Ninety-Nine Years, Then Thirty
Portugal granted the concession to build the Benguela railway on 28 November 1902 and wrote it to run for ninety-nine years. It expired to the day, into a country where the line had been cut for a quarter of a century — and the terms Angola wrote for the second concession, in 2022, are pointedly not the terms it inherited.
Lobito station is a low building at the root of a sand spit, and on Monday mornings there is a train in it. It leaves at seven, it is going 1,344 kilometres to Luau on the Congo border, and it takes about thirty hours to get there. A few hundred metres away, inside the same bay, gantry cranes work a mineral terminal handling copper and cobalt that were dug in another country. Both of those are the same railway. The argument about which of them it is for has been running for a hundred and twenty years.
On 28 November 1902 the Portuguese government granted a concession to build a line from Lobito to the Katanga copper fields, and wrote it to run for ninety-nine years. It ran the full term. It expired on 28 November 2001 — into a country in the twenty-seventh year of a civil war, where every kilometre beyond the coastal strip had been cut, mined or stripped, and where the state taking the railway back could not have run a train on it if it had wanted to. Angola signed the next concession twenty-one years later. It is a different document.
What the first concession bought
It went to Sir Robert Williams, a Scottish mining engineer whose company, Tanganyika Concessions, held an interest in Union Minière du Haut-Katanga at the far end of the proposed route. That is the design in one sentence: the railway and the mine were the same business, and Angola was the ground in between. Construction began at Lobito on 1 March 1903, built to Cape gauge — 1,067 mm, the southern African standard, chosen so the line would join the Congolese and Rhodesian networks rather than anything Portuguese. The rails reached the Congo frontier at Luau at the end of the 1920s and through traffic to the Katanga mines followed in 1931. For the next forty years the Benguela line was among the most profitable railways in Africa, and everything that made it profitable came out of somebody else's ground.
The line that stopped
Before 1975 the railway was the principal outlet for Katanga's copper and one of the main ones for Zambia's. Independence in November 1975, and the war that began with it, ended that inside a year. UNITA held the interior, the line stayed cut for the duration, and of 1,344 kilometres the 34 between Lobito and Benguela were about all that kept running. The consequences ran well past Angola's borders, and Zambia's timing was extraordinary. Having lost its southern outlets to the Rhodesian crisis, it had been building TAZARA since 1970 — an entire second railway to the Indian Ocean, 1,860 kilometres of it, financed and built by China — and the line opened to traffic in 1976, the year after this one went down. Zambia did not build TAZARA in answer to the Angolan war; it simply had the alternative finished at the moment the old route closed, which is more than Zaire could say. The war took twenty-seven years.
The concession ran its ninety-nine years and expired on schedule. What reverted to the Angolan state in November 2001 was a right of way, sixty ruined stations, and a war with a year still to go.
Rebuilding it, and who paid
Work restarted in 2006, with China Railway 20th Bureau Group as contractor and a bill of roughly US$1.83 billion, carried largely on Chinese credit. It took eight years. The rebuilt line was declared complete in August 2014 and formally handed over at Lobito in a ceremony in 2019. What Angola got was not the old railway put back: line speed went from something like 30 km/h to 90, stations were rebuilt along the whole length, and the Lobito–Luau run came down to about thirty hours. The Monday passenger express is the visible half of that spending. The freight the line was actually rebuilt for took another decade to show up.
The second concession, and what is different in it
In 2022 the Angolan government awarded a thirty-year concession over the corridor to Lobito Atlantic Railway — Trafigura and Mota-Engil holding 49.5 per cent each, with the Belgian rail operator Vecturis taking the remaining one per cent and running the trains. The concession transferred in 2023 and operations began in January 2024. Set it against 1902 and the differences look deliberate. Thirty years rather than ninety-nine. Freight only: passenger services stayed with the state operator, Caminho de Ferro de Benguela, which now runs them over the concessionaire's network under a track access agreement. And the infrastructure did not change hands — Angola kept the railway it had just spent 1.83 billion dollars rebuilding, and sold the right to run trains on it. That is a different transaction from the one Robert Williams was given.
What goes back up the line
The money behind it has moved again since. The US International Development Finance Corporation has committed a US$553 million loan to the consortium, with a further US$200 million from the Development Bank of Southern Africa and European backing through Global Gateway. The corridor is the flagship of the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment launched at the 2022 G7 summit, and Washington's interest in it is not really Angolan: it is that Congolese cobalt and copper currently leave the continent by routes China controls, TAZARA among them. So a line laid out by a Scot for Belgian copper, rebuilt by a Chinese state contractor and operated by a European consortium is now underwritten by an American development bank. Not one of those decisions was taken in Luanda.
The Angolan argument is a different argument, and it is about direction. Ore goes west, unprocessed, and Angola earns a transit fee on somebody else's minerals for the second century running. What would change that is what moves the other way: fertiliser and machinery up onto the Planalto, and Angolan grain, fruit and vegetables down to the port in wagons that presently go back empty. The European Union has put money into precisely those value chains, and the corridor's own operators talk about agricultural volume as the thing that makes the business survive a downturn in the mining cycle. Whether it happens gets decided in Huambo and Kuito rather than in Brussels. Huambo is worth holding onto here: the town exists because the railway needed a station there in 1912, it was renamed Nova Lisboa in 1928 when Portugal was considering moving its colonial capital to it, and it was largely destroyed in fifty-five days of fighting in 1993. This line made that town and then unmade it. It is on its third attempt.