Fact Check: The History and Reality of the Cape to Cairo Route

Getting around Africa is pretty hard. For example, if I wanted to fly to Accra or Nairobi, it would basically cost the

same for me as if I were to fly all the way to Paris. But that's just flying, right? You can't

always predict what something's going to cost just by looking at the distance. So, you know, maybe that's just the way

it is. But trying to drive is even worse. Say you wanted to ship a container of corn from Lagos to Mombasa.

It would be easier for you to put that container on a ship and sail around the entire continent than it would be to put

it on a truck. Since 1971, the United Nations has been working on this plan called the Trans African Highway. It

started with one road and now it's a network of nine different highways that snake across the continent.

Funny thing is since 1971 only one of these roads has been finished. The Transahelian Highway

transport in Africa costs between 50 and 175% more than it does in the developed world. Between 80 and 90% of Africa's

transport happens by road and only a quarter of those roads are paved. And don't even get me started on trains. My

producer Katie lives in London. If she feels like having a croissant in Paris, she can just hop on the Euro Star and be

there in like maybe like 6 hours or something. I don't know what if I was craving a Rolex from Uganda for instance

and wanted to hop on the train to Kala. Not going to happen. If I could take the train, I wouldn't have to buy my own

car. I don't have to drive. I can just watch the world go by like all the African scenery and I could possibly

emit like 90% less CO2. You see the most famous highway on this map is this one here. You might have heard of it before.

It's called the Cape Tairo. This highway has actually been in development for 130 years. So what happened to the Cape to

Cairo? >> Send up the sand railway telegraph colonization. There is no limit. The

Cape TOOK CAIRO. BACK IN THE DAY, the idea of building a Cape to Cairo was quite a big deal.

Today, if you've met someone that's done a Cape to Cairo, they're quite a big deal. People know me.

>> The reason is it's quite hard to do a Cape to Cairo. If you type in these two cities into Google Maps, it gives you a

route of about 10,000 km and tells you that it will take like 160 hours to do. That's quite ambitious. If you go really

fast, you can maybe do a Cape to Cairo in a month. Most people take more than four months, and that's also going

really fast. Now, I know what you're thinking. Cape to Tripoli is actually like a longer route, but it doesn't

eliterate. So, whatever. So, doing this trip is no easy feat. You need to organize visas for every individual

country, unless you are part of the SADC like myself. You need a vaccination for yellow fever. You need some plan to not

get malaria. and you're going to drive over quite a few unpaved roads. You might even encounter bandits or

terrorists, corrupt traffic officials, and extremely unpredictable border crossings.

As they say, this is Africa. But that doesn't stop people from doing this journey. People from all walks of

life, from Obi-Wan Kenobi himself to this 80year-old lady who did it in a Toyota Corolla by herself. It's one of

those once in a-lifetime adventures that people dream their whole lives of doing. So, back to Google Maps and we've typed

in our two cities. If you want to switch from driving to train, Google doesn't let you. Google doesn't think that

there's a train route between these two cities. But the thing is, if you try really hard, there actually kind of is.

It's just a little bit incomplete. The idea of the Cape Taro is said to have come from the Daily Telegraph in

1874. This is kind of that time when all the Europeans were looking at the map of Africa and were like that should be easy

to evade, right? Britain and a whole lot of other European countries were trying very hard to become colonial empires at

this point and they were all busy gaining territory. The map of Africa was in their mind a map of Europe's

mishmashed extended colonies. Most European countries like Germany and Portugal and France were trying to get

pieces of territory that spanned the continent laterally, but Britain was actually super ambitious and they wanted

to connect a piece of land from the Cape Colony in the south to Egypt, which was kind of like an unofficial British

territory at the time. And to really get the story going, I have to introduce you to one of Africa's most controversial

figures, ladies and gentlemen. say. Oh, wait. That's awkward.

>> Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the statue that is still here, Ceil Jean Rose.

In 1871, this hefty boy was found on the banks of the Orange River by Kriqua Shepherd. This sparked a diamond rush

and this area was invaded by hordes of prospecting miners and the town of Kimberly was born. Ceil's family had

moved to the Cape Colony to start a farm in 1870. But Ceil wasn't really that good at farming. So one year later, he

moved to Kimberly to try find his fortune in the diamond fields. And find his fortune he did. It wasn't because he

was good at mining. It was because he was a really shrewd businessman. Any money that he got from his claims, he

would reinvest straight into his diamond business by buying more and more claims and pieces of land. Eventually, he had

bought out all the competition and even secured funding from the Rothschilds in France. Within a few years, he had

become a diamond magnate. Cecile wasn't only a crazy rich boy. He was a crazy rich boy. Crazy, rich. In 1873, he left

Kimberly to go get an education at Oxford while remotely managing his diamond fields in Kimbley. He ended up

spending eight years there. And during that time, he fell in love with Britain and the empire. But he also developed

this weird imperialistic fervor. In 1877, there's this document that he wrote called his confession of faith.

