A striking dust jacket offers two contrasting impressions of Africa's Freedom Railway. On the front cover, a picture shows villagers rushing to load parcels and passengers onto a train slowly passing along the TAZARA Railway, which links Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia. The back cover tells a different story, with an extract from the introduction recounting a classic cold-war confrontation between Chinese workers constructing the railway and Americans building a rival road along the same route. It is Jamie Monson's masterly elucidation of the first aspect of the history of the TAZARA railway – its appropriation by local villagers – that places the second in context, showing clearly the limits of analyses that see railway construction primarily through the lens of the imposition of state power, whether colonial, postcolonial, or, indeed, neo-colonial.

The TAZARA, or Freedom Railway, was the centrepiece of China's development efforts in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. As Monson explains, the idea of building a railway that would connect Zambia with the Indian Ocean had a long history, but it was Southern Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 and growing conflict between the white-dominated states of Southern Africa and the independent states to their north that made the building of the railway a pressing political need. With Western countries reluctant to fund a railway that seemed uneconomic, instead offering finance for a road, China stepped into the breach. China's involvement served to increase the political temperature, and every aspect of China's work in Tanzania was scrutinized for an insight into Tanzania's political orientation. The building of the railway became an iconic symbol of Tanzania's struggle to pursue a non-aligned path.

But Monson does not follow the path of earlier chroniclers of TAZARA in concentrating on Chinese–African relations. For her, the relevance of TAZARA lies rather in its demonstration that ‘state-led development projects in Africa could work in unintended ways’ (p. 9), and the railway serves as a hook on which to hang a far more interesting and nuanced social and economic history of what she terms the ‘TAZARA corridor’, the slice of rural Tanzania through which the railway travels. In doing so, she offers important insights into the practice of Chinese development practices in Tanzania, but, more importantly, she also provides a fascinating analysis of the ways in which the Chinese workers and the railway itself were perceived by the Tanzanians they encountered, and how local identities were transformed through the railway's construction.

The book is structured in two parts. The first part, ‘Freedom Railway’, focuses on the building process. Extensive interview material unpacks local perceptions of Chinese workers, stressing the strict discipline under which they worked and the distance that they maintained from the local African population. But human will-power alone was not enough to construct the railway for, as Monson reminds us, ‘the landscape through which TAZARA passed was not neutral, but was a place imbued with meaning’ (p. 70). Her interviewees repeatedly told stories of powerful local spirits impeding progress until Chinese workers abandoned their own ‘medicine’, their red books, and sought advice from local ritual experts.

In the second part, ‘Ordinary Train’, Monson shifts from the railway's construction to its post-construction appropriation. Her focus here is on the stopping service, which took on such a crucial role in the economic lives of villagers that attempts in the 1990s to close 19 stations unleashed a flood of protests. While the railway's intended purpose was to move copper from Zambia to Dar es Salaam, for the inhabitants of the TAZARA corridor its prime economic function lay in the service that it provided of carrying parcels along the line. Using parcel receipts, as well as life-history interviews, Monson explores the development of new trading networks and successful small-scale businesses along the train line. Though it was not only items intended for sale that were sent as parcels: one receipt recorded the shipment of a corpse, carried by the train to a rural village for burial. As the book's subtitle makes clear, however, Monson's concern is with ‘lives’ as well as ‘livelihoods’, and the final chapter explores identity and belonging. Her discussion of the ways in which mobility affected notions of belonging, using the binaries of being ‘at home’ and being a ‘stranger’, contributes to a growing historical literature on identity in postcolonial Africa that moves beyond an exclusive focus on ethnicity.

Africa's Freedom Railway is a valuable addition to the social history of postcolonial Tanzania. Moreover, it should serve as an inspiration to historians of the postcolonial period not to be deterred by the difficulties involved in accessing conventional historical sources but to follow Monson's lead and develop new methodologies and innovative approaches to the challenge of writing the postcolonial history of African states. This book provides an excellent example to follow.