Logistics, Sovereignty, and the Concessionary Port

Two bodies of scholarship frame the argument of this article: critical studies of logistics and a long-standing literature on sovereignty and delegated authority in Africa and elsewhere. The first has recast circulation as a central terrain of governance under global capitalism; the second has shown that state authority is often exercised through private actors rather than being opposed to them. Read together, these literatures allow us to approach ports such as Lomé not simply as nodes in global supply chains, nor as spaces where sovereignty is eroded, but as arenas in which logistical and sovereign power become mutually entangled through institutional arrangements that both extend and redistribute authority.

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that logistics is far more than the technical management of supply chains (Cowen Reference Cowen2014; Chua Reference Chua2018; Khalili Reference Khalili2020). Rather, it constitutes a mode of governance with deep historical roots in imperial trade and military organization. As Deborah Cowen argues, logistics involves not merely enabling movement but continuously administering circulation—fixing, governing, and regulating the boundaries between mobility and immobility (Cowen Reference Cowen2014). Laleh Khalili likewise shows how infrastructures of maritime circulation in the Arabian Peninsula emerged from earlier imperial projects that bound commerce and organized violence together in the making of global trade routes (Khalili Reference Khalili2020). Indeed, from the slave trade to present-day Trumpism, the distinction between commerce and organized violence has often collapsed entirely—commerce is not merely entangled with violence but constitutes a form of it.Footnote ¹

Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, the operations linking production to consumption—previously treated as unproductive costs—were reconceived as sites of value creation. Containerization, intermodal transport, and the expansion of global production networks transformed logistics into a central domain of capital accumulation (Cowen Reference Cowen2014; Danyluk Reference Danyluk2018; Blaszkiewicz Reference Blaszkiewicz2023). The “logistics revolution” was not merely technological but a transformation of political economy itself: it reorganized relations between firms, states, and territory by recasting the governance of circulation into a distinct terrain of power.

Ports are key sites through which these transformations become visible. Far from passive backdrops to global trade, they are locations where the promise of frictionless circulation encounters its material and political limits. As Jatin Dua (Reference Dua2024) notes in his call for an “anthropology of and from the ocean,” maritime infrastructures reveal how global circulation depends on grounded sites where flows are slowed, inspected, and regulated. Ports thus function as logistical chokepoints—locations where circulation is funneled, delayed, and rendered governable, and where the capacity to control passage becomes a potent political and economic resource (Carse et al. 2020; Chua and Bosworth Reference Chua and Bosworth2023; Dua Reference Dua2024).

Ethnographic research on maritime infrastructures has further shown that the appearance of seamless circulation depends on complex social arrangements and forms of labor that remain largely invisible within logistical imaginaries. Studies of port work in Africa and elsewhere demonstrate how logistical systems rely on local labor relations, social networks, and improvisational practices that complicate the technocratic vision of automated flow (Leivestad Reference Leivestad2021; Rothenberg Reference Rothenberg2018). Working on the Angolan port of Lobito, Schubert (Reference Schubert2021) reveals how the fiction of frictionless trade is sustained through intensive labor and social relations that cross the formal boundaries between state institutions and commercial actors. These studies underscore that ports are sociopolitical environments in which the governance of circulation is continually negotiated.

Yet while critical logistics scholarship has illuminated the politics of circulation, it has paid less attention to the specific institutional arrangements through which logistical infrastructures are governed in many postcolonial contexts—a key contribution of this study. In much of Africa, port terminals are operated through long-term concession agreements that transfer operational authority from the state to private firms in exchange for investment, revenue sharing, and infrastructural modernization. These concessionary regimes bind states and corporations as juridical partners while simultaneously redistributing authority over the infrastructures through which global trade circulates.

The concession itself has a longer lineage as a technique through which political authority and economic extraction have been organized. In colonial Africa, imperial powers frequently governed through concessionary arrangements that granted private companies extensive commercial privileges and control over territory, infrastructure, markets, and labor (Cooper Reference Cooper2002). Contemporary concession agreements in oil, mining, and other extractive sectors can be understood as iterations of this form, now largely reframed as contracts. As scholars of mineral extraction have shown, such contracts make states and corporations legal partners in projects of resource exploitation even amid profound asymmetries in capital, expertise, and bargaining power (Appel Reference Appel2019; Ferguson Reference Ferguson2006; Hönke Reference Hönke2012; Schubert Reference Schubert2020).

