by Guy Arnold
In November 1975 the civil war in Angola led to the closure of the Benguela Railway and this event forced Zambia to abandon its policy of only exporting its copper to the north; instead, it was obliged once more to export through Rhodesia and Mozambique. Another complication arose in March 1976 when the new FRELIMO government of independent Mozambique closed its borders with Rhodesia, forcing the illegal regime thereafter to use South African routes for all its exports and imports. However, Mozambique could not afford also to close Maputo to South African business. Although, under FRELIMO, Mozambique’s ideological inclination was to have as little as possible to do with its white minority neighbours, it too found itself greatly constrained by the politics of the region since a large proportion of its income had always been derived from the freight and port handling charges obtained from its inland neighbours, and especially South Africa, so that a total closure of its ports and railways to South Africa as well as Rhodesia would have precipitated an economic disaster. Under the Portuguese Mozambique had broken UN sanctions against Rhodesia by providing fake certificates of origin for exports of minerals such as chrome and Beira and Maputo had been Rhodesia’s main outlets while the bulk of its oil came in through Maputo. After the 1976 border closure all Rhodesia’s traffic had to pass through South Africa and the costs were higher. Mozambique, then, was an essential transit country for the white South as well as Zambia and Malawi.
THE BOTZAM ROAD
Prior to independence Botswana’s main transport route was the railway to the Cape. In any case, most of its trade and imported manufactures came from South Africa, although the 400-mile railway line that passed through the country from South Africa in the south to Rhodesia in the north-east did give Botswana an alternative white-ruled trading partner. Speaking in Denmark in 1970, Botswana’s President, Seretse Khama, described his country’s sense of isolation in a white-controlled world:
Our only common frontier with independent majority-ruled Africa is a narrow disputed one with our sister Republic of Zambia… And these states [the white-ruled ones] are not only our neighbours; for historical and geographical reasons, which are none of our choosing, we also trade with them. Our economies have long been closely interlinked and we depend on their transport systems for our outlets to the world. The main railway connecting South Africa and Rhodesia crosses Botswana and we rely on it not only for our trade with the outside world but for internal communications. It is wholly owned and operated by Rhodesia Railways.4
In the early 1970s, as confrontation became a permanent fact of regional politics, the possibility of an outlet to the north that was not under the control of South Africa or Rhodesia became increasingly attractive to Botswana. To create such an outlet meant upgrading an old route that had ‘been maintained by the Witwatersrand Labour Association for the transport of labour from Barotseland and Angola to the Rand Mines’,5 a fact that was overlooked by the Pretoria government when it argued that Botswana had no frontier with Zambia.
In the late 1960s the United States had made a loan to Botswana to construct the Francistown–Maun road upon which stands Nata, the turning-off point for Kazungula in Zambia, which was reached by a ferry crossing over the Zambezi. Up to 1969 US interest in Botswana had hardly been noticeable but was now to be increased by two factors: the Communist Chinese had agreed to construct the TANZAM Railway for Tanzania and Zambia and the United States wanted to build its own ‘freedom road’ in Africa; and President Nixon wished to demonstrate to black pressure groups in America that the United States was busy, on the right side, in Southern Africa. This conjunction of political circumstances led to the US offer to construct the BOTZAM road, which offered just what Washington required. When in 1969 the Americans were looking for a suitable aid project in Botswana, they had been presented with a list of 24 projects in order of priority and they chose number 17, the Nata to Kazungula road, which was to become known as the BOTZAM. This projected stretch of road would form the northern end of a 625-mile road beginning at Lobatse in the south: the Nata to Kazungula stretch was 180 miles long. In 1972 USAID signed an agreement to provide US$12.6 million for the BOTZAM, a gravel-surface road that would take 32 months to construct and was to include two spur roads at its northern extremity: one of 3.7 miles would connect the road to the Rhodesian border; the other, 40 miles in length, would pass along the south bank of the Chobe River to Ngoma where a bridge crossed the river to the South African base of Katima Mulilo in the Caprivi Strip. This stretch was designed to facilitate traffic from Rhodesia to Katima Mulilo and was included by the US as a sop to Pretoria, which had opposed the road. It was, in consequence, an embarrassment to Botswana whose US-built ‘freedom road’ would also assist the South Africans maintain their base at Katima Mulilo that, according to the United Nations, was illegally on Namibian soil and posed a direct threat to the independent states to the north. Zambia agreed to upgrade the ferry service across the Zambezi from Kazungula to Kasane and to establish facilities on the north bank to handle heavy traffic. The BOTZAM, from being low on the government’s list of priorities, had become the largest aid project in Botswana’s 1973–78 Development Plan.
