EUROPALIA TRAINS & TRACKS 2022 | TRAINS & TRACKS IN AFRICA 17/03 AfricaMuseum | Session 2
Session 2 with Shehu Tijjani Yusuf, Charline Kopf and Q&A with Jonathan Cane
Shehu Tijjani Yusuf: 'Lived Experiences and Responses to Railway Technology in Gimi, Dangora and Madobi Villages in Northern Nigeria, 1908-1967.'
This presentation examines the lived experiences and responses to European railway technology in Gimi, Dangora and Madobi villages in northern Nigeria, from 1908 to 1967. As the intervention will demonstrate, the railway had an enormous impact on the socio-economic activities of local people. The initial arrival of the train was marked by mixed reactions of anxiety, fear, and wonder in the villages, because the people did not understand what it was all about. However, as they started to better grasp the opportunities offered by the presence of the railway, they developed initiatives to use it in distinctive ways to better their lives. In fact , the railway provided them with a cheap and faster means of transport around which they crafted multi-spatial livelihoods. It also stimulated the cultivation of cash crops, notably groundnut, and the arrival of imperialist trading firms whose activities intensified the production and trade of these crops. This trade in cash crops also attracted many migrants whose presence led to the emergence of two main settlement patterns, thereby contributing to the growth and expansion of the villages into a peri-urban hub. As it will be further shown, the railway also stimulated a crime economy around its infrastructures, as a reaction to the colonial policies, and the three villages became hubs for all sorts of crimes committed along the railway line.
Charline Kopf: 'Maintaining railway lives and lines: Working bodies and toxic dust in a Senegalese railway depot.'
This intervention examines railway workers’ narratives of dust and debris while they repair and maintain the suburban trains running on a section of the colonial Dakar-Niger rail line in Senegal. Often complaining about the poussière (dust) that engulfs them during their work, the workers’ reference to dust denoted a toxic blend, not only of pollution and sand, but also of asbestos lodged in the old train wagons. Attending to the corporeal and intimate stories of the workers, i shed light on how they handle their daily encounters with a fleeting, invisible toxicant as it seeps into the bodies of both machines and workers. Moments of maintenance also prompted heroic memories of former railway repairs, multiple stories of refurbishment and expertise surrounding the different types of trains the railway company relied on, from second-hand ones imported from France to what the workers called the ‘second-class’ trains that arrived from India and Pakistan. Amidst institutional and industrial negligence and processes of ruination, the workers persevere with their perilous practices, for fear of losing their jobs. I argue that the attention to dust helps disentangle the more nostalgic memories attached to the railway’s past, as well as the precarious and dangerous futures that are woven into the journey of the trains and their debris.
Curated by Johan Lagae, Robby Fivez and Anne Wetsi Mpoma
In the framework of EUROPALIA TRAINS & TRACKS, from 14 October 2021 until 15 May 2022: https://europalia.eu/en/trains....-and-tracks/programm
#europaliatrainsandtracks #europaliaartsfestival #AfricaMuseum #UGent
Step on board for EUROPALIA TRAINS & TRACKS, from 14 October 2021 to 15 May 2022! This year, EUROPALIA dedicates an edition to the train, an invention that shaped society and appears to be playing a leading role again today. EUROPALIA TRAINS & TRACKS presents a multidisciplinary programme of over 70 projects—mostly new creations and residencies—spread across artistic institutions but also, and especially, to be discovered in stations and aboard trains.
Every two years, EUROPALIA compiles a diverse artistic programme focusing on a country or a theme. For four months, in Belgium and its neighbouring countries, EUROPALIA, in collaboration with a wide network of cultural partners, presents a biennial with a myriad of artistic and socio-cultural projects that bring together visual arts, performing arts, film, music, literature and debate so as to stimulate an exchange of ideas. Newly commissioned projects and artistic residencies hold a central place in the programme that engenders a unique interaction between heritage and art.
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