Palm Wine, Railways, and Gold reinterprets the early 20th-century rainforest in southern Côte d’Ivoire as a technological landscape. It examines the relationships among people, technology, nature, and empire, set against environmental constraints and imperial ambition. Challenging plantation-centred narratives, it reconstructs forest economies before oil palm and banana monocultures, highlighting the economic and cultural centrality of palm wine and kola nuts.
It re-conceptualises the Abidjan–Niger Railway as fragile infrastructure requiring constant maintenance and repair, and links river-based gold mining to regional trade networks. Through everyday encounters, David Drengk foregrounds forest dwellers and their persisting contestation and negotiation of French colonial rule in West Africa.