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Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses “national interest” as the main value in national airlines. “Neo-liberal” dogma on profitability hide the affective social and political values of large-scale infrastructural enterprises and distort their functionality.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I discus “national interest” ––a concept that encompasses rational, strategic, economic, and emotional aspects of statecraft and national identity––as the main value in national (and imperial) airlines at the example of East African Airways Corporation (EAAC), a colonial federal airline that continued to serve the East African Federation after independence until 1977, and its main successor company Kenyan Airways (KQ). As for every national airline, for EEAC and KQ profitability was always made secondary to their role in national (and imperial) interests. Hence, like most national airlines, EEA and KQ ran unprofitably in most years. Their performance in serving national interests varied over time from a source of pride, to a source of skepticism and perceived state failure, visible in the troubles the airlines had to keep their planes in the air. I will argue that views of African national airlines as “dysfunctional”, “commercially unviable”, or “corrupt” reflect wider discourses on the states and nations they are part of, in line with “neo-liberal” discourses and dogmas on profitability as the prime motivation in services that should be left to the free market as states are by definition (by dogma) unfit to run commercial enterprises. These “neo-liberal” discourses on commercial profitability and private enterprise hide the affective social and political values of large-scale infrastructural enterprises and even distort their functionality. They should be offset, in African aviation history as elsewhere, against the immaterial and rationalized affective “national interest” as a main motor in national and colonial airlines.