This insight intersects with a broader literature on sovereignty in Africa that has examined how state authority operates through arrangements that blur the boundary between public and private power. Achille Mbembe’s concept of private indirect government describes a mode of rule with colonial antecedents in which states delegate coercive and extractive authority to nominally private actors, producing enclaved spaces that discharge sovereign functions while unsettling the territorial model of the nation-state (Mbembe Reference Mbembe1999, Reference Mbembe2000). James Ferguson extended this argument to contemporary extractive industries where capital “hops” between enclaves of production, after which corporations exercise a sovereign monopoly, leaving surrounding economies only tenuously connected to global circuits of accumulation (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2006). A related dynamic is captured in Aihwa Ong’s notion of graduated sovereignty, in which states selectively redistribute authority across special economic zones and other exceptional spaces (Ong Reference Ong2006). These concepts describe different, often adjacent dimensions of the same processes; this article fuses them into a dialectical image of the port as a site where state sovereignty and capital engage in the practices through which governance is fashioned in the age of the global economy.

This framing resonates with scholarship that has moved away from narratives about the erosion of state sovereignty to emphasize the co-production of authority between state and nonstate actors. Hagmann and Péclard (Reference Hagmann and Péclard2010) argue that statehood in Africa has historically been negotiated across multiple arenas rather than emanating from a singular sovereign center. Béatrice Hibou (Reference Hibou and Hibou2004), similarly, shows how the privatization of state functions often constitutes a governing strategy rather than evidence of institutional decline. Studies of extraction and security governance have likewise demonstrated how state authority emerges through collaboration with corporate and transnational actors (Schubert Reference Schubert2020).Footnote ²

The ethnographic material presented here, however, suggests a more volatile relationship than either sovereign erosion or co-production fully captures. In the concessionary port, logistical and sovereign authority are constantly renegotiated through a dialectical process in which state and corporate actors simultaneously enable and constrain one another. The state depends on terminal operators for capital, technological systems, integration into global supply chains, and, to some extent, legitimacy; corporate actors rely on the state for territorial access, juridical authority, and a frictionless operational environment. Yet these arrangements remain inherently unstable, often fragile. The governance of circulation produces ongoing struggles over rents, infrastructural control, and the boundaries of political authority.

It is this volatility that makes Lomé analytically revealing. The transformation of the harbor into a major transshipment hub has produced a new terrain of governance in which state institutions, global shipping conglomerates, and local actors continually rework the terms under which circulation—and the rents it generates—can take place. Lomé thus shows how the governance of circulation becomes a key site through which relations between capital and states are continually refashioned.

Ethnography in Restricted Spaces

While the dynamics of logistical governance and port labor have received increasing ethnographic attention, the concessionary regimes through which terminals are governed remain comparatively underexamined. In part this reflects the spatial organization of contemporary ports themselves. Privatized container terminals operate as highly restricted zones, typically accessible only to authorized personnel. As a result, much existing scholarship on ports has been conducted at their margins—among dockworkers off-shift, truckers, or in surrounding urban spaces—rather than within the operational infrastructures of container terminals.

Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic research in Lomé conducted between 2017 and 2023, this article is grounded in sustained access to the interior of the port’s transshipment terminal: its operational floors, control rooms, and quayside infrastructures.Footnote ³ This positionality enables an analysis of concessionary governance from within the spaces where it is materially enacted. At the same time, a nondisclosure agreement restricts discussion of certain operational data and labor disputes, imposing limits on what can be disclosed even as my access afforded direct observation of the practices that structure contemporary maritime logistics. Fieldwork in Lomé was complemented by interviews with port professionals in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Hamburg, allowing for a comparative perspective on the changing governance of maritime infrastructure.

To trace concessionary governance in practice, the article moves between historical and ethnographic registers. The next section follows Lomé’s port from colonial wharf to postcolonial national project and, later, to a privatized transshipment complex. It is followed immediately by an ethnographic vignette at the port authority, which makes the reform era visible from the ground and introduces the split geography of authority produced by the concession system. The sections that follow move from concessionary law to logistical governance and then to entanglement, showing how contracts, labor regimes, rumors, and transit politics together remake state-corporate authority.

