This is a book about colonial violence. J. P. Daughton tells the story of the Congo-Ocean Railway, the construction of which cost between 20,000 to 60,000 lives and left thousands more laborers undernourished, sick, and traumatized. The 500 km railway, connecting Brazzaville with the Atlantic port Pointe-Noire (both in present-day Republic of the Congo), first envisioned in the 1880s, was built between 1921 and 1934. Although officially relying on volunteers, the construction sites became known as exceptionally violent workplaces both in French Equatorial Africa and the imperial center, France. How is it possible then, Daughton asks, that despite the knowledge of horrendous working conditions, the project was carried out over thirteen years-and after the completion of the railway, the suffering and deaths of African laborers were completely forgotten about in France? Daughton sets out to bring justice to this neglected human suffering on the Congo-Ocean Railway and embeds his story of the railway in a larger history of French colonial violence in equatorial Africa.
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