‘When will we hear the whistling of the train?’ Imaginations of connectivity and remoteness in a Nigerien town

In 2014 the construction of Niger’s first railway was announced. Billed as a ‘lifeline and corridor of hope’, the railway would provide the landlocked country with a much valued direct connection to the coast and to the maritime port of Cotonou in neighboring Benin. In the town of Dosso, one of the main stops of the future railway line, people had been waiting for the railway for a long time as the promise of the railway, accompanied by expectations of economic development, connectivity and modernity, dated back to independence. Despite the failure of the first railway projects, the essentially administrative town developed into an important crossroads, mainly thanks to its position at the intersection of two national highways that channel a significant part of all Nigerien imports and exports. However the relative value of the town’s status as a crossroads (ville carrefour) and the importance of mobility (including migration, travel, trade, transport and transit) for the local economy has varied over time, a function of political and economic conjunctures. Following an extended period of economic downturn and marginalization, the town appeared more and more as a place that people and goods passed through on their way somewhere else than as a destination. In this context the new railway project, coupled with the creation of the country’s first dry port, seemed to offer a means of tapping into formerly elusive flows of goods and economic capital. Flows that would now, or so it was imagined, stop in Dosso, thus turning the town into an essential node (destination, location) in the wider national and regional context. In this presentation I focus on how these changes are narrated and experienced by town residents in order to explore the role of mobility and infrastructure (roads, railways…) in shaping imaginations of both remoteness and connectivity.