VIOLENCE OF EMPIRE: The Tragedy of the Congo-Ocean Railroad

The 320-mile railway between the Atlantic Ocean port of Pointe-Noir and Brazzaville in the Congo was built with forced local labour between 1921 and 1934 by the French company Batignolles when Equatorial Africa was still a French colony. The railroad had to traverse difficult terrain including the unstable Mayombe and the Bamba tunnel, and abuses and cruelty led to the deaths of an estimated 20,000 workers. The fact that this took place under the management of the French with their ideals of liberty is a theme of the book. The Europeans on the project perversely believed that malnutrition was part of the African way of life, and a belief in the superiority of the white races went without question, though this was not unchallenged at the time, as a contemporary cartoon shows in which the bodies of workers appear as railroad sleepers. For the railroad's defenders, the project was a measure of French expertise and benevolence, bringing new technology and infrastructure to west Africa. In fact, workers died from accidents and wounds, they were murdered at the hands of overseers, whose own brutalisation forms an interesting additional theme of the book, and they died of diseases such as dysentery and, very interestingly, what is now regarded as possibly an early manifestation of AIDS. Around twice as many Africans died on the Congo-Ocean railway as on the better-known atrocity of the Burma-Siam railway in World War II. African workers were conscripted at gunpoint, separated from their families. They hacked their way through dense tropical foliage, excavating by hand thousands of tonnes of earth in order to lay down track. They blasted their way through rock to construct tunnels and risked their lives building bridges over otherwise impassable rivers. Porters were needed to transport building materials and often two men were assigned to lugging a 200-pound load and other "crushing and unmanageable burdens". When a doctor tried to intervene on one occasion, he was callously told that the men were expendable. 368pp, eye opening photographic evidence in photos. Map.