And it says, "I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit, the better

it is for the human race." Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable

specimens of human beings. What an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglosaxon influence. Next

to his confession of faith, he also wrote a will. In this world, he bequeaths his funds towards various

causes that he believes in. The chief one being the extension of the British Empire. He wanted Britain to control the

entire continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole

of South America, the whole of the Malay archipelago, and the seabboard of China and Japan, as well as the entire United

States of America. His reasoning was that if Britain controlled everything that there would be no more wars, but I

don't know. I don't know how that would work. In 1880, he started Debeia's mining company, which was a company that

would consolidate all of his diamond mining operations, which got so rich that it bought out the only competition

in town in 1888 and became Debe's Consolidated Mines. The company was so successful that they ended up

controlling 85% of global rough diamond distribution and it even controls up to 30% to this day. By the way, it's also

this company that came up with the idea of diamond wedding rings. >> How else could 2 months salary last

forever? A diamond is forever. Debeers Ceil was amassing all this wealth for one reason, power. In 1881, Cecil

managed to sweet talk his way into Cape Parliament. He knew that if he could connect the Cape Colony with Egypt, that

it would give Britain immense power and control over Africa. In getting into parliament was the start of him

unfolding this plan. Unfortunately, there were quite a few obstacles in his way. See, all this land on the map

actually still belonged to native African tribes. South of this land there were the Bu republics of the Transf and

the Orange Free State. In the center of the continent, Roads was blocked by King Leopold II of Belgium, who controlled

all of the Congo and German East Africa. But this wasn't going to stop Roads. He decided that he was going to hack away

at the continent one people group at a time. Here north of the Transfold were two

native kingdoms, Masha land and Matab land. This is where we get the modern Shauna and Indelia tribes and languages

from. There was also an interesting power dynamic here as the Shauna were kind of subject to the Indelia at this

time. Roads worked to declare this area a protectorate of the Cape colony. That means that they allowed themselves to

move into this land to protect them. So the king of Matabelli land was King Loingula. Ceil convinced a bunch of

missionaries to build a relationship with this guy and then convinced him to sign a treaty to let Cecil mine and

develop his land. It's speculated that King Loenula did this because he hoped that it would prevent the British from

attacking him. But sadly, he effectively signed away his entire kingdom. And here's where things get kind of crazy.

In 1889, Roads went back to London where he set up a meeting with the queen and convinced her to give him a royal

charter. This allowed him to set up the British South African Company, also known as the Chartered Company. Having a

Royal Charter means that according to British law, roads now had the authority to act on Britain's behalf. The BSAC

could have its own flag. It could have its own roads and railroads, but then most importantly, it could settle any

territories that it wanted to, and it could have its own police force and financial institutions.

Roads had effectively become the king of a company state whose main goal was to colonize. Roads moved 192 prospecting

miners and 480 British South African company police officers into Macha land which he then called Salisbury. They

were hoping to find gold, but after trying their best, they couldn't find any. So trying to cut his losses, he

decided to turn the area into farmland, which went against the treaty that Cecil had made with King Loenula. Long story

short, Cecil got tired of having to deal with King Loenula and his treaty. So he faked a confrontation between the Sha

and the Indella people, which justified him sending in his police officers to protect the Shauna people. and he ended

up killing most of King Loenulo's MP warriors which forced him to flee his kingdom. Now Roads was feeling

invincible. He finally had a massive chunk of southern African territory under his belt. In 1892, he went back to

London and had a conversation with the Times and he announced his plans to build the Cape Takairo railway and

telegraph line. And that's when Punch magazine published this cartoon, the one that everybody knows about. Let's look

at the map quickly to see what roads managed to build in his lifetime. So before roads was the prime minister of

the Cape, there was already a rail going from Cape Town to Kimberly, they started building this line to a little town in

the middle of nowhere called Fraber and then to this town called Muffy King, which is on the modern-day border of

South Africa. From here, they started accelerating, building tracks at a rate of a mile a day. They finally reached

Bulawayo in Rodesia in 1897. When the line landed in Rhodesia, a banner flew that said, "Our two roads to progress,

railroads and cess roads." From here, roads's main interest was getting this line all the way to the east coast in

Bayro, which would prove extremely valuable for getting goods to and from these ports. Roads ended up cutting a

deal with Portugal so that they could start building this line. But the construction of this segment was super

treacherous. The workers had to cross forests and swamps and this part of the world is malaria territory. Half of the

