| Rethinking China-Africa Relations during the Cold War: Military Modernization and the Tanzania-Zambia Railway Project |  Printable version
|
Date: 24 May 2012
Time: 15.30-17.00
Room: 1A27
Speaker: Prof. Jamie Monson, Humboldt University, Berlin
Discussant: Judith Zoetelief
You are kindly requested to register for this seminar.
Some 40,000 Chinese railway workers travelled to Eastern Africa
between 1968 and 1975 to help with the construction of the TAZARA
railway. They worked side by side with 60,000 African workers in machine
workshops and base camps, laying track through some of the most remote
and isolated areas of Tanzania and Zambia. This trans-national railway
line, stretching some 1865 km from the Indian Ocean to the Zambian
Copperbelt, was China’s largest global development intervention at the
time. Built in the midst of Pan-African solidarity as well as Cold War
rivalry, TAZARA became an enduring symbol of China’s friendship with
Africa.
The workers who participated in the project did so in the context of
competing Cold War modernization ideologies. China, the US and the
Soviet Union were all seeking to gain influence in Africa through
development practice. This ‘superpower standoff’ was not only
ideological but also military and strategic. This seminar will consider
the ways that everyday practices of industrialization and labour were
shaped by military-strategic concerns during the construction of the
TAZARA. Jamie Monson will argue that facts – and fears – of real war
during the Cold War in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to a specific
form of military modernization in China-Africa relations.
Jamie Monson’s research focuses on the relationship between China and
Africa during the Cold War. Her current project is a transnational study
of work on the TAZARA railway, China’s largest and most famous
development project in Africa. She is currently a research fellow at the
Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, where she is collaborating with
a Chinese filmmaker to document the life stories of African and Chinese
railway workers. Based at Macalester College in Minnesota, USA,
Professor Monson has published on the TAZARA Railway, the Maji Maji War
in Tanzania, and African environmental history.
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
