Infrastructure between Statehood and Selfhood: The Trans-African Highway

摘要

In his 1977 novel Petals of Blood, the Kenyan novelist NgugT wa Thiong'o condemns the continued exploitation of Kenya's people and the expropriation of their land after independence from British rule in 1964 (Figure 1).~1 NgugT describes the hypocrisy of many elites and institutions, but the novel's grandest manifestation of capitalist-driven injustice and dispossession is the construction of a massive transcontinental highway, the "Trans-Africa Road." NgugT begins by acknowledging, even celebrating, the project as one of Africa's great feats of engineering: an infrastructural network that will connect Kenya's villages and cities with all of Africa's newly independent nations.~2 But once it becomes tarmac, the project transforms places into waypoints, ultimately destroying people's connections to one another and to the land. Symbolically and literally, "the Trans-Africa Road cleaved Ilmorog [the town at the center of NgugT's novel] into two halves"—those of the very rich and the very poor.~3 This infrastructure, meant to connect Africans to one another, ends up alienating them instead. This is the tragedy of African decolonization: people struggled for control over their bodies, minds, and land only to be betrayed by a new ruling elite working in collusion with international capital. In NgugT's critique, infrastructure is the means by which the Kenyan state becomes neocolonial.