The Kamba people of Kenya claim they were warned about the evils of colonialism long before the first colonialist arrived. The legend goes that the prophet Syokimau, back in the early 19th century, told her people of “a long narrow snake spitting fire” that would make its way up from the East African Coast, bringing with it “red people” who would take away their land. She was right; it was the railroads more than anything else that enabled European colonialists to exploit Kenya’s people and extract its wealth during the first half of the 20th century.

The 1,000-kilometer track stretching from the Kenyan port of Mombasa to Uganda was Britain’s most ambitious project in Sub-Saharan Africa. The railroad, begun in 1895, was famously disrupted by the so-called man eaters of the Tsavo, two lions that stalked and attacked construction workers. More than 130 people are said to have been killed — the exact number is uncertain — before the animals were finally hunted down. Within the next five years the railroad was completed and the way opened to British domination of the region.

Although portions of the original railroad are still in use, the British no longer call the shots. The Chinese are the new game in town. Beijing has signed off on rail projects across the continent, from Angola in the South, Ethiopia in the East and Nigeria in the West, heralding an infrastructure-expansion boom on a scale never seen in Africa.

On Nov. 28, presidents of four African nations gathered in Mombasa for the inauguration of what was billed as the largest single project in the region’s history: a $13.8 billion standard gauge rail line that is expected to link five East African countries and replace the line built by the British. The massive rail networks, almost all of them leading to the sea, will doubtless reinforce the image of a resource-hungry China eager to extract as much as possible from the continent.