Paper short abstract:

How can travel writing cast new light on the production of colonial regimes based on the premises of landscape as a source of energy, against the backdrop of transnational commodity frontiers? I propose to read M. Burr's travelogue in Angola in order to highlight dynamics related to these vectors.

Paper long abstract:

August 21, 1907. In the New York Tribune, an article announced the recent findings of copper and gold deposits in the Katanga region of the Congo State, stressing the existence of a railroad from Lobito Bay to the Bié Plateau in Angola (Caminho-de-Ferro de Benguela), and urging the completion of the trajectory up to the Congo border. The last section of the Benguela-Katanga railroad would open in 1929, connecting the Belgian Congo to the port of Lobito, from which, after WWII, most of the shipments destined to the ore-handling facilities in Baltimore would be dispatched. According to Paul Virilio, the compulsion to accelerate that defined the history of railroad gave rise to a politics of time, regulating, in turn, a logistics of speed, or dromology, that instituted dynamic forms of occupation and delocalization. The travelogue A Fossicker in Angola (London, 1933) by Malcolm Burr, covers the search for fossil fuel to supply the Benguela Railway. In this paper, I focus on Burr's narrative to unravel the motifs of speed and violence in the industry of movement created by transnational configurations of power in Angola during the early decades of the 20th century, and how the logistics of speed is challenged and disrupted by the indigenous worker's bonds of kinship.