Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development. Allen F. Isaacman
visiting its edge for water and food. The Zambezi delta, with its predictable episodes of massive flooding and silt deposits, and its abundant supplies of fresh water and food, also attracted a spectacular array of large mammals, including zebras, elephants, waterbuck, hippopotami, and buffalo,311and the river’s islands offered a particularly friendly habitat for many bird species, including the now-endangered wattled crane.
During the rainy season, when wild game that roamed the forests and scrublands of the floodplain stopped at the river to drink in the early mornings and late evenings, they became easy prey for local hunters.312Oral testimonies confirm the importance of hunting as both a source of food and an affirmation of male status in riverine communities. Zhuzi Luizhi reported that it was common to snare small animals as they “[sought] green grass along the river.”313Chidasiyikwa Mavungire remembered that “during the time we were young, people could . . . hunt in the floodplains. In the area between the two rivers, the Shire and the Zambezi, there used to be shrubs where [small] animals could be found.”314Other accounts highlighted both the prodigious supply of large game in the past (frequently expressed in the form of lists of animal species) and the community’s collective pride in the skill of talented hunters. Maurício Alemão, for instance, explained that “there were many animals for us to hunt, including elephants, buffalo, giraffes, and eland.”315
There were also two groups of renowned hunting specialists living on the margins of the river, who regularly provided meat to villages nearby. Those known as mukumbalumi killed elephants and larger game with homemade guns, called gogodas.316Their return to the village after a successful hunt was an occasion for great festivities and the consumption of large quantities of beer and meat—some distributed by the hunters among their relatives and the remainder exchanged for grain.317Phodzo canoemen armed with iron harpoons, by contrast, focused their hunting activities on hippopotami. After a kill, they removed the valuable hippo tusks for sale to the Europeans and sold some of the meat in nearby villages.318In a region inhospitable to livestock, the meat provided by all these hunters was a highly desired protein.
Rural communities also valued, and carefully managed, the timber and plant resources found in the savanna woodlands near the river. These river-nourished soils supported many species of trees, whose decomposing leaves were a natural fertilizer. Trees also supplied necessary materials for home construction, canoe building, fuel, and, the numerous wild fruits, roots, and tubers that supplemented rural diets.319Through the controlled use of fire, peasants balanced their dependence on these forest products with their knowledge that well-timed burns of wooded areas made other food sources available. Thus, fires at the conclusion of the harvest cleared land for next year’s agricultural cycle, while early-season fires were effective both at flushing game out of the forest for hunting and at creating paths through the bush for easy travel.
Additionally, floodplain habitats yielded many medicinal plants used by respected herbalists320 to treat rural families’ common illnesses and serious diseases—from ailing bodies to complications during childbirth, childhood illnesses, diarrhea, venereal disease, sexual impotence, convulsions, and nervous disorders. Herbalists, most of whom were women, gathered therapeutic plant materials in and near the Zambezi during the seasonal floods, drawing upon detailed knowledge learned from family members and other practitioners. In the delta, some consulted with Nzunzu, the spirit of the water, before exploring remote corners of the Zambezi in search of medicinal plants.321Curandeiras also provided medications to protect their patients against witchcraft, to prevent attacks by crocodiles and hippopotami, and to treat common rural mishaps, such as snakebites.322João Raposo, for instance, recalled using a plant in Caia called mghangha to treat the bite of the tchipiri snake.323In short, these villagers used their expert knowledge to promote health and sustain life in the rural communities they served.
Moreover, the natural flow regime of the Zambezi River itself helped to regulate the health of rural communities in the centuries before construction of Cahora Bassa. The annual flood cycle, for instance, flushed out stagnant water bodies, thereby reducing the fecundity of disease vectors, such as malarial mosquitoes. The river’s rapid flow also temporarily cleansed the water of schistosomiasis and other waterborne diseases.
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Long before the construction of Cahora Bassa, the Zambezi played a critical economic and social role in the lives of the people living and working adjacent to its shores. While European administrators and travelers generally saw the river very differently than the indigenous population, occasionally they agreed. Thus, when the British explorer Frederick Selous wrote, “there’s life in a draught of Zambesi water,”324and Carl Peters, his German counterpart, observed that the river’s “arteries infused life into whole countries,”325 their narratives overlapped with indigenous representations. For most foreign observers and government officials, however, the river had to be tamed before the region could prosper—which was the dominant development narrative that inspired the building of Cahora Bassa.
3 Harnessing the River
High Modernism and Building the Dam, 1965–75
On December 6, 1974, two pressure-driven steel gates, each weighing 220 tonnes, stopped the mighty Zambezi River in its course. After five years of toil by more than five thousand workers, the construction of Cahora Bassa was complete.326Portuguese colonial officials, representatives of the new Frelimo-led government, church leaders, engineers, hydrologists, and journalists who were present on that day marveled at the dam’s majestic 170-meter-high walls, its five massive General Electric turbines, and the vast man-made lake that would cover more than twenty-six hundred square kilometers.327The technical complexity and skill needed to erect the world’s fifth-largest hydroelectric installation in a remote corner of Mozambique also attracted considerable international attention. For its proponents, Cahora Bassa represented high modernism at its best—the ultimate confirmation that science and technological expertise, in the hands of a strong state, could conquer nature and reorder biophysical systems to serve humankind.328
Yet casting Cahora Bassa as a high-modernist triumph obscures a great deal more than it reveals. As Mitchell demonstrated in his study of colonial Egypt, capitalist modernization projects undertaken by authoritarian states tend to be permeated with violence or its ever-present threat.329In fact, coercion was a central feature of Cahora Bassa’s construction. Local African communities were forced to abandon their homes in the Songo highlands to make way for the construction of a segregated town for white workers recruited from abroad. Additionally, state officials often relied on conscripted labor to build both the infrastructure around the dam site and the dam itself. Moreover, even within the increasingly fortified confines of the dam site, colonial authorities used coercion to silence, repress, and discipline angry workers and suspected militants whom they feared might disrupt construction in some way.
The centrality of violence to the process of colonizing the Zambezi River and building Cahora Bassa demonstrated that the Portuguese regime had neither the political power nor the material resources to accomplish its ambitious economic goals. Frelimo’s determined diplomatic and military campaign to stop the dam’s construction, combined with the fiscal uncertainty of the chronically cash strapped colonial state, drove Portugal once again into the arms of South Africa, Mozambique’s wealthy neighbor. The resulting transnational alliance enabled Portugal to hold nationalist forces at bay long enough to complete the dam, although at the cost of developmental goals that were supposed to improve the lives of African communities in the area.
This chapter examines the origins of the dam project Portugal hoped would economically transform the Zambezi River valley. It chronicles the local, national, and transnational factors compelling Portugal to scale back its plans, making Cahora Bassa simply a provider of cheap energy for South Africa. Most of the chapter, however, explores the very different lived experiences of European and African workers, embedded in unequal ways in a highly racialized and inherently coercive labor process. The final section highlights Frelimo’s diplomatic and military efforts, with significant international support, to thwart Cahora Bassa’s construction. While the brutality of Portugal’s counterinsurgency measures ensured the triumphant unveiling of Cahora Bassa, in late 1974, as both a marvelous technical accomplishment and a symbolic defeat of the nationalist challenge, the dam’s completion was, in many ways, a pyrrhic victory, won at the expense of the region’s economy, environment,