Well, Cecil John Rhodes’ vision is about to come to fruition! Sort of.
Rhodes, the quintessential settler imperialist long dreamed of a railway that would connect Africa from the Cape to Cairo. Doing so would serve his purposes of extracting resources and of connecting the various markets (and the various resources within those markets) across Africa. None of this was intended to serve Africans especially well, of course, but it would serve imperialists and their cause of commerce quite well while re-enforcing their political conceptions about Africa.
Various iterations of the Cape-to-Cairo dream have continued to linger. The latest version of these would “bring more than half a billion consumers from Cape Town to Cairo into a single free trade zone.”
Critics will, of course, complain about the neo-liberal nature of this vision (“neo-liberal” is a very popular critique in part because it is vague enough to mean whatever its user wants it to mean and thus serves as a nice bogeyman in lieu of actual analysis) and certainly this conception of linking Egypt and South Africa with all points in between is about commerce and trade and thus will benefit some more than others, a tiny minority more than the vast masses. But commerce and trade are good and necessary things in the right contexts even if their benefits are distributed unequally and if these linkages are made by and for Africans it will represent another example of how the continent can work for its own development while blocking the designs of the (wait for it . . . ) neo-liberal neo-imperialists of the West. In some ways, then, the newest Cape-to-Cairo vision represents a nicely ironic inversion of Rhodes’ dream.
