“Addiction to cement.”

In this paper, we build upon our previous investigations on cement plants as meta-infrastructure to inquire about material constraints related to cement production in Sub-Saharan Africa across the long twentieth century. To this avail, we follow the common thread of the—actual or perceived—lack of cement in different local contexts and temporalities, in both the colonial and postcolonial periods. By focusing on three different moments in time and three different regional contexts, we scrutinize and question the recurring theme of the constantly rising demand for the binder of concrete and the material used to produce cement blocks. All the examples we discuss are connected by the use of German machinery and design by global players such as G. Polysius or Philipp Holzmann AG. This enables us to move beyond the usual imperial trajectories of dependency between the (former) colony and the metropole. We consider both capitalist and socialist-leaning settings in order to understand how the dependency on cement came about and became a widespread “addiction.”