European workers died of tropical diseases. By 1898 a cape to Bayra line was complete. So while they completed

this line to Bayra meanwhile in the north in Egypt things weren't going so well. Egypt already had some railways

since the 1850s but there was a lot of turmoil in the area. Nobody had been able to build anything in Sudan. There

was this militia group known as the modests who were fighting the Egyptians and they were frustrating roads dream of

taking the line south. The main town in this conflict was Kartum. If Britain could capture this town, they could

control the area and they could build whatever they want. Roads was friends with this guy, Major General Herbert

Kitner. Kitner decided that in order to win the war, they needed to establish rail superiority. Most of the transport

in this part of the world happened on or adjacent to the Nile. The problem is that the Nile snakes so much here that

if you followed it, it takes you twice as long as it would take if you just had a straight line going from point A to

point B. So Kitner imported a French Canadian engineer to find a route that would take them to Kartum. They ended up

cutting a shortcut between Hala and this town over here called Abu Hamemed. What's really interesting is that

Winston Churchill was part of Kitchener's army at the time and he wrote about this construction. He said

that it's scarcely within the power of words to describe the savage desolation of the regions into which the line and

its constructors plunged. They managed to get the rail all the way to Adbara which is basically Hartum and it helped

Britain to secure a massacre of a victory against the modests. The modists lost thousands of fighters while Egypt

only lost about 15. And you might think that this rail was only to win the war. But it turns out that the rail that

Kitner built was built according to the Cape Gauge standard. Gauge is the distance between the two tracks of the

railway and different railways across the world have different gauges. The Cape gauge is actually a super unique

standard that originated in Cape Town and they made it quite narrow to bring down the costs of building the rail. The

fact that the line in Egypt was also built on the Cape Catch standard just meant that roads intended to connect the

two lines eventually. Okay, so Egypt and Rhodesia, things are looking good for roads, but the Burjs

down south were still making life difficult for roads. Britain was forced to play nice with the Burj who were

making their own republics, which had become an economic powerhouse in southern Africa. If Roads wanted to

dominate Africa, he would have to own this territory. In 1896, roads incited the Jameson raid, which was kind of like

a coup where the British tried to just flat out attack the Bush. The raid was an embarrassing defeat for the British

and it was also an international scandal. It immediately made roads look like a scoundrel and it marked the

beginning of the end for roads. In 1899, the Anglo Build War broke out in the Transval. Roads went to fight to defend

his diamond mines in Kimbley. He fell ill during the fighting and he returned home to Cape Town where he died in his

massive luxurious home in 1902. So after Road's death, they built this monument to honor him. I think it was

the Cape Parliament. It was finished in 1912. At the bottom, there's this statue of a dude on a horse supposed to

represent Roads's energy and genius. And then at the top there's a bust with a poem that Riad Kipling himself wrote in

Roads's memory. The whole place is extremely grand. There's like bronze lines lying the steps. It overshadows

the southern suburbs of Cape Town. The idea that one man can get a monument dedicated to himself like this in a city

like Cape Town, it's pretty crazy. With roads gone, the BSAC had lost the imperialistic further that drove their

enterprise. But they were still motivated to build railways because they were hoping that miners would start

finding all kinds of precious metals in Africa and then be compelled to use their railways. So they kind of tried to

keep the rail going. Roads had a dream of crossing the Zambzi River close to the Victoria Falls. He said that he

wanted the train cars to catch the spray of the falls as they crossed the bridge. In 1905, the BSAC achieved just this.

They actually built a bridge in England and then shipped it to the falls where they assembled it in less than 14

months. You can still walk across this bridge today and feel the spray of the falls on your face. At the time it was

the highest bridge in Africa. They kept going from here and eventually they made it all the way to Elizabethville in the

Belgian Congo. All that stood in their way was this giant patch of forest. I mean it is a big patch of forest but it

didn't look so far off that this rail would become a reality. And the idea of taking the train in Africa was

romanticized all around the world. Pictures of white people riding fancy trains and splashing around in the

Victoria Falls were plastered over magazines all around the world. But World War I was about to mess everything

up for everyone. After the Allied victory, German East Africa got divided between Belgium,

Britain, and Portugal with the lion share going to Britain. And for a hot second, Britain finally had one

continuous line of territories going from north to south. And it looked like this was it. Now the Cape Cyra can

finally just be built. But the problem is World War I had destroyed Britain's economy and nobody had money left to

fund Ceil roads' crazy and expensive dreams. So the Cape to Cairo was dead as a colonial ideal. But it had become a

household name burning in the minds of travelers all around the world. The first person to try and walk the Cape to

Cairo was Ewit Grogan. He was doing this before roads even had died. The reason he was doing this was allegedly to

convince the father of his girlfriend to allow him to marry her. The story goes that he got as far as Sudan before

nearly dying of fever and took a steam train up the Nile all the way to Cairo. That journey took him 2 years. In 1913,

an expedition group led by Welsh Captain RN Kelsey was the first to try and do the entire route by motor vehicle. They

used this unique car that was designed in Argentina that had a pontoon for a body so that if you drove into a river,

you could just float across it. I guess like cars weren't a thing at the time because Kelsey had never driven a car

before the expedition. Unfortunately, they didn't finish the journey. They got as far as Broken Hill in Rhodesia when

the car broke down. While waiting for spare parts, they got attacked by a leopard and Kelsey died of gang green

soon after. The journey was attempted again in 1924, but this time by South African filmmaker Stella called Treat.