Infrastructures of Extraction: The Historical Making of Lomé’s Port

The reconfiguration of Lomé as a global transshipment hub is not a break from the past but part of a longer history in which ports have functioned as infrastructures of extraction, circulation, and territorial power. What began as a small fishing village was transformed in the early twentieth century into the capital of German Togoland. Strategically located near the border with the British Gold Coast, Lomé became a nodal point that captured cross-border flows and facilitated their administrative control.

The maritime infrastructure that supported Germany’s empire was rudimentary: a simple wharf landing fitted with steam cranes and rail tracks. Because Lomé’s unsheltered coastline was exposed to heavy surf and lacked breakwaters or deep-water quays, steamships anchored offshore while cargo was ferried by surfboats. This spatial configuration embodied what Charmaine Chua (Reference Chua2018) describes as the “struggle against distance”: not frictionless circulation, but a coercive remaking of space through infrastructures of territorial control underwritten by monopoly and violence. Rail lines built with forced labor extended from hinterland to coast, facilitating the extraction of palm oil, cotton, cocoa, and rubber while importing European manufactured goods (Gayibor Reference Gayibor2011). These transport corridors organized the colony as a geoeconomic formation, stitching together interior and coast through a logistical rationality that served imperial accumulation.

Following Germany’s defeat in World War I, Togo became a French mandate territory. The colonial administration expanded the maritime infrastructure in the late 1920s, but by the 1950s storms had rendered it inadequate to meet the demands of postwar shipping. Against this backdrop of rising anticolonial sentiment, Sylvanus Olympio’s Committee of Togolese Unity emerged as a political force pushing for economic self-sufficiency and sovereignty from French rule (Toulabor Reference Toulabor1986). When Togo gained independence in 1960, Olympio articulated a vision of national economic sovereignty that placed the construction of a new deepwater port at its core.Footnote ⁴ Although his presidency was cut short by his assassination in 1963, his administration had already laid the groundwork for what would become the Autonomous Port of Lomé.

On November 23, 1962, the foundation stone was laid 11 kilometers east of the rapidly growing city center. The new harbor embodied postcolonial aspirations of economic independence and modernity. Its free port regime—the only one in West Africa to this day—was designed to attract traffic by allowing goods to pass through with minimal customs barriers, positioning Lomé as a regional hub for transit trade. Prosperity in this model depended less on taxing goods than on attracting high volumes of traffic and deriving value from their movement through the port.

However, soon after the port was formally inaugurated in 1968 under President Gnassingbé Eyadéma, it became a political-economic instrument of state power. While Olympio had emphasized economic sovereignty through fiscal restraint and private enterprise, Eyadéma nationalized the phosphate industry and expanded port facilities to support growing exports. Throughout the 1970s, the global phosphate boom filled state coffers and attracted international banks to Lomé, earning the city the moniker “West Africa’s little Switzerland.” This period of prosperity unraveled in the 1980s as world phosphate prices declined sharply, eroding state revenues and weakening the economic foundations that had supported Togo’s national infrastructural ambitions (Piot Reference Piot1999). Under Eyadéma’s long dictatorship (1967–2005), the port became a site of elite accumulation and shadow economic activity, reflecting what scholars have described as Togo’s transformation into a “smuggling state” (Bayart et al. Reference Bayart, Ellis and Hibou1999). Drawn into illicit circuits of trade, the harbor sustained the regime’s political economy even as its formal performance deteriorated.Footnote ⁵

By the late 1980s, mounting mismanagement, congestion, and chronic underinvestment had deepened these vulnerabilites, creating the structural and fiscal vulnerabilities that would underpin a new phase of reform and infrastructural reconfiguration in the post–Cold War era. Under these pressures, Togo entered a period of economic and political liberalization in the 1990s (Piot Reference Piot1999, Reference Piot2010). The end of the Cold War and growing international scrutiny pushed it to liberalize its public sphere and subject its economy to Structural Adjustment Programs. At the behest of the World Bank, port reform became a central component of this agenda. These measures laid the institutional groundwork for the concession era, during which Lomé’s port was reconfigured through public–private partnerships and the strategic involvement of global shipping lines.

By the early 2000s, a new port governance regime had taken shape. The state-run port authority, which had until then managed all terminals and their operations, was reduced to an administrative landlord body. Private operators took over containerized cargo handling under concession arrangements: the port authority retained ownership of the land and infrastructure but ceded regulatory control over operations. This shift laid the groundwork for the transshipment hub purpose-built on undeveloped land that would harbor the MSC Diletta in 2025.

