there will be a very big road here […]. When it passes here, all our animals, all our goats, will be finished because, they don’t … animals, they have never seen these things, these machines, so they will just come across the road and then they are being swept by the vehicles moving up and down.  (Leparsanti, interview 29 January 2018)

This anticipated limitation of mobility for pastoralists is juxtaposed with increased mobility for the kinetic elites (Sheller 2018, pp. 129–134). An activist for indigenous and women’s rights in Nanyuki said about a resort city that will be built near Isiolo as part of the LAPSSET project:

It will be like Las Vegas, where people will fly in and go back. You know, just come for the sun. And then we will have double-lane highways […]. What will happen to the livelihood of these pastoralists’ community, our mobility? It means, if the fence is put on the road this side, I cannot be able to cross on the other side. Maybe my family is on the other side, maybe I am a polygamous man with three homes […]. So, it means I won’t pass to the other road. […] This is an electric fence if you go near it, it is going to hit you. (Julia, interview 3 April 2018)

The UR and the LAPSSET corridor seem to grapple with the inherent ambivalence of relations that present both an obstacle and a connection. In both cases, the proponents of each project have used promises of increased mobility as an argument. Sir Charles Eliot dreamed that the UR’s development would ‘mean the opening of a new world’, while the LCDA promises that the LAPSSET will ‘open a world of trade and investment opportunities’ (LCDA 2015, p. 37), and promises a ‘seamless connected Africa’ on its website.⁶ In contrast, the above quotes illustrate that pastoralists anticipate considerable limitations to their mobility, while it was the explicit goal of the UR to ‘kill every other mode of locomotion’ (Hill 1949, p. 54).

Regarding the way each project resolves its relational ambivalence, however, shows one major discontinuity. Even though both projects produce new immobilities, the LAPSSET corridor is depicted and justified as a ‘pure’ connector, as a granter of seamlessness that enhances mobility and connectivity for everyone. It promises better access to markets for pastoralists, better integration of pastoral regions within Kenya, and access to world markets of resources and tourists (LCDA 2015). While negative impacts on wildlife or pastoral communities are acknowledged, they are mostly regarded as an unfortunate side effect that can be mitigated through engineering solutions such as appropriate underpasses for people and animals (JPC and BAC/GKA JV 2011; SAI Consulting 2016), or by offering settled pastoralist participation in modern, motorised mobilities.

Contrary to this, a major purpose of the UR was its role in inhibiting unwanted mobilities. Throughout the parliamentary debates, as well as in later assessments, the explicit ability of the UR to monopolise mobility and to create new, hard borders was used as a justification for its construction. It was seen as a way to inhibit further incursion by the Germans and their infrastructure projects, defining and rigidifying the British sphere of influence (Gunston 2004; see also Hill 1949, pp. 130–131). Furthermore, it allowed for the frustration of caravan routes (and the associated slave trade), as well as the containment of wasteful nomadic ‘straggling’ (Eliot 1905, p. 310).

6. How LAPSSET and the UR structure anticipation

They say that all winners are visionary, and without a dream, a nation withers. A dream to be an oil-producing country unites us with the Kenyan people. This shared dream is brought to life through the joint partnership under Project Oil Kenya – a catalyst for the opening-up of Northern Kenya. (Project Oil Kenya, 2018, timestamp 00:06)

The LAPSSET corridor establishes not only a fixed directionality of travelling through space, but also particular anticipations. ‘Chaotic’ movement of pastoralists is associated with a past that needs to be overcome by ‘modern’ orderly movement afforded by infrastructural lines. The conflict of pastoral and infrastructural mobilities is thus projected onto a clash between the past and the future.

Consequently, the incentives provided by the LAPSSET for semi-nomadic pastoralists to modernise by settling down are regarded as a positive effect. The corridor would not only be an obstacle to pastoralist livelihoods but would simultaneously mobilise capital, which in turn may help to create employment opportunities for the educated children of pastoralists. In particular, people living in major settlements along the LAPSSET route see education and (motorised) transportation as both a necessary precondition for development and its primary manifestation. However, many interlocutors who went to school themselves see pastoralism and the associated semi-nomadic lifestyle as the principal obstacle to education and thus development itself. Another person, who lives in Kipsing and had worked as a pilot for a nature conservancy, explained the situation, stating that

People normally tend to resist change. It will be very hard, although if education comes first to the people […] then that will change, definitely. But the local people around here, it will be very hard for them to change their way of life. (Paul, interview 26 January 2018)

Through better connectivity, settled residents expect LAPSSET to create jobs, which will incentivise people to abandon their pastoralist and semi-nomadic lifestyle, which in turn will enable them to send their children to school:

When the LAPSSET will come, so many people will be employed, and with that time no children will go to graze the animal, they will all go to school because now everyone will be working, the parent will be working so they will have fees to pay for their children. (Mary, interview 24 February 2018) 

The LAPSSET corridor conjures a particular vision of what it means to be modern: to be integrated into a capitalist system of production and locomotion. It may seem paradoxical that settling down is seen as a prerequisite to participation in a modernity defined by hyper-mobility. However, the mooring provided by a fixed residence is regarded as a basis for facilitating the participation in a national project, as well as global flows of goods and capital (Enns and Bersaglio 2019).

