In the shadow of the railway

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Eric Marante had always been a fighter. Age 21, he found himself with a squad stationed on a bridge in Iraq. On the morning of April 21st, 2007, a truck packed with 3 ,000 pounds of explosives was detonated just a few feet below them. This is a story about a man who turned pain into purpose. Therapy for me is being in the boxing ring. It's just good for your soul, good for your body. This is season four of Legacy. Defiant. Search Defiant Legacy wherever you get your podcasts.

0:46This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Marcia Vega.

0:59My mother and I would leave home at 5am to catch the train By around 8 or 9 the sun would be up And we would walk a 2-3 hour journey on foot Carrying heavy loads on our head under the scorching sun Aboard at 8.30am from Luena to Lubito Mawesh Kakumba, a long-serving train inspector on Angola's Benguela Railway, is telling me about his life. The diesel locomotive growls ahead, pulling nine carriages, as the train winds through open plains dotted with reed hearts, tin homes and roadside stalls. We're heading west, through the country's interior, on a 700-kilometre journey towards the Atlantic coast.

1:46I was born in 1973. My mother raised five children on her own. This was a time in Angola when hunger was everywhere. She survived only by selling fish. When he was a child, this railway was his family's lifeline. At the time, there was minimal transportation, so the train was hugely important when I was growing up. Kakomba and his mother would travel on the train each day to sell fish. Once at the market, my mother and I would do our business there. I remember the paths of fish, carapau, sardines, corvina, pufferfish. Each had its own smell. That was life. Long before the line was built, this was a slave route, a corridor where humans would be led to the port bound for lives of labour in Brazil.

2:46In the mornings, waiting for customers to buy fish, we lived between faith and hope. When hope failed, we still had enough faith to face the next day and keep going. From the 16th century, Portugal established colonial rule in Angola. In the early 20th century, the Portuguese granted a British businessman the contract to build this railroad. Its purpose was to transport copper from deep within Africa's mineral-rich interior to the coast for export to Europe. It also carried passengers, though that was secondary. In 1975, four centuries after the Portuguese founded the capital, Luanda, Angola won independence.

3:32The railway was the country's biggest employer and a symbol of national pride. It was the artery through which the nation's commerce flowed. We would work until the end of the day. Often the sun had gone down, but we kept hoping a customer would come, so he could sell a little fish. Then we would walk three or four kilometres back to the station and take the train home. It's a memory that still brings tears to my eyes, but it taught me a lot. It made me a man.

4:16Gugumba's nostalgic for his childhood because in the same year that Angola gained independence, his country was torn apart by civil war. When the Portuguese next week abandon the last of their African possessions, the real war in Angola will only have begun. These young soldiers are eagerly turning the weapons they've used to fight for their independence on each other. More than half a million Angolans died. And, like much of the country's infrastructure, this railway was decimated. Once peace returned in 2002, repairing the railway was a priority, but how to fund it? Salvation seemed at hand when China agreed to rebuild the line in return for Angolan oil, but a lack of regular services meant it wasn't used much and the country was burdened with debt.

5:07Fast forward to 2023 and there's a new hope. The US-led project promises billions of dollars of investment in Angola's Lobby Corridor, along which the Benghela Railway runs. The aim, they say, is to build a quick and reliable supply chain to export minerals from neighbouring Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. These minerals are then shipped to the West, where they'll power the batteries and our gadgets. But what's in it for Angola? The investors promise huge economic benefits for ordinary Angolans. But will it deliver, or is history repeating itself? Foreign powers extracting Africa's resources for their own gain.

5:46I'm Marcia Vega, and I've come back to Angola, my home country, to answer that question. And I'm taking the train from Luena to the port of Luido, tracing the path of those exact minerals to find out how the new Lobito Corridor project is changing the lives of ordinary Angolans.

6:05So I've hopped off the train. On the platform where I'm stood right now, if you can probably hear, there is so much happening. I've seen people selling guava. I can see people selling plantain as well as bananas. They're carrying it on their heads. They're carrying it on their sides. There's loads of young women. I can see loads of passengers as well they've got their heads out of the window and they're interacting with the sellers and again it kind of feels like a rush for survival and I can see huge avocados she's got a whole bucket full of like 20 avocados she's got really small ones that are a lot smaller than my hand and then she's got really big ones that are probably the size of like a human head a baby human head This is the first of many stops on our journey.