Sovereignty at the Gate

In early August 2017, I sat in the conference room of the Lomé port authority together with a group of entrepreneurs from Ouagadougou. The visitors from Burkina Faso had made the trip to explore the advantages of routing their goods through Lomé. The head of the port authority’s public relations department, Ahmed Komlan, proudly described the “efficiency” of the harbor: its “natural” deep-water advantage, the billion-dollar transformation of its 900-hectare zone, and the towering super-post-Panamax cranes that, as he put it, “can handle the kind of ship that not even the Panama Canal can.”

We watched a promotional video, couched in the familiar language of modernization and reform, celebrating the port’s infrastructural reinvention—its compliance with international quality certifications, its streamlined customs system built around ASYCUDA (the Automated System for Customs Data). When the narrator proclaimed that the new system had reduced corruption, one of the Burkinabé entrepreneurs laughed: “Ha, wouldn’t that be nice?” The laugh was telling. Platforms like ASYCUDA have been central to port reform agendas driven by supranational institutions such as UNCTAD, where digitization is framed as a technical solution to governance failures.Footnote ⁶ But for transit traders who depend on Lomé as a corridor to landlocked markets, port modernization has meant less a reduction of friction than its redistribution: from informal payments to formalized charges, from negotiable encounters to nonnegotiable system requirements. As Deborah Cowen (Reference Cowen2014) argues, logistics governs not by eliminating interruption but by recalibrating the terms on which movement is made possible.

Following a series of questions by the Burkina traders about tariffs, container dwell times, and road transport security up the 895 kilometers to the Burkina border, Komlan ushered us toward the final part of the visit: a bus tour of the port’s facilities. Apparently, Tony Blair had toured the two container terminals just a few weeks earlier. But our own visit ended abruptly. At the gate of Togo Terminal—then operated by the French logistics conglomerate Bolloré under a thirty-five-year concession—private security guards denied our group entry, even though the port authority had obtained prior authorization. Komlan, visibly embarrassed, dismissed it as a misunderstanding. Yet the incident spoke volumes. It quietly captured the new order of things: the port authority, once the embodiment of national sovereignty, found itself stopped at the threshold of infrastructure it nominally governed.

Among the Burkinabé visitors, the episode elicited knowing eyerolls; a gesture that conveyed how familiar such power plays were within the circuits of Françafrique, those long-standing networks tying French political and economic interests to postcolonial African regimes. For the anthropologist on the tour, the scene seemed at first to confirm a familiar story: the erosion of state power that left port officials waiting at the gate. Yet the episode also pointed to something more specific: that sovereignty was being performed at the threshold of the gate in the power to grant or deny access, rather than simply residing in the institutions that claimed it.

As our bus turned back toward the port authority’s compound, the contrast was striking. Cracked asphalt gave way to dirt tracks where trucks jolted through deep potholes, kicking up clouds of dust and the sharp scent of diesel. We passed a line of lorries inching forward until one got stuck; several drivers in flip-flops rushed to free it, shouting over the blare of horns from time-pressed container haulers. One of the Burkinabé traders shook his head at the gap between the sleek efficiency promised in the promotional video and the scene before us. Komlan, quick to respond, pointed toward a roadside sign announcing future construction work. But what remained most striking was the visual divide: crumbling public roads and rust-stained port buildings set against the vast, gleaming silhouettes of super post-Panamax gantry cranes rising behind electrified fences. The cranes—part rocket launch tower, part humanoid machine—stood as emblems of a different ordering of authority, one organized through enclosure and the regulation of movement.

The trucks stuck in potholes outside and the logistical precision promised inside were not separate worlds. They were part of the same terrain, one in which highly capitalized infrastructures of circulation coexisted with, and in some ways depended upon, uneven and degraded public systems. Yet what remained unclear was how authority itself was organized across this terrain. The port authority retained formal jurisdiction, but access, movement, and decision-making appeared to be governed elsewhere, through actors and arrangements not immediately visible. At the gate, in the moment of denied entry, this ambiguity became most apparent.

