Author: Jamie Monson.

In China, Tanzania, and Zambia, state officials participate in an ongoing articulation of official memory of the TAZARA railway project of the 1970s. In high-level diplomatic relations, the TAZARA project and its construction workers are continually held up as a foundational legacy for China–African development cooperation and friendship. However, the now-retired workers who built the railway tell very different kinds of stories about their experiences. In the context of recent economic liberalization policies, retired TAZARA workers draw on individual and collective memories of railway building to achieve both recognition and material security in a world in which they feel forgotten. They seek resolution of their grievances in old age through the telling and retelling of narratives of their youth. By doing so, they claim their own right to remember in the face of ongoing official efforts to reinvent heroic pasts.,