| This research investigates Chinese aid relationship with Africa mirrored in the Tazara railway aid project in Tanzania, with the view to analyzing its motivations and its impact on the lives of the people of Tanzania. Issues that border on Sino-African relations are no doubt gaining increased currency both in the academic and official discourses. One of the dominant factors in this over-debated China-Africa dealings is aid which flows exclusively from China to Africa. China's rapid economic growth has noticeably been accompanied with impressive roles in Africa manifesting in forms of aid, aid projects, and other forms of economic assistance. This aid-giving has concomitantly been assailed with accusations. China's intentions and practice of giving aid to Africa have been questioned especially by the West, who posit that the Chinese modus-operandi undermine their efforts at encouraging reforms and bringing about genuine economic development and stability in Africa. This work therefore, historicizes China's aid to Africa within the broad framework of China-African relations, and explores its impact on Africa.From the colonial period onward, successive regimes in East Africa imagined a southern railway that would link the Indian Ocean with the regions to the west beyond Lake Nyasa. Railway visions in colonial East Africa were connected to territorial rivalries and pan-territorial ambitions, whether these involved the German aspiration to span Mittelafrika or the British desire to create an Imperial Link between the settler colonies. At the time of independence, presidents Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda dreamed of a pan-territorial project that would end the "balkanization" of colonial spheres of influence while liberating the landlocked states of central Africa from their dependency upon routes through their stillcolonized neighbors to the south. Each of these railway visions was constructed in a specific historical moment, reflecting the pressing political and economic issues of its time, The Imperial Link would have connected white settler interests in the southeastern African region; the post-colonial Freedom Railway sought to unravel them. Yet there was also continuity in these successive imaginings of a southern railway—not only in the mapping of the route itself, but also in the larger material and symbolic meanings that the southern railway held for states, subjects, and citizens. Railway visions carried with them visions of development, visions that in the colonial period pitted Railway visions carried with them visions of development, visions that in the colonial period pitted white settler interests against the interests of those who sought to profit from an African peasant model of production. Thus the surveying and planning process in colonial railway development was contested by the individuals and interest groups who stood to benefit or to lose from the plan's ultimate implementation. While individual and collective stakeholders lobbied for their own interests, railways in the colonial and the post-colonial period remained projects of the state. As large-scale infrastructure investments, railways were material and symbolic expressions of state power:they held the potential to control the movements of people and goods, the locations of production and consumption, and the extraction of resources and labor. The southern railway that was finally built in the 1960s and '70s could be viewed in this way as a classic model of a state-driven, large-scale infrastructure project. It came on the heels of other large-scale interventions in East African development, including the Groundnut Scheme and other projects of rural modernization that were instituted in Tanzania during the post-World WarⅡperiod. As TAZARA's construction was completed, the railway stations on the Tanzanian side were incorporated into Julius Nyerere's vision of ujamaa villagization, a state-led rural resettlement project that had its predecessors in the colonial sleeping sickness campaigns of the 1940s and the agricultural resettlement schemes of the 1960s. TAZARA was built during the Cold War, when development visions were shaped by global rivalries; these rivalries played a pivotal role in the TAZARA project. They were part of the reason that TAZARA was dismissed by its critics as an ideological project (which it was in part), driven more by third world solidarities and pan-African aspirations than by economic common sense. In this global context, the Chinese had articulated their own vision of development assistance in Africa through the Eight Principles of Development Assistance introduced during Zhou Enlai's tour of Africa in 1963-64. These principles reflected China's efforts to distinguish its approach to African development from those of the United States and the Soviet Union. Several of these principles had direct application to the TAZARA project, in particular the provision of an interest free loan with a generous repayment schedule, the effort to promote self-reliance rather than dependency, the transfer of technical skills, and the expectation that Chinese technicians would have the same living standards as the African workers, without special amenities. These Chinese principles, together with Tanzanian and Zambian development ideals, became part of the state vision of railway development that shaped the TAZARA project. Stemming from this research and its findings, the theses are that contrary to the claim of the West, China is not opportunistic. China is not imperialistic, and does not harbour colonial tendencies for Africa. China's aid relationship with Africa is developing and not destructive. The research work is organized into four chapters. Chapter one gives clear and elucidating background knowledge to the study, states the problematic, and the aims of the research. Chapter two delves into situating Sino-Tanzanian relations, and the China-Africa aid interactions into a proper historical context. Chapter three offers an analysis and a scholarly retrospective introspection into the TAZARA aid project. Chapter four is the conclusion. |
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