The Lamu Port-Southern Sudan-Ethiopia Transport – or Lapsset – corridor is the flagship project of Kenya’s Vision 2030 development agenda. Inaugurated in 2012, the planned corridor includes a railway, highways and an oil pipeline connecting newly discovered oil fields in the north to a new port in Lamu, north of Mombasa.
Projects like this are often understood in the context of a new “infrastructure boom”, fundamental for “Africa’s future”. But infrastructure in Africa has a long history. As a contribution to the “long view” on infrastructure in Kenya, I recently compared the Lapsset corridor with the Uganda Railway, a colonial project completed in 1901. I focused on different and often competing visions and imagined futures.