The hopes and anticipations of the colonial government in Kenya seem hauntingly similar. In 1920, the House of Commons debated the ‘ultimate goal of colonisation’ as developing ‘the progress of the natives’ (Deb 1920, pp. 930–332). A quote by Sir Edward Grigg concerning employing indigenous labourers in the UR project was read:

‘With regard to native labour there are two points to consider. First, that native labour is required for the proper development of the country, and, secondly, that we must educate the native to come out of his reserve and work for his own sake’.

However, in the same debate in 1920, one of the members of parliament expressed

‘[…] a very shrewd suspicion that the motive behind the suggestion contained in this circular is not altogether the benefit of the native, but in order that the native may become a better wealth-producing machine’.

Past anticipations and suspicions of a country civilised and developed through the discipline required by salaried labour retain a ghostly presence in current discourses about the potential transformations of infrastructure projects.

At this point, it is helpful to wonder whose hopes, fears and dreams are important to justify the LAPSSET corridor and the UR, respectively. The answer to this question marks one significant difference between the projects. Certainly, the indigenous people, during the construction of the UR, were highly sceptical of the benefits of organised labour, as evidenced by their proclivity to abandon the construction sites in favour of more useful or enjoyable occupations (Hill 1949, pp. 284–285). Admittedly, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colonial projects increasingly justified imperialism as a philanthropic project, but the specific mechanisms through which indigenous people would receive the blessings of civilisation were rarely explored. Generally, the hopes, fears and anticipations of ‘natives’ were irrelevant as long as they did not stand in the way of the modernising project. Conversely, one of the key impacts of the LAPSSET is framed as ‘local content’, such as ‘new business opportunities for the local community’ (LCDA 2016, p. 12), or ‘increased participation by locals in investing in the corridor’ (LCDA 2016, p. 13). In a similar context, Greiner (2016) coined the term ‘economies of anticipation’, describing how pastoralists in North Kenya are not only anticipating passively, but actively imagine and thus shape their own futures, and produce ‘locality’ in relation to lines of connection and demarcation.

This ‘capacity to aspire’ (Appadurai 2004), however, is limited by excluding people from being informed about and participating in the project. Without being able to ‘prepare oneself’ for it, the LAPSSET appears a wild ‘animal’, as one resident of Isiolo described it:

Ahmad: So, I don’t have any idea about LAPSSET but I heard there is something, an animal called LAPSSET – but I don’t have any information because I was not part of it when they shared the information.

Interviewer: What do you mean ‘animal called LAPSSET’?

Ahmad: Because it will come when the … it might swallow me with what I have on the ground. But if I could be part of the information [exchange] about the LAPSSET, I would prepare myself. As a community, we didn’t have any awareness. They only took some senior officers from the government. They make workshops in big hotels but they never go to the local people and under the tree and talk to them. (Ahmad, interview 19 March 2019).

Nonetheless, inhabitants of the area passed by the LAPSSET demand inclusion in the future visions formulated by the corridor. Significantly, indigenous and women’s rights groups in Kenya actively demand recognition of their particular visions of modernity, a version of development that is not imposed by an outside force but one that is anchored in the hopes, fears, dreams and anticipations of local communities. Mary, the activist for indigenous and women’s rights quoted above, said about development:

And we don’t say that development is bad as such, no! Development is good but it is good when the people are consulted, involved and participate fully and then we see. This is how we want this development to be done in our territory. […] But now when it is the vice versa that development is being brought and imposed on us. And then they say that we don’t want to develop. Then we say that development is not development. It is harmful to our livelihood, it is harmful to identity and it is harmful to our self-determination as indigenous people. (Mary, interview 3 April 2018).

The sentiment expressed in this quote resists the dominant notion of development and modernity as defined and enforced through infrastructure itself. To the contrary, Mary insists that the LAPSSET corridor has to take into account residents’ versions of modernity and development, rather than letting a central planning authority define what it means ‘to be modern’ (Edwards, 2003, p. 186) through infrastructure.

7. How LAPSSET and the UR structure scalar hierarchies

As mentioned before, Edward Grigg said that ‘It is the railway which created Kenya as a Colony of the Crown’ (quoted in Hill 1949, p. v). This statement can be read as marking the relevant scalar hierarchy that the UR created in which the colony is subsumed under the reign of empire, thus reproducing both the colony and the empire as distinct entities. In contrast, the above quote from Oil Kenya suggests unity through the eradication of internal boundaries and the dream of oil production shared by all Kenyan people.

