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In January 1935, a railway bridge 2.3 miles long was opened across the Zambezi delta in Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique). Fifty-one years later, it was blown up by anti-government forces fighting with Renamo. This book brings together politics, diplomacy, economics, labour history and technology to show how the constructions of the ‘longest bridge in the world’ was both a major engineering feat and a disaster of colonial planning.

It is based on Portuguese and British archives including materials newly available and it tells the story of Libert Oury, financier and railway king, whose associates nicknamed him ‘the other Rhodes’ but whose career has never before been described. But the book´s real hero is the Zambezi River, that ‘treacherous highway’ which the bridge was intended to conquer.

Today the lower Zambezi bridge is by far the grandest of the ruins of colonial enterprise littering the vast river valley.