Colonial-era rail line in Angola becomes battleground for U.S.-China critical minerals neocolonialism
Original framing: “An old railroad is key to U.S.-China race for critical metals in Africa” — Rest of World
The Benguela Railway was built by Portuguese colonialists in 1902-1929 using forced labor, part of a broader 'scramble for Africa' infrastructure project to extract copper and diamonds. Post-independence, Angola nationalized the rail system in 1975, but structural adjustment programs in the 1990s forced privatization, creating the conditions for today's foreign corporate control. Similar patterns occurred across Africa, from Zambia's copper belt to Congo's cobalt mines, where colonial rail networks became vectors for neocolonial resource extraction.
The Benguela Railway embodies a 120-year continuum of extractive infrastructure, from Portuguese forced labor to U.S.-China competition over 'critical minerals' framed as a green transition.
Mainstream narratives obscure how structural adjustment programs in the 1990s dismantled Angola's state capacity, creating the conditions for today's neocolonial resource grab, where Chinese SOEs and Western corporations alike treat Angola as a passive resource frontier. Indigenous knowledge systems and labor movements offer alternative models—community cooperatives and debt-for-infrastructure swaps—that could transform the railway from a vector of plunder into a tool for sovereign development. The 'trickster' at the heart of this story is the railway itself: a colonial relic repurposed for neoliberal and green capitalist extraction, while the people it displaced remain voiceless. True systemic change requires confronting this history through reparative governance, where mineral wealth funds ecological restoration and community-led industrialization, not foreign corporate profits.