Similarly, in his study on the Isiolo–Moyale road (which is also part of the LAPSSET corridor), Hassan Kochore (2016) describes how practices connected to the road – including trading and travelling, but also prophecies and songs – integrate people in the country’s North into the rest of the country. He shows how the road brings people both literally and metaphorically closer to Kenya, thus allowing state power to be broadcast into formally marginalised areas. Above, I have maintained that they present not just one particular scalar instance – ie ‘the state’ – but necessarily also all other instances along the scalar hierarchy. This means that the materialisation of the state in formerly marginalised areas also implies a definition of ‘local’ (as underdeveloped receptors of development), ‘global’ (as the general principle of development towards modernity), and the ‘state’ (as the arbiter and distributor of development). If successfully constructed, this scalar hierarchy can hide political struggles over the validity and value of particular visions of future development (Achiba 2019). If there is only one universal future, then the question is not ‘Where are we headed?’ but rather ‘How do we get there?’, and can consequently be framed in technocratic terms. In this case, ‘politics of scale’ is fundamentally about the obfuscation of their own political nature. The ‘real future’, then, can be found at the end of a pipeline: ‘The future is a crude-oil pipeline, […] That’s where the real future is!’ (Project Oil Kenya, 2019, timestamp 10:37), as the Principal Secretary of the State Department of Petroleum in Kenya put it.

During the construction of the UR, indigenous people were at best regarded as passive beneficiaries who would generally profit from proximity to Europeans: ‘The closer the contacts between Africans and Europeans the sooner would the former acquire the ideas of a superior race’ (Hill 1949, p. 273). Nevertheless, the main policy of dealing with indigenous people during the construction of the UR was their isolation in reserves, as ‘the alternative to settling the Masai in reserves was to leave vast areas of land as the private preserve of some 45,000 backward and nomadic pastoralists’ (Hill 1949, p. 275). Conversely, the term ‘local’, which is commonly used to designate people directly affected by the LAPSSET corridor, implies an integration into a universal globality – at least a potential part of the whole, instead of a ‘formidable obstacle’ to the universal project of civilisation. At the same time, the notion of local-ness is interwoven with backwardness, tradition and isolation, and is thus the counterfactual to modernity, development and globalisation. As one of my research assistants (who works for a non-governmental organisation and does not consider himself to be a ‘local’) put it:

The locals do not have a defined place to live; they live here and they move to another point. So, from that they depend on … they are chasing their life by their own livestock. […] Living in a set-up that does not have vehicles, that does not have modern roads (James, interview 26 March 2018).

This illustrates how (im)mobilities and anticipations related to infrastructures (un)make scalar hierarchies. In the specific context of the current development agenda in Kenya, ‘local people’ are not defined by their adherence to a particular location, but – to the contrary – by the fact they ‘do not have a defined place’ and ‘[chase] their life by their own livestock’, creating an image of chaotic and wild movement. However, if pastoralists align with the development corridor and its regulated mobility, settle down, and use the road to access schools, workplaces and markets, they can become part of the state and the universal promise of modernity it offers (Adas 1989). As a resident of Isiolo put it: ‘The people, now they need the new changes. The new world. […] The LAPSSET is going to bring the new world’ (Matthew, interview 23 January 2018).

‘Locals’ and their erratic mobilities may still reflect the past, but LAPSSET offers a seamless connection to the rest of the world – the new world – and thus a pathway towards modernity. At least rhetorically, the emphasis is not on the establishment of scalar hierarchies, but on the possibility of overcoming them: the northern pastoralists can become a part of Kenya and Kenya can become a part of the global economy, flattening formally existing hierarchies. ‘The LAPSSET is going to bring the new world ‘, but it also promises to introduce Kenya to the world. As a primary school teacher in Oldonyiro said:

All these other countries are moving on; why not us?  Kenya right now, we are supposed to be competing with these other countries like not East Africa […].  We are supposed to be competing with the global world, you know? I would like to see Kenya compete with Germany! (Bertram, interview 31 January 2018)

Contrary to this vision, the UR sought to establish new hard hierarchies along the ‘monstrous chain of command’. The difference between colony and empire was not to be overcome, but to be established in the first place. While the two projects arguably did similar things – building a large-scale infrastructure project through Kenya – the assumptions on which the respective justifications are built are different. While the LAPSSET project seems to assume divisions that are sought to be overcome by the corridor, the UR presumes an empty canvas onto which new scalar hierarchies could be inscribed, where connections could be opened but also closed at will. As Charles Eliot (1905, p. 3) wrote: ‘We have in East Africa the rare experience of dealing with a tabula rasa, […] where we can do as we will, regulate immigration, and open or close the door as seems best’.

