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Concept
Cape to Cairo Railway
Summary
The Cape to Cairo Railway was an unfinished project to create a railway line crossing Africa from south to north. It would have been the largest and most important railway of that continent. It was planned as a link between Cape Town in South Africa and Port Said in Egypt.
The project was never completed. Important parts which were completed have been inoperative for many years, due to wars and lack of maintenance by the former colonies.
This plan was initiated at the end of the 19th century, during the time of Western colonial rule, largely based on the vision of Cecil Rhodes, in an attempt to connect adjacent African possessions of the British Empire through a continuous railway line from Cape Town, South Africa to Cairo, Egypt.
The original proposal for a Cape to Cairo railway was made in 1874 by Edwin Arnold, then the editor of The Daily Telegraph, which was joint sponsor of the expedition by H.M. Stanley to Africa to discover the course of the Congo River. The proposed route involved a mixture of railway and river transport between Elizabethville in the Belgian Congo (now Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Sennar in the Sudan rather than a completely rail one.
Imperialist and entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes was instrumental in securing the southern states of the continent for the British Empire and envisioned a continuous "red line" of British dominions from north to south. A railway would be a critical element in this scheme to unify the possessions, facilitate governance, enable the military to move quickly to hot spots or conduct war, help settlement and enable intra- and extra-continental goods trade. The construction of this project presented a major technological challenge.
France had a somewhat rival strategy in the late 1890s to link its western and eastern African colonies, namely Senegal to Djibouti. Southern Sudan and Ethiopia were in the way, but France sent expeditions in 1897 to establish a protectorate in southern Sudan and to find a route across Ethiopia.
Official source
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