6:58Also taking the train is Fernanda, a young woman with a braided ponytail, dragging three enormous sacks of goods. She flashes me a lovely welcoming smile, so I ask to speak to her somewhere quieter. When I leave Wambo province, I bring these big sacks of broccoli, potatoes and carrots with me. When I return from Moxico province to Uambo, I take sweets, honey and corn. This railway is still so important because outside major cities, Angola's roads are notoriously bad and air travel is too expensive for most. A plane ticket from our starting point Luena to the coast costs$100 to$200, whereas my train cabin costs roughly$20.

7:45The train is more than just a means of transport. it's my livelihood. If I can't get the train or I can't take my goods on the train it's a disaster because I can't make any money. After their arrival in the 2000s the Chinese built all sorts of infrastructure including repairing the railway but their work has been criticised for being unreliable, poorly built and the line suffered frequent derailments. Improving the trains would be a huge benefit because at the moment the train only leaves once a week on Mondays, which isn't ideal. It would be better if he left on Monday and Friday, at least. As well as securing the route for minerals to the coast, the new Lobito project promises an expansion of the passenger train service, with more regular and safer trains.

8:31But the project is barely a year old, so the railway is still a work in progress. Because the trains are so infrequent, and there's so much demand from passengers, we don't always get tickets. And And even when we do, sometimes there's not enough space to load our goods. Whenever that happens, it's a huge loss for our traders. And all the goods can spoil by the time there's another train. There are so many people trying to squeeze on the train and it gets really hot in there. Sometimes people faint because of the heat. In November and December, the crush is really awful. People can't move. They can't use the toilets.

9:09And with all the goods packed in two, it becomes really difficult. People have died inside the train. But wouldn't it be possible to have more departures each day so we could be safer?

9:28All right, so the train's on the move. And I'm just popping my head out the window safely to have a little look at what I can see. and I can see a market, a makeshift market, that's been made by containers that have been broken down. Right next to me, within the train, is a man cutting up his cucumber. He's eating and enjoying and also peering his head out the window. I squeeze past other passengers through the tight corridors on my way to my cabin. The train, it kind of looks like the one that you'd see in Harry Potter, but it's a little bit less glam. There are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine carriages.

10:11They differ in colour, but primarily it's red, yellow and black. And that's the colours of the Angolan flag. I can see the bathroom to my right. And what stands out the most is that I can smell it before I can even open it up. So I know I'm by the bathroom. And he's saying rain, rain, rain, which now means come back, come back, come back. So I'm going to scoot over to my room. And now I found my room. I'm just going to slide the door open. In my cabin, there are two firm bunk beds attached to the wall. I flip the top one down, turning it into a sofa. The place is clean and comfortable, with plastic walls painted to look like wood, a small table squeezed in one corner, and a slightly cracked window through which I take in the landscape outside.

10:54It feels modern. But, yeah, and I can hear outside. I believe it to be a rooster. Yeah, it might be a rooster. Yeah, it's a rooster. It's a rooster for sure. He's taking the rooster. I actually might try and follow him with this rooster. It didn't have a cage or anything. The rooster's just been held by its neck. Maybe that's why it's crying for help. Once the rooster calms down, I settle down on my sofa bunk. My conversations with Kukumba and Fernanda have shown me how important the railway is and the challenges it's had to overcome through Angola's recent history. but with American money flowing in for a year now, I want to find out who's really benefiting.

11:38I'm Marcia Vega and this is the documentary from the BBC World Service.

11:46Eric Marante had always been a fighter. Age 21, he found himself with a squad stationed on a bridge in Iraq. On the morning of April 21st, 2007, a truck packed with 3 ,000 pounds of explosives was detonated just a few feet below them. This is a story about a man who turned pain into purpose. Therapy for me is being in the boxing ring. It's just good for your soul, good for your body. This is season four of Legacy. Defiant. Search Defiant Legacy wherever you get your podcasts.

