https://furtherafrica.com/2025/11/17/lobito-corridor-a-magnet-for-investment-and-geopolitical-interest/
Edited by Madelyn Bello, Rishi Chandra, Amelia Cantwell, and Owen Andrews
By August of 1913, Sir Robert Williams was in desperate need of cash. As the managing director of Tanganyika Concessions, Williams was spearheading the construction of the Benguela Railway, a 1,300km corridor designed to funnel copper and rubber from the Congolese interior to the Atlantic coast of Angola. Much like the imperial competition among great powers today, Germany, Britain, and France competed for access to the lucrative Benguela Railway. At the time, Germany was desperate to be regarded as a great power and saw the scramble for Africa as an opening. German bankers offered the necessary capital to finish the line, but at the price of majority ownership and operational control. Unwilling to cede British control of the railway to Berlin, Williams instead turned to Belgium and France for funding. This financial coalition did more than build a railway; it 'excluded' Germany from the circle of world nations, a transgression that German nationalists warned would lead to an appeal to arms through ‘blood and iron.’ The collapse of a German-funded Benguela Railway killed any last hopes for a large ‘Mittelafrika’ central African colonial empire. This failure signaled the end of German diplomatic expansion by the spring of 1914. Less than six months later, Germany issued its infamous ‘blank check’ of unconditional support to Austria-Hungary, effectively forcing a European-wide escalation that ignited the start of World War I.
The struggle for the Benguela Railway thus serves as a microcosm for the broader imperialistic rivalry that transformed European industrial competition into a clash for global hegemony. By blocking German colonial efforts, Britain and France essentially denied Germany “admittance to the circle of world nations” it so desperately desired to join. At the time, Germany possessed a rapidly growing domestic population and a vastly superior industrial economy, yet it remained a second-tier power in the global hierarchy. In fact, Germany’s growth at the time mirrors the rapid economic transformation of China today—a surge in power that established powers inevitably met with a strategy of containment.
Tension between Germany and other powers was exacerbated by what Berlin viewed as a systematic policy of encirclement. On one side, Britain actively undermined German colonial efforts while maintaining a naval supremacy that stifled German maritime expansion, ensuring that London remained the primary arbiter of global trade routes. On the other, France exploited Germany’s reliance on French and Swedish iron ore to exert geoeconomic leverage over Germany’s steel industry, which was crucial to its military-industrial complex. Furthermore, France provided massive loans intended to finance Russian industrialization efforts. These loans were subsequently used to construct a network of strategic railways designed to accelerate Russian mobilization along Germany’s eastern frontier. Caught between a rising Russia to the East and an increasingly hostile and defensive Britain to the West, Germany found itself strategically suffocated despite its phenomenal domestic growth. This sense of existential encirclement, coupled with the repeated denial of colonial infrastructure like the Benguela Railway, convinced Berlin that only an ‘appeal to arms’ could break the existing international order.
Today, the Benguela Railway stands as the front line of a new kind of strategic competition between Washington and Beijing. While Germany and the Triple Entente powers once fought for control over 19th-century staples like copper and rubber, today the United States and China are locked in a struggle over the new building blocks of the digital age: copper and cobalt. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) stands at the center of this rivalry as the world's leading producer of cobalt and is home to some of the world’s richest copper deposits. Despite its vast mineral wealth, the DRC lacks the domestic infrastructure needed to process these strategic resources, leaving a development vacuum that global powers have rushed to fill through extractive partnerships. Today, these minerals are among the most coveted strategic resources on the planet. Cobalt serves as a critical component in the cathodes of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, the foundational technology underpinning the global transition to renewable energy. As the Department of Defense observes, “Cobalt… has critical applications in high-capacity batteries for military and commercial electric vehicles.” Similarly, copper remains a high-priority resource; just as the Second Industrial Revolution relied on African copper for the electrification of the Western world, modern industrial powers now recognize the metal as an indispensable alloy for solar panels and electric vehicles. The United States and China view the resource-rich interior of the DRC as a strategically crucial region in the struggle for global hegemony.
Once again, the Benguela Railway is at the center of Great Power conflict. For decades, it pumped valuable natural resources out of the Congo and Angola to the Atlantic port of Lobito. After Angola gained independence in 1975, a 27-year civil war broke out, and the track became a primary target for rebels and insurgents. By 2001, heavy sabotage and millions of landmines had reduced the operational line to a mere 34km. In 2006, however, China struck an “infrastructure-for-oil” deal in which it agreed to provide $1.83 billion in loans to rebuild the Angolan section of the railway in exchange for reliable Angolan crude oil. Completed in 2014, the updated railway relied on Chinese technical standards, railway cars, and signaling systems.
This Chinese dominance was tested in 2022, when the Angolan government held an 'open tender' to determine who would be awarded the prized 30-year contract to operate the line. In a stunning reversal, Angola rejected the bid from the Chinese state-owned enterprise that had funded the reconstruction in favor of a Western consortium comprising Belgian, Portuguese, and Swiss firms. After the deal, the United States swooped in and promised a massive $553 million loan to the consortium to further develop the railway and replace the Chinese tracks and cars. This transition reflects a coordinated effort by the United States and its allies to reclaim a strategic corridor from Chinese influence. More importantly, it stands as one of the flagship projects the United States has developed to counter China’s famed Belt and Road Initiative. Now officially the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor, the Benguela Railway represents not a mere commercial pivot but a calculated and strategic geopolitical move.
This struggle for the Lobito Corridor is a revival of great power imperialism, in which the sovereign territory of developing nations once again serves as the stage for systemic conflict. In 1914, the refusal of established powers to accommodate a rising Germany led to a world war. This does not have to be the case today. The risk of escalation remains high, however, if China perceives Western control of African infrastructure as a deliberate attempt to stifle its geopolitical ascent. If Beijing feels cut off from the critical resources essential for its continued economic growth or denied the global leadership roles its economic power warrants, it may feel threatened by the current status quo. In the same way the United States facilitated German economic reintegration post-1945, the United States must now contribute to a global framework that integrates all great powers to ensure global security and peace. Rather than posing an existential threat to its growth, Washington should instead seek to avoid a direct confrontation over critical minerals and instead accommodate the global leadership roles China’s economic power warrants. As the lessons of World War I teach us, when a rising power sees its future growth threatened by the existing international order, it may conclude the only way to sustain this rise is through conflict. If China’s path to global hegemony appears permanently blocked, Beijing—like Berlin in 1914—may view an appeal to ‘blood and iron’ as the only option.