Treat's expedition team consisted of her husband, her little brother, a journalist, and a cinematographer.

They were explicitly inspired by Roads' Cape to Cairo concept, and they chose to follow his original route, even though

it was much more difficult than a route that allowed deviation from British territories. They took 3 years to

complete this route with cars. That other guy, he took two years with his legs. And after finishing the journey,

they released a documentary called Cape to Cairo. Okay, but what happened to the line today? You can kind of still take

the train from Cape to Cairo with a level of difficulty. Okay, so disclaimer, any of the lines I talk

about here might not be functioning at the time you're watching this video. None of these trains are online, not

even my local South African ones. And there is no way of knowing if they are actually running except for calling the

station, which only probably works in South Africa. In reality, you probably have to go there in person or get a

really good fixer to help you on the ground. But if you're up for that challenge, let's begin.

From Cape Town, the only trains that go internationally are fancy cruise liners like the Robos Rail and the Blue Train.

For this exercise, we're not going to look at those because I'm not that fancy. I mean, they do look kind of

cool. Like this one has a bathtub in it, but let's stick to normal people trains. If you're a normal person, you can go up

to Johannesburg and then decide which one of South Africa's neighbors you want to meet. If you want to avoid buses as

much as possible, we are going to choose Mosmbique and take the train all the way to Kumati. At Kumati, you unfortunately

can't cross the border by train. You have to get out of the train and then walk across the border. I guess you

could like find a taxi or something, but that's not guaranteed. On the other side of the border, you can actually take a

Chinesebuilt air conditioned train from Maputu to Chikua Koala on the border of Zimbabwe.

Here you also have to get off and walk across the border and then you can hop on a train to

Bulawayo. And this is a really cool part because the next stop is the mighty Mossi Tuna or Victoria Falls. On this

line, there's also a good chance that you get to ride in a vintage carriage from like the 1940s or 1950s. Once you

get to Victoria Falls, you'll have an amazing view of one of the most beautiful natural sites in the world.

Unfortunately, if you're a normal person and you didn't take a fancy cruise train, you can't cross this amazing

bridge by train. You have to get off and once again walk across the border. across the bridge and take a train from

Livingston to Capirium and Porschi, which is the end of the British line. From here, we get onto the Chinese built

stuff. What's really cool about the Chinese Desar Rail is that it's the first one on the route that you don't

have to walk across a border. Apparently, your passport just gets stamped as you ride across by an

official on the train. At the end of this 18,800 km line, you'll end up in Dar Salam. This is where today's Cape

Tairo line kind of falls apart. There is no direct train connection to take you any further north. There is the inner

city express between Montbasa and Nairobi. But from Nairobi, the tracks end once again. The closest piece of

rail that you can aim for is all the way in Kartum, which is 3,000 km away. And between these two cities lies dirt

roads, sketchy mountain passes, and plenty of bandits and terrorist activity. unfortunately, but that

shouldn't put you off because between these two cities is also beautiful mountain passes, amazing people and

wildlife, and the best coffee on the planet. China is planning to eventually connect Mombasa to Kartum, but that

future seems quite a way off still. So, once you've decided to cross this gap by road or plane or walking or whatever,

we're back on Chinese B lines. The Chinese B lines here basically follow the old British lines, but they also are

interrupted. There's a gap between Wii Alpha and Asan. And here you can take a ferry, but unfortunately, like

everything on this route, it's hard to know if the ferry is even running. But that shouldn't be too hard of a

challenge for you. And once you've gotten across this gap, then you can take the train all the way to Cairo. And

you've done it. You've done a Cape to Cairo. And your name will forever be written in the Travelers Hall of Fame.

I'm kind of a big deal. >> I'm very happy for you. >> So, as you can see, the route isn't

simple, but that doesn't stop people from doing it. But this is kind of where you have to make up your own mind how

you feel about the situation. Organizations like the UNCA and African Development Bank are still trying to

build this Trans African highway. But the fact that it's not built kind of makes this journey wild and adventurous.

On the other hand, something like an uninterrupted rail line from Cape Town to Cairo would benefit millions of

Africans on the continent who desperately need accessible transportation. I mean, the reason the

Cape Cairo has stuck is probably just due to the alliteration. But it's also an ideal we can use to measure our

cooperation with one another. Or maybe this is just the colonial fever dream of a crazy rich boy.