Developments in neighbouring Rhodesia and South Africa’s increasing confrontation with the states to the north determined Botswana to break the Republic’s economic stranglehold upon the country. From the beginning the BOTZAM was a very political road; in purely economic terms it was never to be very important though its symbolism was crucial to Botswana’s desire for closer relations with independent black Africa to the north. During the 1970s the EEC became one of Botswana’s major aid donors and the assistance that had been committed by 1977 included a grant of US$10.5 million for work on a segment of the BOTZAM from Francistown to Nata. The Zambian connection, the ferry crossing to Kazungula, was the only geographical route that could release Botswana from the pervasive stranglehold that South Africa exerted upon the country, hence the strategic and psychological rather than economic importance of the road.
South Africa used bullying tactics in an attempt to persuade Botswana not to go ahead with the BOTZAM road but President Khama was not intimidated and Prime Minister Vorster backed down (see the Botswana section of Chapter 15 above). Vorster, who conveniently forgot that the road and ferry crossing had long been used as a route for labour from the north that had been recruited to work in South Africa’s mines, had argued that Botswana had no common frontier with Zambia. Not only did South Africa have no case; persistence in its opposition to the BOTZAM road would have drawn unwelcome attention to South Africa’s military presence in the Caprivi Strip, which the United Nations had pronounced illegal. The events of 1973 – the Smith government’s decision to close the Rhodesian border with Zambia, the escalation of the guerrilla war in Rhodesia, the Arab oil boycott of South Africa and the Saudi agreement to supply Botswana with oil provided it did not pass through South Africa – each gave point to the BOTZAM road which was then given greater priority by Botswana.
THE BENGUELA RAILWAY
Another highway that assumed great strategic significance in the mid-1970s was the Benguela Railway, which runs from west to east across the centre of Angola. The railway was constructed between 1903 and 1929 and stretches for 838 miles from Lobito on the Atlantic coast of Angola to the Shaba province of Zaïre. The Shaba province is the centre of Zaïre’s mineral deposits and mines; an extension of the railway southwards to the Zambian Copperbelt linked up with Zambian railways. In 1973, when Smith closed the Rhodesian border with Zambia and the TANZAM Railway was only half-completed, Zambia urgently needed an alternative route out for its copper and the Benguela Railway appeared to be the answer. At that time 40 per cent of the line’s traffic was transit freight from either Zaïre or Zambia and this accounted for 75 per cent of all freight revenues. The political confrontation across the Zambezi gave new life to the Benguela Railway, which had been under-utilized for many years because of the cheaper haulage rates offered for freight going south through Rhodesia and Mozambique to Bei
ra. However, UDI in 1965 led to congestion on the southern routes and, combined with the political confrontation that followed, this worked in favour of the Benguela route, which Zambia then began to use for part of its copper exports. The line assumed even greater significance for Zambia following Smith’s closure of the border at the beginning of 1973. Reflecting this change in its preferred exit routes, in January 1975 President Kaunda announced that a new line was to be constructed from the Copperbelt to Solwezi in the north-west of Zambia and thence, through new copper deposits at Lumwana, across the border into Angola to connect with the Benguela Railway at Luso and bypass Zaïre. As a consequence of these events and after an historically slow start, the Benguela Railway entered a new period of prosperity as it served the needs of landlocked Zambia. The prosperity was not to last.