12:29As the day draws on, I get used to the rhythm of the railway. Every stop is a frenzy as the train absorbs a new wave of passengers, goods and live animals.

12:44The restaurant carriage next to ours gets louder and louder as the alcohol begins to flow.

12:52eventually around 5am the music finally calms down and at long last i feel myself drifting off to sleep your joke it's that rooster from earlier and it's in the carriage next to me it won't shut up

13:17I'm travelling on Angola's Bengala Railway to find out if a huge US-led investment in the country's L 'Orbitol Corridor is going to benefit ordinary Angolans. Eventually, I manage a couple of hours sleep. Bleary-eyed, I greet Gugumba, the train inspector I spoke to earlier, and we're about 600 kilometres into our journey. Over coffee, he describes the first time he heard about the new L 'Orbitol Corridor project. My expectation was very high. America is a country of opportunities. It is a serious country, a country of great responsibility. But we need more from the U.S. than just infrastructure.

13:58We need ordinary Angolans to truly benefit from this economic partnership. This is a beacon of hope. We must ensure that it doesn't take another 30 or 40 years before Angolans can genuinely feel the benefits of it. As I look out the window, I notice much of the vegetation has been burned by farmers to clear the land. Agriculture is the country's most common vocation, so any project claiming to boost the economy must surely help farmers. 15 years ago, when I went to Angola, So I'd be at a dinner, you know, Friday night and people go, yeah, the casual small talk. So what is it that you do? I said, I'm a farmer.

14:36And people almost moved away from me. Oh, my God, you know, what's this guy doing? Chris Masters is an Angolan-British farmer. He owns an avocado farm in Huamble, one of the provinces the railway passes through. And he also chaired the UK Angola Chamber of Commerce. He was made aware of Angola's agricultural potential over a decade ago through a chance encounter at one of those dinner parties. I finally sat down with the right person. That person tells me, well, Chris, what Angola highlands, what that region offers in terms of altitude, climate, space and water, all four at that level of quality currently exist nowhere else on the planet.

15:18So when I hear this, I'm like, OK, so we're talking about creating a world class industry. We're talking about creating a world class cluster that got my attention. The Lobito project promises big things for agriculture, including a quicker route to market for local farmers.

15:58Lobito Corridor is the Kaala logistics platform that is being built in Wanbo. The Kaala logistics platform Chris mentioned is under construction. A digital representation of what it will look like resembles a small airport with its own train stop. So agricultural produce can be loaded and unloaded with minimal friction. So we're talking about a state-of-the-art, as good as it gets, agri-logistics platform for the proper handling and shipment of agricultural products. So packing house, cold storage, phytosanitary certifications on the spot, cold refrigerated container, the whole lot. So this will become a major hub for exporting quality fruit and other agri-produce.

16:46That sounds all well and good for big farms like Chris's, But does that help smallhold farmers who make up the majority of Angola's agricultural workforce? The social inclusion is absolutely fundamental. A big part of the problem is that, you know, they're in the middle of nowhere. They don't have the know-how and they don't have the market access. So this is, you know, where a farm like mine comes in. And we're not the only ones. We end up acting as anchor farms, right, where we develop not only our business, but then we end up being agents to pass on the knowledge to smallholders around us to produce the kind of products that we also want, where we buy off them to then resell.

17:25And all of these with fair prices. Otherwise, it's not sustainable, right? It's not just about extracting all the wealth out of Africa, because really Africa is not looking upon that favourably anymore. Chris wants to temper people's excitement, though. Agriculture, he reminds me, requires patience above all else. But he believes the project signals a bright future. I really do think that Angola has been a country that was very close for many years. It was war, it was a lot of tribulation. But at least within the circles of agribusiness and as a source of quality fruits and other agricultural products, it will most likely in years to come become a household name.

18:06You'll see a lot more about Angola. That much I can guarantee. So the Lwito project promises great things for those living near the railway, but that's just a small slice of a huge country more than five times the size of the UK. What about Angolans dispersed around the nation's vast provinces? Back in July, over 30 people were killed when taxi drivers went on strike because of the rising of fuel costs, and they wanted to increase the prices for transporting the people. And that had to do with the fact that there is no public transportation system working in the country. So private taxi drivers basically make the bulk of the transportation system.

