The African Experience on the African Railroad

The archive, I think, is it seems thin in some ways in terms of documentation that can show us the sort of experience of say recruitment. There are enough stories produced by administrators themselves about what they did to recruit workers or how local people who were recruited ended up living on the railroad itself. You could look at, for example, how much food was being distributed and sort of do the math based on how many workers there were to get a sense of the kind of caloric intake that workers must have had. So there are enough reports that really allowed me to stitch together a recreation,. certainly not of what the African workers themselves felt or thought because those are difficult issues to get at.