Stop That Train: Material Crimes Podcast Out Now

How can infrastructure be criminal? How does a road, a prison, a suburban neighbourhood, or a dam become a perpetrator of violence and insecurity?

Material Crimes answers these questions. Each episode investigates a different piece of infrastructure, tracing its global, colonial connections across time and space. The series shows us how physical sites of everyday life are linked to networks of private and public actors who profit from violence inflicted on spaces and communities on the margins. The series also shines a spotlight on the people-powered movements exposing and challenging the many crimes of infrastructure.

“But didn’t colonialism give them railways?” The “Cape-to-Cairo” railway was meant to stretch from Africa’s southern tip to Egypt in the north. It was the unrealised fantasy of an unruly cast of imperial hustlers, including most infamously Cecil Rhodes. In the first episode of Material Crimes Season 3, Dom Davies traces the legacy of this unfinished railway across Africa, asking how tracks of colonial plunder, resource extraction, and white supremacy continue to haunt the continent.

Talking to Adam Elliott-Cooper, Megan Jones, Uhuru Portia Phalafala, Sara Salem, and Jonny Steinberg, Dom explores the violence of the Cape-to-Cairo railway as both a symbolic and material crime. Using songs and poetry of resistance, he also unravels how fantasies of a connected Africa energised successive generations of activists, from Black Consciousness poets to Rhodes Must Fall. 

Listen back to the full episode below. For more episodes follow Material Crimes on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.