This narrative is based on interviews conducted by Lobito Corridor field researchers. Names and identifying details have been changed. The account is preserved on our source evidence archive.
I am 67 years old. I started working on the Benguela Railway in 1978, three years after independence. I was trained as a locomotive driver by the old Portuguese engineers who stayed on after independence. For four years, I drove trains between Lobito and Huambo.
Then the war came to the railway. UNITA started mining the tracks, ambushing trains, blowing up bridges. By 1983, we could not go past Kuito. By 1985, we could barely leave Lobito. I remember the last run I made — we hit a mine near Catumbela. The locomotive derailed but did not explode. Three wagons behind me were destroyed. Two railway workers were killed. I was pulled from the wreckage with broken ribs and a gash across my face. The scar is still there.
For twenty years after that, I did what I could. I worked at the port loading ships. I drove a taxi. I sold telephone credit. The railway sat there, rusting, disappearing under vegetation. Sometimes I walked along the old tracks and remembered what it was like when the trains ran — the whistle echoing off the hills, the villages coming alive when the train approached, the feeling of connecting a country that was falling apart.
The Chinese came in 2006 to rebuild. I was too old to drive the new locomotives — they are diesel-electric, computer-controlled, nothing like the old machines. But I worked as a supervisor during the rehabilitation, showing the construction crews where the old track bed was, where the bridges had been, where the gradients required special attention. I knew this railway by feel.
Now the new consortium is running the trains. Young drivers, trained on modern equipment. They do not know what it was to drive through a war. They do not know the fear of approaching a bridge that might be mined. I am glad they do not know. But I want them to understand that this railway was built with suffering — the suffering of the workers who built it in colonial times, the suffering of the families who died in the war that destroyed it, and the suffering of the communities who lived without it for thirty years.
When I hear the train whistle now, I cry. Not from sadness. From something I cannot quite name. The railway is alive again. Angola is connected again. I hope this time it lasts. I hope the young drivers know what they carry — not just copper and cobalt, but the hopes of communities who have waited decades for the trains to return.
What the Railway Means
People who have never ridden a train cannot understand what it means to a community when the train runs. A train is not just transport. It is connection. It is possibility. When the Benguela train ran, a young person in Kuito could dream of going to Lobito to see the ocean. A farmer in Huambo could send produce to markets in the interior. A family separated by war could reunite. The train made Angola feel like one country rather than a collection of isolated towns.
When the train stopped, Angola shrank. Towns that had been connected became islands. Markets that had been supplied became empty. People who had been mobile became trapped. The psychological impact was as severe as the economic impact — the feeling of being cut off, of being forgotten, of watching the world move forward while your town stood still. Twenty-seven years of no train. An entire generation grew up without the possibility of travel that their parents took for granted.
Now the train runs again, but it is not the same train. The new railway moves minerals, not people. The schedules serve the mines, not the communities. Freight volumes are published proudly in investor reports; passenger numbers are not mentioned because they are not the point. The railway has been resurrected as an export pipeline, not as the community lifeline it once was. I am glad the tracks are repaired. I am glad the bridges are rebuilt. But I mourn the railway that served the people, and I fear that the corridor's vision of success does not include the grandmother in Kuito who wants to visit her grandchildren in Lobito.
More Voices
Three Railways
I have driven trains on three different railways, all on the same track. The first railway was the Portuguese one, the one my father worked on. That railway was strict, disciplined, always on time. The Portuguese were hard men, but the trains ran. I started as a fireman on a steam locomotive when I was sixteen, shovelling coal into the firebox while my father drove. The whistle of that locomotive — I can still hear it. It announced the train's arrival like a king's herald. People came to the stations to watch us pass, and children waved, and we waved back.
The second railway was the war. UNITA mined the tracks. The government retreated. The locomotives sat in Lobito yards, rusting. For twenty-seven years, I was a train driver with no train. I repaired motorcycles. I sold charcoal. I did whatever work a man with no trade except railways could find. Some nights I dreamed of driving, the rhythm of the wheels on joints, the landscape unrolling like a green carpet, and I woke up in a city that had no functioning trains.
The third railway is this one — the Chinese rebuilt it, and now the Europeans operate it. The locomotives are diesel, not steam. The signals are electronic, not mechanical. The track is welded, not jointed. Everything is different except the landscape and the people who live beside the line. I am too old now to drive the new locomotives — the computers confuse me, and my eyes are not what they were. But they gave me a job in the yard at Lobito, organising shunting movements, because I know every curve and gradient from Lobito to Luau by memory.
What I want for this railway is what my father wanted: that it serves the people who live along it, not just the minerals that move through it. A train that carries copper but not passengers is not a railway — it is a conveyor belt. The Portuguese ran passenger trains every day. If the new operators cannot do the same, they have not rehabilitated the railway; they have replaced it with something lesser.
Names changed for protection. Interview preserved with source verification.