Up to the 1973 border closure between Rhodesia and Zambia, the Benguela Railway was carrying about 15,000 tons of copper from Zambia every month and handling some 8,000 tons of Zambian imports. By May 1974 the tonnage of Zambian imports had climbed to 45,000 a month while its copper exports had risen to 35,000 tons a month with an additional 8,000 tons of lead and zinc exports. By 1975, the year the Portuguese quit Angola, Benguela Railways (owned by the British company Tanganyika Concessions – TANKS) had become the largest single private employer in the country with about 13,000 employees. At that time its steam locomotives were being replaced by diesel engines (the company had embarked upon a major programme of modernization in 1972). But even as the 1973–74 boom for the Benguela line was taking place, the Chinese were constructing Zambia’s alternative route to the sea, the TANZAM railway that would give Zambia direct access to the Indian Ocean at Dar es Salaam. The threat to the Benguela Railway posed by the coming of the TANZAM was noted in the TANKS company report for 1973–74: ‘The present traffic boom is due to circumstances beyond our control, and it will not be long before a new competing route is opened which will link Zambia to the port of Dar es Salaam.’ Meanwhile, TANKS had opened an office in Lusaka and used it to maintain direct contact with the Zambian government, and its directors regularly visited Zambia to confer with officials and ministers.
On the eve of Angola’s independence in 1975, it seemed possible that the Benguela Railway would act as a major engine of growth: it provided much-needed jobs while its workshops at Benguela and Nova Lisboa were bases for industrial development. Moreover, Zambia had obtained secret agreements with the Angolan liberation movements not to attack the railway. However, threats to the railway had developed in the last stages of the liberation war against the Portuguese and from August 1975, as the fighting escalated, the railway ceased to provide any services either for Zambia or Zaïre. Bridges were destroyed and for a time UNITA forces held the greater part of the line. On the coast, fighting round Lobito and Benguela see-sawed and the towns changed hands several times. Luso was threatened by anti-government forces and from Luso to the Shaba border trains had to be accompanied by armed guards who travelled in turreted armoured cars ahead of the train while no night travel was allowed on this stretch of line. Just as the strategic-economic importance of the railway had been established for Zambia things fell apart. The withdrawal of the Portuguese in November 1975 meant the use of its ports and railways was suspended. The main military forces of the MPLA were confined to the area round Luanda, the capital, and faced major attacks from the rival liberation movements, the FNLA and UNITA. Cuban forces were sent to support the MPLA government while the Soviet Union supplied technicians and arms. A column of mixed South African and Portuguese troops advanced up the coast from South Africa towards Luanda and newly independent Angola was in deep crisis. By the end of the first Angolan civil war, from independence in November 1975 to March 1976 – the South Africans withdrew from the country on 28 March – the railway was entirely in the hands of MPLA forces from Benguela to Teixeira de Sousa on the Zaïre border.
In May 1976 talks were held between President Agostinho Neto of Angola and President Mobutu of Zaïre to normalize relations between their two countries (Mobutu had backed the rival FNLA movement) and Zaïre traffic was again able to use the line. The Cubans, who by then were in the country in strength, provided engineers to repair damage to bridges and other installations that had been sabotaged. Zambia, whose President Kaunda had been deeply suspicious of Neto, now also recognized the MPLA government, which was anxious to get the railway operating again and earn transit charges from both Zaïre and Zambia. The respite for the railway was brief. In 1976 the TANZAM Railway was officially opened to give Zambia another much-needed outlet. Already, at the end of 1975, UNITA guerrillas were targeting the Benguela Railway in their escalating war against the MPLA government and the railway, despite accords with Zaïre and Zambia, was closed to use in 1976. It was reopened briefly in 1978 but then closed again and remained closed throughout the 1980s. Major plans for its rehabilitation and reopening were drawn up during the 1980s but clearly depended upon an end to the civil war and a political settlement between the MPLA government and the UNITA rebels and this would not, in fact, be achieved until the turn of the century.