The above sections have shown that LAPSSET’s vision of seamless, modern and global mobility relies on the immobilisation of ‘local’ pastoral mobilities. As illustrated in the quotes in Section 6, the promises of infrastructure are not perceived as being realised for ‘the local people under the tree’, but only in ‘big hotels’. On the local level, which is itself defined by the absence of infrastructural modernity, LAPSSET is expected to create barriers and disconnections, while its vision of modernity and frictionless movement is conjured as a national project of integration into the global market.

8. Conclusion

In this article, I have described the relationship between infrastructures, the way they govern mobilities by creating connections and disconnections and how these mobilities create particular ways of anticipating the future, as well as scalar hierarchies.

By shaping (im)mobilities and anticipations, both LAPSSET and the UR function as technologies of scale. LAPSSET is built upon the ruins of empire, and is haunted by its ghosts. As Enns and Bersaglio (2019) point out, the similarities between past and current infrastructure projects in East Africa are too stark to be ignored, and both projects discussed in this paper aim at mobilising capital while resulting in a fixing of ‘local’ pastoral mobilities. People appear ‘local’ in relation to infrastructures and the concomitant anticipation of a global modernity from which they are excluded. The term thus carries with it familiar notions of backwardness, tradition and underdevelopment, but also a way towards redemption – along a tarmac road, a pipeline, or a railway towards ‘the real future’, as the head of the State Department of Petroleum put it.

The analytical framework proposed in this article – paying attention to mobilities, anticipation and scale – reveals that LAPSSET also deviates from the legacy of the UR in significant ways. Consequently, this article departs from previous historical analyses (Enns and Bersaglio 2019) of LAPSSET that assert a direct continuation or repetition of colonial infrastructures. While the UR helped to forge a ‘monstrous chain’, with clear hierarchies between empire and colony, the scalar topology that LAPSSET presents is more complex and ambivalent. Scalar hierarchies still exist, but they appear fluid, negotiable and contingent – not on geographical location, but on participation in the kind of mobilities that conjure a vision of modernity. The LAPSSET project uses colonial debris as building blocks – fixing pastoral mobilities in favour of frictionless movement of capital, a universal promise of modernity – but builds a different scalar hierarchy. The UR implied a common vanishing point for all lines conjured by the railway, located at the core of the empire. It is the ultimate origin and destination for the flows of people, goods, capital and ideas, but also the focal points for all anticipations, the embodiment of the only available version of modernity and civilisation. LAPSSET, in contrast, is ambivalent and frayed. There is no final destination except for an amorphous global world market; a vision of modernity that consists of ‘promises towards a future which is uncertain and unclear’ (Harvey and Knox 2012); an emerging scalar hierarchy where notions of the local, the national and the global are fluid and contingent. This ambivalence may explain the apparent paradox that had puzzled me when encountering so many different accounts on what LAPSSET is, what it does and where it leads.

To conclude, this paper has shown that the persistence of certain chunks of colonial debris is not equivalent to a repetition or continuation of colonial infrastructuring of space and time. It is vital to recognise these discontinuities as well, as they testify to the ways in which different actors, including people living near the LAPSSET corridor, actively imagine, shape and challenge the complexity and ambiguous scalar hierarchies of modern globalised capitalism. Echoing Enns and Bersaglio’s (2019) call for more historical studies on colonial legacies of infrastructure projects in Africa, this article furthermore emphasises the need to explicitly include the active role of people living near mega-infrastructure projects in shaping them.

Acknowledgements

I thank Swati, Michael, Jan, Alexandra, Fredrik and Johan for their feedback. I am particularly grateful to April for her extensive comments and general train-nerdage.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Johannes Theodor Aalders

Johannes Theodor Aalders is a PhD Candidate in Environmental Social Science at the School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University. He holds degrees in Human Geography (BA, Bayreuth, Germany) and Environmental Studies (MSc, Lund, Sweden). His main research interests include the politics of scale, relational space, Derrida’s hauntology, walking as an ethnographic method, environmental justice, climate change, critical animal studies and Kenya’s oil infrastructure.

Notes

1 All names of interviewees have been changed.

2 The final report of the UR Committee in 1903 showed that ‘of a total of 31,983 coolies imported from India […] 6,454 had been invalided and 2,493 had died in East Africa’ (Hill 1949, p. 240).

3 http://web.archive.org/web/20141120182521/http://www.lapsset.go.ke

4 The distinction between these different practices is significant, but in the context of this text, I venture to collapse the aspect of hope implied by his understanding of aspiration, and speculation based on past experiences implied by his use of anticipation, into one term.

5 Furthermore, it was also clear that if Britain didn’t occupy this transport monopoly, her rivals would: ‘If you do not establish that communication, Germany will do so’, Mr. Curzon, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, stated bluntly (1896, quoted in Hill 1949, p. 137).

6 http://www.lapsset.go.ke/