From Reforms to Regimes: Concessions and the Making of Logistical Enclaves

The port, as the preceding scene suggests, is not governed from a single center. Authority is exercised unevenly, through decisions about who and what moves, where, when, and under what conditions. These decisions do not simply reflect institutional hierarchies; they reveal a more complex arrangement in which control is distributed across overlapping actors, sites, infrastructures, and forms of regulation. This did not emerge by chance. It was produced through a series of reforms that, from the 1990s onward, transformed ports such as Lomé into concessionary regimes structured by public–private partnerships.

Beginning in the wake of structural adjustment and accelerating in the early 2000s, as mentioned earlier, the port of Lomé was reorganized under World Bank–backed reform programs that converted it into a landlord port. Under this model, the state retained ownership of the land and basic infrastructure while delegating terminal operations to private firms through long-term concession contracts, often spanning several decades. Reform was framed in the familiar language of modernization—efficiency, transparency, faster clearance, and global competitiveness—but, in practice, it reorganized how authority over circulation was exercised. While the port authority remained the formal custodian of the harbor, the governance of movement—access, sequencing, handling, and storage—shifted into privately operated enclaves.

As these developments suggest, the reorganization of port operations through concession contracts cannot be understood solely as an institutional or technical shift. Rather, concession contracts function as legal instruments that make manifest state and corporate personhood and secure spaces for monopoly capital. In doing so, they extend colonial modes of extraction into the present.

In her work on oil-sharing contracts in Equatorial Guinea, Hannah Appel (Reference Appel2019) shows how these arrangements are framed as partnerships between equals but are legal fictions that mask profound asymmetries. While they presume the juridical equality of the “partners,” the relative political and economic weakness of states like Togo has left them with far less bargaining power. This gap between legal formality and material capacity exemplifies what Appel (Reference Appel2019, 21) calls contractual enclosure: the use of contracts to delineate and reorganize space, transforming ostensibly public national territory into enclaves effectively governed by private companies. It is this mode of corporate enclosure that positioned Bolloré Africa Logistics (BAL) to exercise extraordinary power over Togo’s containerized maritime gateway.

BAL entered the Togolese port sector in 2010 when it secured a thirty-five-year concession for Togo Terminal. Crucially, this was not an open bid. Bolloré had pursued it since the early 2000s, and its eventual acquisition was shaped by dense political ties linking the French conglomerate to the regime of Faure Gnassingbé. The contract had initially been awarded to Progosa, a firm closely connected to Togolese political and business networks. But it was later reassigned following President Eyadéma’s death in 2005 and the consolidation of power by his son Faure. In Lomé, the transfer of the concession was widely understood not as a market outcome, but as the product of political brokerage, in which control over the port functioned as both an economic asset and a resource of sovereign power.Footnote ⁷

Once under Bolloré’s management, Togo Terminal was expanded through a $45 million upgrade: a 450-meter quay, a yard enlarged to 16 hectares, new cranes, and a terminal operating system. Completed in 2014, the project increased annual capacity from roughly 350,000 to 1.2 million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units, the standard measure of container volume) and folded Lomé more tightly into Bolloré’s continental network, which by 2022 stretched across 46 African countries and employed approximately 25,000 people. Yet the significance of this transformation lay not only in infrastructural modernization. As Chua and Bosworth (Reference Chua and Bosworth2023) suggest in their work on chokepoints, the operator that controls terminal space does not merely service circulation; it governs passage. The concession transferred to Bolloré the effective power to sequence vessels, regulate access, and monetize delay at precisely the site where flow can be slowed, accelerated, or refused.

This power was never exercised in isolation from the state. Rather, it depended on an ongoing relationship in which the Togolese government remained both partner and counterparty—collecting dues, authorizing operations, and retaining the capacity to renegotiate the terms of the concession. The port thus became a site of mutual dependence: corporate control over circulation relied on sovereign authorization, while the state’s fiscal and political interests became tied to the revenues and investments generated within the enclave.

