ZAMBIA: The Great Railway Disaster

Five years have passed since Zambia joined the U.N. boycott against Rhodesia. During that time, Rhodesia has managed to survive quite well with the help of embargo-breaking Western countries and supplies from South Africa. Meanwhile, Zambia's economy has dwindled toward disaster. Landlocked, Zambia needed transit routes through Rhodesia to southern Africa's ports for its main export, copper. After the boycott closed the Rhodesian borders, scarce alternative routes disappeared, world copper prices declined, and Zambia began running short of food, machinery, oil fertilizer, soap and coal. Inflation ballooned to 30%, fueled partly by expensive airfreight shipments to speed goods, and foreign debt climbed to $1.5 billion.

According to Zambian planners, the economic failure should not have occurred. As it happened, the Chinese, eager for an African foothold, had already granted a $460 million interest-free loan to Zambia and neighboring Tanzania to finance a new 1,160-mile rail link running northeast from Zambia's copper mines to Tanzania's Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam. The project, built by 51,000 Chinese and African laborers, was first called the Great Uhuru (Swahili for freedom) Railway, renamed Tazara (for Tanzania-Zambia Railway) and was completed in 1976. Tazara should have provided Zambia with a new lifeline. Instead, it has become as useful as, well, Ian Smith. Last week TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief David Wood traveled the length of the Tazara to discover what had gone wrong. His report:

The twice-weekly passenger express left on schedule, gliding smoothly out of the airy Chinese-built station at 6:40 p.m. Picking up speed (to a jaunty 30 m.p.h.), the train, imported from China along with everything else that went into making the Tazara railway, headed southwest toward its Zambian terminus, which, according to the timetable, lay 36 hours away.

The equipment was only two years old and already showed signs of neglect. Toilets that the Chinese once scrubbed meticulously were now subjected to desultory and occasional swabbings by Tanzanian and Zambian workers. The dining car was clean but cramped and hot; its $2.50 menu, passengers joked, included only two choices: chicken and rice, and rice and chicken. In second and third class, travelers swayed together, jammed six or eight to a compartment.

An hour out of Dar, the commissary had already depleted its stock of warm beer and soft drinks. No one seemed to mind; passengers had brought their own cases of drinks, huge bundles of bananas, cashews, bread and other staples and, inevitably, transistor radios blaring the immensely popular Zaïre Rock, a rhythmic cacophony of drums and electric guitars.

The Tazara wound across virgin bush, its gleaming China-forged rails resting on immaculate beds of crushed stone. The 300 bridges, 19 tunnels, concrete retaining walls, culverts and sidings amounted to an awesome engineering feat. Even the hundreds of footpaths that crossed the tracks were neatly marked (in English) with big railway-crossing signs.