Port of Egulo

The Port of Egulo was never meant to be just a port. It was meant to be a statement.

When Adeze Kanza announced its construction, critics scoffed. Afrikanza had no oil, no rare earths, no gold. “What exactly are we exporting?” they asked. “Access,” Kanza replied. Egulo would be a port not for what Afrikanza had, but for what it could channel: the restless movement of other nations’ goods. A corridor between inland ambition and ocean-bound opportunity.

But the port’s true genius lay not just in logistics—it was in design. Kanza obsessed over the layout. He carried around a weathered copy of Domus Magazine from 1984 where Alessandro Medina interviews Dieter Rams, whose minimalist functionalism would shape everything from the cargo terminals to the customs booths. But Rams was just one layer. Beneath that lay the clean geometries of Bauhaus, beneath that the earthy ethics of the Arts and Crafts movement, and buried deepest, the ghost of Byzantine Collegia—ancient trade guilds that once linked Constantinople to the Aksumite kings of East Africa.

It was Aksum that Kanza studied with fervor—an empire that mastered trade without empire, influence without conquest. Egulo, then, was less a modern port and more a spiritual reconstruction. Each concrete pillar held the memory of stone workshops, each shipping manifest echoed the ledgers of ancient guilds. A port as palimpsest.

And it worked. Within a decade, Afrikanza was the choke point of a dozen regional trade routes. Goods passed through not because they had to, but because Egulo made it easy—faster, cleaner, smarter. “The best port,” Kanza liked to say, “is the one that feels inevitable.”

By the time the world noticed, it was too late. The Port of Egulo wasn’t a port. It was a throne.