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Paper short abstract:

With a focus on some of the large- and small-scale colonial railway projects in colonial West Africa as associated with peanut monocrop transportation – we will scrutinize the active role of these projects in the region's settlement planning and design intertwining primary visual evidence.

Paper long abstract:

The lecture will focus on some of the large-scale and small-scale colonial railway projects in French and British West Africa as associated with peanut monocrop production and transportation. Rather that embracing mainstream perspectives in the study of colonial railways – such as technical operative issues, economic history terrains of storage and seaport exportation, or North-South colonialist extraction and exploitation – the lecture will scrutinize the active role of this infrastructure in the region's settlement planning and design. Bringing into the fore the societal-cum-morphogenetic aspects of colonial town planning as directly related to these large- and small-scale railway projects in West Africa from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth, will enrich our understanding of the variety of trajectories of such infrastructure (whether planned or unexpected). The analysis will dwell on the ethno-cultural dimensions as were created and recreated by colonial segregationist urban-planning politics in association with railway layouts. Close attention with be assigned to indigenous, expatriate and repatriate populations and forms of habitation, and to variegated indigenous expressions with regard to these layouts. An emphasis will be put on the grandest projects of Dakar–Saint-Louis/Niger lines (1885/1924); Lagos– Ibadan/Kano lines (1901/1914); and the Lagos Steam Tramway (1902). Instrumental for the analysis are visual data collected from multilateral colonial archives in the UK, France, Senegal and Nigeria; and from the author's recent fieldwork in Senegal along the lines of this infrastructure and its offsprings.