By Carol Van Sturm
Nairobi, AU: Officials in Capetown, Cairo, and other African cities simultaneously cut ribbons opening the Cape to Cairo Railway yesterday, completing a project begun more than 150 years ago.

Originally the imperial wet dream of Cecil Rhodes and 19th Century British colonists, the Cape-to-Cairo rail project foundered repeatedly for more than a century, interrupted and fragmented by world wars, competing colonial interests, engineering nightmares, and the economic and social collapse of African states in the early 21st Century.
Completion of the railway required retooling and reconstruction of three different track gauges and rolling stock, as well as new railbed and bridge construction through previously unserved regions of Uganda, the Sudan, and Somalia. The entire project would have been inconceivable prior to reorganization of the African Union (AU) through the now famous Treaty of Civilized Unions, which united the continent’s previously warring nations and failed states twenty years ago.
The new AU, modeled loosely on successful elements of the European Union, definitively freed the continent and its member states from historic political and commercial exploitation by off-continent states such as Britain, France, China, and the U.S. The AU’s most dramatic departure from the European model was its assumption of collective ownership and control of all natural resources on the continent, with particularly stringent regulations on resource extraction practices and distribution of profits to all member states.
Professor Lawrence Hamilton of the AmerAfrican Institute in Wilmington, Delaware, extolls the results of AU resource control in his popular book, “Africa On Its Own.” With its wealth no longer exported to off-shore corporations, he says, the AU was able to tackle immediate crises of AIDS, malaria, famine, civil war, overpopulation, desertification, and shrinking water supplies. The AU triumphed over these disasters through encouragement of labor unions, nationalization of energy production, continent-wide education programs, and massive, labor-intensive public works projects .