18:56And now we're talking about a huge regional investment for transportation of minerals. Rafael Mahkej is an Angolan journalist and activist who heads the anti-corruption watchdog Maka Angola. His reporting helped bring down Isabel dos Santos, daughter of Angola's former president and once regarded as Africa's richest woman. Rafael's kind, bespectacled face transforms into a piercing glare when we begin talking politics. He's wary about the project. If you look at the Angolan railway system, It doesn't connect regions besides having the railways connecting to the harbors. For exports, you don't have a railway system that connects north, south, east.

19:42They're very separate. So when you look at the Lobito Corridor project, it's not about the development of the country. Is there any project to divert the Lobito Corridor to other areas of the country? I don't think so. So then how is it going to link up with other communities? If it was for the benefit of the people, they would have done something basic, provide public transportation for the people, because it's all about minerals, and we cannot continue to be an extractive country. Either we're robbed by the Chinese or we're robbed by the West. Rafael warns that Angola's abundant natural resources have long made it a target for corrupt individuals.

20:26Some of these people, they do not want the common good of Angolans because all they do is to plunder the country and siphon the resources away and that continues to this day. The man in charge of the Lobito Corridor project from the Angolan government's perspective is Transport Minister Ricardo Dabreu. When standing for election, his administration put fighting corruption centre stage. I ask him how the Lubito project will help ordinary Angolans. We are talking about 1 ,300 kilometres of railway. The Lubito railway crosses five provinces of Angola. So it's a very long extension of rail and communities.

21:12We are reducing time from having the critical minerals from the copper belt. Through Lubito it takes seven days. And if we go to other regions, it takes 30, 40, 60 days. We are reducing in seven days. This is very important for economic growth and development. But there's always the indirect impact through the other businesses, agribusiness, processing industries, tourism, which is currently also a very important part of the Lubito corridor. We've been receiving trains coming from Daresh Salaam or even from Cape Town. We are also developing the logistic platform of Kahala exactly to integrate our agri capacity on that region.

22:02Flagship project is the avocado cluster. So it's a very important project that is currently being promoted in Lobito corridor. We also, in terms of social responsibility, established a trained clinic that is being today operating along the line, taking medical care to the communities along the line. We are no longer talking about an infrastructure corridor. We want to turn this corridor into a corridor that actually enables the creation of opportunities and with that we will be able to generate more investment, more jobs, more re-qualified professionals along the corridor. I return to the train inspector, Kokumba, to ask how he feels about it on a personal level.

22:55Satisfied. Satisfied, happy. The project is already employing a lot of Angolan labour. I get much more work now, far more. And the position I hold comes with greater responsibility. As we draw closer to our final destination, we pass destroyed bridges, relics of Angola's civil war and a reminder of how much infrastructure the country still has to rebuild. I asked Okumba if he thinks the Lobito project will improve on previous foreign interventions in Angola. The project has already brought President Joe Biden to the region. Um, I don't know. My experience tells me that there's greater seriousness now.

23:37For instance, we've seen the former US president visit Angola to inspect the Lobito corridor. To me, that shows the level of importance placed on this new contract with the US. That is the difference. it's still early for us to, how can I put it, to be firm in this expectation. But the truth is that the Lubiru Corridor is already a reality, because the transportation of minerals from Congo to Europe and America is happening as we speak. And on top of that, the children need to study. They need medical care and treatment, a more humane kind of support. Improving the supply of these goods to these communities is essential when it comes to improving people's quality of life.

24:27That's why the railway is so important.

24:34I love your family!

24:40Okay, I can ask you why you are singing with joy. Because I came to my province. So I asked her, you know, why are you screaming with happiness? And she said, because I've arrived in my province. Oh, and how long has happened? One. Okay. Now I'm in trouble. It makes so much sense. She said that this is where she's from, this is her province, but she moved to... But then she went to Luena, where we started this journey, and she'd been there for one year for work. So the reason why she's screaming of joy and happiness is because she's making her return back home. Who's waiting for you back at home?