This is why concession contracts matter analytically. Under standard agreements, operators pay fixed lease charges, traffic-based royalties, and harbor fees to the port authority, while financing infrastructure, collecting handling tariffs, and managing operations. A single container thus attracts a stack of claims—port dues, handling charges, storage fees, shipping-line surcharges, and demurrage—each calibrated to the organization of circulation rather than to the value of the goods inside. Concessions bundle governance and extraction within a single instrument, combining control over space with the capacity to generate rents from movement itself.Footnote ⁸

The political character of this arrangement became explicit in 2018, when French prosecutors charged Bolloré Group executives with using the company’s media subsidiary to support the election campaigns of Faure Gnassingbé in Togo and of Alpha Condé in Guinea in exchange for port concessions. In Togo, the case centered on the very concession that had granted BAL control over Togo Terminal. For many in Lomé, however, the revelations confirmed what had long been suspected: that concessionary reform was not simply a technocratic process of modernization, but a politically mediated reallocation of control over strategic infrastructure. Not surprisingly, the concession became the subject of rumor, critique, and speculation.Footnote ⁹ Stories circulated of political favoritism, hidden financial arrangements, and the displacement of local actors, alongside complaints about labor conditions and persistent logistical bottlenecks.

Most people I spoke with in Lomé over the course of my research had a story to tell about Vincent Bolloré and his dealings in the port. These “dealings,” as people described them, referred not only to the political favoritism surrounding the concession but also to the vast reach of Bolloré’s African logistics empire, built through long-term port and rail concessions that gave his company near-monopoly control over maritime trade in much of West and Central Africa. Some claimed that he had invested little of his own capital into the Togo port, relying instead on state funds and port revenues to finance his operations. Others accused him of dishonesty and exploitation: of having retrofitted outdated machinery rather than building the modern terminal he had promised. Another story held that the agreement with Faure Gnassingbé guaranteed the latter a personal share of the terminal’s profits each month. Still others spoke of the human costs of privatization: of workers dismissed despite supposed protections under the concession contract, and of their being exposed to dangerous working conditions without proper safety gear. There were also frequent complaints about recurring logistical bottlenecks that impaired smooth port operations, precisely the kind of inefficiencies that privatization had been expected to eliminate.

These stories were not merely gossip, although they were that too. They also served as a vernacular mode of analysis through which people made sense of opaque agreements and the reorganization of authority they entailed.

Bolloré’s empire did not survive intact. In 2022, the group sold its African logistics portfolio to MSC for roughly $6.5 billion. What changed hands was not the ports themselves, but a web of concessions, corridors, and terminal operations: legal rights to govern circulation across public infrastructures. Rebranded as Africa Global Logistics (AGL), the former Bolloré assets entered MSC’s orbit even as the Togolese state used the transfer to renegotiate its own position, raising its stake in Togo Terminal from 5 percent to 30 percent and securing two additional board seats (Dossavi Reference Dossavi2023; République Togolaise 2023).

That move matters. It shows that concessionary rule is unstable by design. Sovereignty does not disappear inside the enclave. It reappears through shareholding, licensing, litigation, and the continual possibility of renegotiation. If the vignette at the gate showed the state’s embarrassment, this moment reveals its residual leverage: not as a unified authority, but as a capacity to intervene, recalibrate, and reassert itself within the very contractual arrangements that seemed to displace it. Nowhere was this evolving geography of power more visible than at the neighboring Lomé Container Terminal (LCT), whose state-of-the-art logistical infrastructure rendered visible the deepening entanglement between private capital, state authority, and the material politics of logistics.

If Togo Terminal retrofitted existing port space to the demands of containerization, LCT was designed from the outset as a logistical platform embedded within global shipping networks. The port thus became not simply a site where goods passed through, but an infrastructural node governed as part of an integrated system of circulation. It is to the operation of this system—and the forms of authority it produces—that we now turn.

Logistical Governance

Logistics, as I have stressed, is never neutral. It governs. In Cowen’s terms, it is “a mode of governance that spatially and temporally orders the circulation of commodities, people, and capital, producing new terrains of power and authority” (2014, 24). At the port of Lomé, that governance takes concrete form, orchestrating labor, space, and capital through digital technologies and managerial regimes that regulate, contest, and render legible the flows of global trade. At the heart of this logistical order lies the Terminal Operating System, which choreographs the movements of ships, cranes, trucks, and workers. Here, as in other ports, it integrates data from ship schedules, yard sensors, and gate controls, translating motion into information. Every movement is measured.Footnote ¹⁰ Efficiency becomes governance: digital coordination doubles as control. This is logistics not as background process but as a technology that renders circulation legible, synchronizing labor, machines, and territory.

