Development of freight transport and logistics in Sub-Saharan Africa: Taaffe, Morrill and Gould revisited

Forty years ago on the eve of the colonial period, Edward Taaffe, Richard Morrill and Peter Gould published a paper on transport in the developing countries that during the 1970s and 1980s became widely accepted as a model of the transport development during colonial and post-colonial rules. On the basis of data from Ghana and Nigeria, they presented a phase model of how the transport system during the colonial period had become increasingly focused on the largest national export ports and foresaw the development after independence of an integrated transport network more supportive of national development. The present paper attempts, on the basis of a detailed study of the last 40 years' development of transport, primarily in Ghana, but supplemented by similar data from Zimbabwe and East Africa, to see to what extent their model has held true in reality. Unfortunately, it has not. Contrary to expectations, the concentration of the export flows has continued, not through port concentration as before, but through the concentration of the shipping industry. There have also been few signs of the integrated network that Taaffe et al. expected or hoped would develop.