Cairo–Cape Town Highway

The Cairo–Cape Town Highway is Trans-African Highway 4 in the continental road network developed by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), the African Development Bank (AfDB), and the African Union. The route has a length of 10,228 km (6,355 mi) and links Cairo in Egypt to Cape Town in South Africa.

The concept originated under the British Empire as part of the proposed Cape to Cairo Road within the Cape to Cairo Red Line of colonial territories. Like the Cape to Cairo Railway, the road was never completed under colonial rule.

The original proposal for a North South Red Line route was made in 1874 by Edwin Arnold, then the editor of The Daily Telegraph, which was joint sponsor of the expedition by Henry Morton Stanley to Africa to discover the course of the Congo River. The proposed route involved a mixture of railway and river transport between Elizabethville in the Belgian Congo and Sennar in the Sudan rather than a full length rail line.

In comparison, the Red Line road would stretch across the continent from south to north, running through the British colonies of the time, such as the Union of South Africa, Southern and Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Kenya, Sudan and Egypt. The road would create cohesion between the British colonies of Africa, it was thought, and give Britain dominant political and economic influence over the continent, securing its position as a global colonial power. The road would also link some of the most important cities of Africa, including Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Salisbury, Lusaka, Nairobi, Khartoum and Cairo. The main street through the centre of Lusaka was part of this route and is how it got its name, Cairo Road. One of the main proponents of the route was Cecil John Rhodes, though his preference was for a railway. German East Africa was a gap in the British territories, but Rhodes, in particular, felt that Germany ought to be a natural ally. Shortly before his death he had persuaded the German Kaiser to allow access through his colony for the Cape to Cairo telegraph line (which was built as far north as Ujiji but never completed). In 1918 German East Africa became the Tanganyika Territory administered by the United Kingdom and the gap was thus filled.

France had a rival strategy in the late 1890s to link its colonies from west to east across the continent, Senegal to Djibouti. Sudan and Ethiopia were in the way, but France sent expeditions in 1897 to establish a protectorate in southern Sudan and to find a route across Ethiopia. The scheme foundered when a British flotilla on the Nile confronted the French expedition at the point of intersection between the French and British routes, leading to the Fashoda Incident and eventual diplomatic defeat for France.

Even though Egypt became independent in 1922, British influence was still strong enough for Cairo to be viewed as part of the British sphere of interest,^{[citation needed]} and the idea of a road remained alive. After the Second World War, the British Empire disintegrated; Sudan was the next to become independent in 1956, putting an end to the colonial motivation of the dream.

The first known attempt to drive a vehicle from Cape Town to Cairo was by a Captain Kelsey in 1913-14 but this came to an untimely end when he was killed by a leopard in Rhodesia. The first successful journey was the Court Treatt expedition of 1924 led by Major Chaplin Court Treatt and described by his wife Stella Court Treatt in Cape to Cairo (1927), which drove two Crossley light trucks leaving Cape Town on 23 September 1924 and arriving in Cairo on 24 January 1926.

The idea was revived in the 1970s with the launch of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa Trans-African Highway programme. UNECA first proposed the continental grid of nine road corridors in 1971 as a framework to boost trade and integration after independence.