THE TANZAM RAILWAY
The TANZAM Railway from Kapiri Mposhi in central Zambia to Dar es Salaam on the Indian Ocean coast of Tanzania was more than 1,100 miles long and was by far the largest and most spectacular Communist and Chinese aid project on the African continent at the time of its construction. According to Western estimates there were at one time as many as 18,000 Chinese working along the line of the TANZAM, which was completed in 1976. In 1978 running and technical difficulties occurred and had to be rectified but in view of the size of the project and the speed of its execution, these were hardly surprising. As the events of the 1970s revealed the extent to which Zambia was almost totally dependent upon exit routes to the south, so the strategic and economic implications of the line to Dar es Salaam became clearer.
Zambia’s dependence upon the southern system of transport routes after independence was principally due to the fact that up to 1924 the territory had been the ‘property’ of the British South Africa (BSA) Company. The BSA Company ruled Northern Rhodesia, controlled its mineral rights and the railway to the south. There was no alternative route through the Congo, neither could the Benguela Railway compete economically with the route to Beira. In both geographical and political terms, therefore, a railway from Zambia northeast to Dar es Salaam would break the established pattern. This, precisely, was why Western opposition to the TANZAM was so sustained. Britain especially, South Africa, Rhodesia and then the West more generally wanted the southern system to be sustained and for Zambia to remain part of that regional complex. The worst aspect of colonialism from an African continental point of view was the fact that each colony had been developed separately without any consideration of comparable developments in neighbouring territories. In terms of any links resulting from colonial times Tanzania and Zambia might as well have been on separate continents. Until the break-up of the Central African Federation at the end of 1963 and its independence in October 1964, Zambia was trapped, locked in by the Portuguese possessions of Angola and Mozambique on its western and eastern flanks and by Rhodesia to the south. Only after independence and spurred on by UDI in Rhodesia was Zambia free to explore alternatives.
The importance of the TANZAM has to be judged in terms of the traumatic events that affected Zambia between 1965 and 1967: as a result of UDI Zambia’s position was changed overnight as it found itself on the front line facing the white-dominated South; initially, Zambia was to suffer more from UN sanctions against Rhodesia, which it applied, than Rhodesia itself. Immediately, for example, as oil supplies that normally came from the south were terminated, Zambia had to rely upon a US/Canadian/British airlift of oil and then fuel brought in drums on trucks along the ‘Hell Run’ as the road from Tanzania was dubbed until the Dar es Salaam–Ndola oil pipeline had been constructed. Zambia’s main export, copper, experienced a three-month time lag from extraction in the Copperbelt to customer. Export sales w
ere then at the rate of between 50,000 and 60,000 tons a month. Following the closure of the Rhodesia border in January 1973, the Zambians believed that Britain and British companies were at least as anxious as the South Africans for Zambia to accept Smith’s offer of using the route south when in February he declared the border open again: both Rhodesia and South Africa wanted the freight dues from Zambian copper. A programme on Zambian Radio complained ‘the British want us to begin using the routes through the rebel colony. That is their advice to us. They can jump into the sea. In the past they have tried to lead us into economic and political ruin by advising us against vital projects such as the oil pipeline…’6
There was great bitterness in both Zambia and Tanzania at the Western refusal to assist in building the TANZAM. Both countries needed the railway for strategic and political survival but the West was more interested in promoting the survival of the white regimes in Southern Africa. On 26 October 1970, at an inauguration ceremony at Dar es Salaam, President Kaunda said: ‘Many things have been said against our railway which is perhaps one of the most opposed schemes in the world.’ Opposition, Kaunda continued, had come ‘from vested interests in white ruled Southern Africa and their supporters elsewhere in the world. Campaigning against the railway had been wide and intense. The railway would be uneconomic, it was argued. We refused to listen. The railway would be too expensive in relation to economic returns, we were advised. We rejected the advice. The railway would take too long to build, it was emphasized rather discouragingly. We ignored the warning. Above all, it was argued that Zambia did not need the railway after all as UDI with all its hardships to Zambia would end in a matter of months.’ Possible participants in the TANZAM were discouraged, Kaunda claimed, because the British government did not think the project was necessary and still saw Zambia and Tanzania as falling within the British sphere of influence. ‘Zambia was to remain dependent on the white-ruled south for the transportation of her exports and imports. We are to be subservient to white domination for as long as it was in the interests of Western governments regardless of our objectives and interests.’