Here, systemic rationality extends beyond algorithms and control rooms. It is built into the port’s very architecture, into the cranes, quays, and concrete grids that materialize the governance of circulation. The entanglement of capital and sovereignty is visibly inscribed in the technological sublime that is the Lomé Container Terminal (LCT). Unlike the older Togo Terminal, LCT was conceived as a greenfield megaproject, constructed anew on reclaimed land, with new berths, basins, and breakwaters extending into the sea. Awarded in 2008 under a thirty-five-year concession to a consortium led by MSC’s Terminal Investment Limited and China Merchants Holdings, and opened in 2014, it initiated a new phase of infrastructural ambition—one oriented toward transshipment, mega-ships, and vertically integrated shipping networks. Since the start of operations, its annual container throughput has grown steadily, approaching two million TEUs by the mid-2020s, consolidating Lomé’s position as a major logistical hub in West Africa (Sylvanus Reference Sylvanus, Nugent and Lamarque2022, Reference Sylvanus2023).

That ambition is written in steel and concrete. The terminal stretches for over a kilometer, lined with towering cranes—eleven ship-to-shore and twenty-two yard cranes—that hum in electric rhythm; the entire port of Boston works with just three. Originally built for 1.5 million containers a year, it now handles well over 2 million and is expanding. The design is modular, anticipatory, built to scale future circulation. Yet LCT’s significance lies not only in its scale. It also lies in the networks it anchors, linking West Africa to Asia, Europe, and the US East Coast. Its routes connect Shanghai and Singapore with Lomé, Tema, Abidjan, and Kribi, an axis that fuses manufacturing zones to African markets and hinterlands. Upgrades to accommodate ultra-large container ships, like the MSC Diletta, offer deep-water access and streamlined operations that surpass regional rivals. In this networked infrastructure of calls and connections, Lomé has become a hinge between continents. Its harbor is now a node within the new empire of circulation.

The rationalization of the port required not just its privatization to finance the techno-industrial upgrade. It also required what Anna Tsing (Reference Tsing2009, 150) calls “new figurations of labor power,” recasting Togolese workers into logistically driven subjects of global supply chains, reducing people to machines, and making machines the movers of the postmodern harbor. At the same time, the port’s 24/7 operation is ordered around the hyper-rationality of the container. An “infrastructural system” in Chua’s (Reference Chua2018) words, it revolutionized shipping in the mid-1950s. The container made mobility measurable, turning the chaos of trade into a grid of logistics. To enhance the speed of flow, crane operators are expected to move a fixed number of boxes per hour. Humans remain central to the port’s visible choreography; the systems that organize their time and motion are hidden. The magic of logistics renders them invisible. This fascination with the technological sublime—the seamless choreography of cranes and steel—obscures the brute counterpoint of capital and labor that underwrites it. To achieve the frictionless flow of goods, hundreds of Togolese must labor in relentless clockwork.

The hidden hand behind all this is the terminal’s operating system, which yields the data needed to assess the productivity of both machines and workers. Their output is measured, calculated, and relentlessly optimized. Yet in Lomé, efforts to fold human labor into the rhythm of circulation have produced a workforce that embodies the contradictions of this new order. Across the port community, stories circulate of men turned into machines. Dockers who worked at Togo Terminal when it was still run by Bolloré portrayed it as a place in which people “worked like robots,” toiling with aging cranes and minimal protection, their bodies performing to a mechanized rhythm without the security of decent pay or safety. Described not as workers but as “humanoids,” they were cast as animated extensions of the equipment they operate. In this telling, robotization is less a technological horizon than a social condition. These stories give voice to anxieties about dehumanization, the fear that logistics seeks to perfect not the machine, but the worker who mimics one.

Under the concession agreement, LCT was required by the state to employ and train a national workforce in line with international labor, safety, and environmental standards. In practice, this stipulation served as a means for retooling labor to match the temporal demands of logistics. Dockers and equipment operators underwent continuous training in yard management, safety protocols, and digital monitoring systems, learning to work to the beat of logistical time. Their training programs sought also to cultivate an ethos of discipline, flexibility, and “situational awareness,” qualities deemed essential for maintaining throughput and minimizing downtime.

