Reopening the Arteries of Empire

Abstract

Abstract Persistent delays, regulatory fragmentation, and uneven access to trade infrastructure along the Beira Corridor continue to constrain both intra-regional and international trade between Zimbabwe and Mozambique. These challenges are commonly framed as technical failures of infrastructure or coordination, yet such explanations obscure the deeper historical and political conditions under which the corridor operates. This article examines why repeated efforts to ‘fix’ the Beira Corridor have delivered limited and exclusionary outcomes, despite its central economic and demographic significance. The study adopts a qualitative historical–geographical methodology, combining archaeological and historical scholarship with contemporary policy documents. It reconstructs pre-colonial systems of circulation linking the Zimbabwean Plateau to the Sofala hinterland and traces how colonial partition and post-colonial border governance reclassified ordinary intra-societal exchange as regulated ‘cross-border’ trade. These materials are analysed through a decolonial governance framework that foregrounds historical continuity, political economy, and distributive effects. The analysis shows that the routes now grouped under the Beira Corridor were not originally export corridors but intra-societal trade arteries embedded in shared language, culture, and political authority. Colonial bordering fragmented these systems, and post-colonial states have largely reproduced these logics through discretionary enforcement and regulations that privilege elites while marginalizing small and ‘informal traders’. As a result, contemporary corridor interventions often modernise colonial spatial arrangements rather than disrupt them. The article concludes that rehabilitating the Beira Corridor is not a project of capitalist expansion or export restoration but a politically contested process of decolonial repair.