ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the 20th century a railway from the Atlantic coast of Angola to the copper-rich region of Katanga (later Shaba) in the Congo and on to the Copperbelt in Northern Rhodesia was seen as a strategic necessity. The Benguela Railway was to be built between 1903 and 1929, beginning with a railhead at Lobito on the Atlantic; it would prove vital for the transportation of copper from the interior. Following the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in Rhodesia in 1965, the railway became a new lifeline for beleaguered Zambia because of congestion on the southern routes. After the Smith government closed the border between Zambia and Rhodesia in 1973 the railway became even more important to Zambia, persuading President Kaunda to announce in January 1975 a plan to build a new line from the Copperbelt to Solwezi and west through Lumwana, where new copper deposits had been discovered, to connect the Zambian Copperbelt directly with the Benguela Railway in Angola and bypass Zaire.