These transformations reordered relations of authority across the port city. As the concession model further consolidated control in private hands, many in Lomé’s maritime community began to sense that sovereignty itself was being outsourced. And as the second container terminal began operations, some commented on what they described as the hollowing out of the port authority. “How can a port be directed by a person who is also the deputy-mayor of Lomé?” one seasoned shipping agent asked me, incredulous. “He spends his mornings at city hall marrying people and only comes to the port in the afternoon to sign papers. Come on! Really?” His complaint captured a widely shared sense that the authority had become a shadow administration, confined to paperwork and fee collection while real decision-making had shifted to the concessionaires. Freight forwarders and transport union members, once central intermediaries in Lomé’s maritime economy, now feared being squeezed out by the terminal operator’s global logistics arms dictating the new terms of circulation. For decades, these actors had formed a relatively stable middle class, running trucking fleets, employing hundreds of drivers, and mediating between shippers and customs. With the arrival of the concession terminals, many found themselves displaced, their services supplanted by transnational logistics companies with integrated networks and privileged access to the terminal.

This new form of corporate enclave operates not only through towering cranes and digital control rooms but as a territorial regime, an infra-sovereignty that encloses labor and capital, securing flows behind fences and surveillance. The port’s glittering infrastructure masks intensifying socio-spatial exclusions. Recall the incident at the gate, where an official of the Port Authority and his visitors were denied entry into the terminal by corporate gatekeepers: a significant demonstration of infra-sovereignty at the limits of the state’s reach. This infrastructural enclosure signals a profound shift away from older notions of sovereignty rooted in a state with a monopoly over its terrain and its national economy. On the surface, this tectonic shift appears to negate the dialectic entangling state and capital in favor of the practical and juridical sovereignty of the latter over the former. But this, persuasive though it seems, does not tell the whole story.

The Dialectic Returns: Entanglements, Rents, and Rumors

The presence of the two container terminals dominating Lomé harbor did not simply eclipse state sovereignty. It created a volatile field of state-corporate interdependence. LCT, for example, generates layered rents—concession fees to the port authority, handling charges to MSC’s subsidiary TIL, transit dues to the state—that are continually negotiated. It is widely believed in Lomé that these revenues sustain not just national infrastructure but the Gnassingbé family’s wealth. Governmental agencies, moreover, retain leverage as allocators of access, while MSC depends on regulatory stability and hinterland corridors to maximize throughput—for which it pays undisclosed amounts. This mutual enablement, as I have noted, also breeds friction: labor slowdowns, revenue audits, and discretionary customs enforcement continually recalibrate the concession’s terms. What Hibou (Reference Hibou and Hibou2004) describes as privatization functioning as a governing strategy operates here in real time: the state does not simply cede authority but repositions itself within the architecture of the concession, extracting rents, insisting on protections for Togolese workers, and, more generally, exercising leverage precisely through the arrangements that appear to diminish its power.

Rumors play a palpable part in amplifying these tensions. They circulate not just as a vernacular critique of the opacity surrounding the sovereign economy of the port, but as an informational archive of events past and future possibilities. Stories of Bolloré’s ousting, Gnassingbé’s personal profiteering, and MSC’s extractive practices, for example, do more than merely point fingers at corruption; they reveal the sovereign excesses of both capital and those acting in the name of the state. In this sense, rumor functions as a counter to Mbembe’s (Reference Mbembe1999; see above) private indirect government. It is the currency of the informal knowledge economy through which ordinary citizens map the otherwise opaque redistribution, the labile counterpoint, of authority between state and corporate actors.

That informal knowledge economy maps a volatile force field rather than a simple corporate monopoly. Enclaves are not islands: they are situated in an economic and political ecology in which contracts establish coordinates of extraction, rents are contested, the terms of logistical governance are negotiated, and access to sources of value is allocated through recursive state-corporate “partnerships.” Thus are the dialectics of sovereignty shaped along the edges of the global maritime.

Coda

What this story of the port of Lomé reveals, then, is not the capture of state sovereignty by logistical capital, despite all the superficial symptoms that point to that narrative. As the informal economy of knowledge and its currency of rumor make plain, their constitutive entanglement runs deep and wide—notwithstanding the visible gates thrown up between them. Analytically, that entanglement has occurred through three movements: the historical formation and growth of extractive infrastructure from colony to postcolony, its legal rearticulation through concessionary contracts, and its contemporary governance through “partnerships” that enable the extraction of rents shaped largely by an evolving logistics regime. Each, state and capital, recalibrates the other, albeit asymmetrically, binding them in a volatile co-production of proportional sovereignties. This is why my analysis fuses the critical anthropologies of logistics and sovereignty.