Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development. Allen F. Isaacman
camps, and of unpredictable discharges of water that destroyed their crops and flooded their fields. Many also describe in detail the results of the river’s altered flow regime—the devastating erosion of fertile riverbanks, the destruction of wildlife vital to their food security, and the dramatic decline of fish populations.
This book advances three central arguments. First, over the past three and one-half decades, Cahora Bassa has caused very real ecological, economic, and social trauma for Zambezi valley residents. All this is conspicuously absent from the widely publicized developmentalist narratives of Mozambique’s colonial and postcolonial states, which have been a critical feature of state efforts to dam the Zambezi River in Mozambique. Elderly African peasants,9who had a long and intimate relationship with the Zambezi River, graphically describe how the dam devastatingly affected their physical and social world and recount their resiliency in coping and adjusting. These memories, which speak so powerfully about the daily lives and lived experiences of the rural poor, are either discounted or ignored in dominant discourses touting Cahora Bassa’s centrality to national development. This silencing is indicative of the unequal field of power in which the histories of the rural poor are typically embedded.
The second argument is that extreme and continual violence has been a critical feature of state efforts to dam the Zambezi River in Mozambique. Bluntly stated, the history of Cahora Bassa reveals the willingness of an authoritarian but embattled colonial state, facing an armed nationalist movement and mounting criticism from the outside world, to put the full weight of its coercive power behind economic and strategic objectives it believed would strengthen its permanent hold over Mozambique. The forced labor used to build the roads to the dam site, the harsh labor regime at the dam itself, the displacement of thousands of peasants, and Renamo’s prolonged destabilization campaign demonstrate the extent to which violence is deeply implicated in the history of Cahora Bassa.
The deleterious social and ecological consequences of this massive state-imposed project never figured in the political calculus of colonial planners. Nor do they seem to matter in current discussions about the building of a second dam, at Mphanda Nkuwa. This disregard for peasants’ concerns about Mphanda Nkuwa is yet another example of the state’s continuing efforts to silence the voices of the rural poor—a form of epistemic violence. In this respect, the present neoliberal government mimics the ways in which the late colonial state exercised and rationalized power.10
The history of Cahora Bassa also reveals the persistence of “colonialism’s afterlife.”11Under the 1974 Lusaka peace accord, which set the stage for Mozambique’s independence, in return for assuming the $550 million debt incurred in building Cahora Bassa, Hidroeléctrica de Cabora Bassa (HCB), a Portuguese parastatal, received 82 percent of the shares, with the remainder going to the Mozambican government. The Constitution of the Cahora Bassa Dam, signed between Portugal and Frelimo on June 23, 1975, which memorialized this agreement, granted the HCB the right to manage the dam until Mozambique repaid the construction debt.12Because it was unable to do so until 2007, for thirty-two years after independence a Portuguese company retained effective control of the hydroelectric project (see chapter 6)—operating the dam, determining the outflows of water, and negotiating the sale of virtually all its electricity to South Africa.
That the newly independent socialist government could not use this energy for domestic purposes, such as electrifying the countryside, exposed the neocolonial reality—which persisted even after Frelimo adopted a neoliberal agenda in 1987 and needed cheap energy from Cahora Bassa to attract foreign investments and promote a free-market economy. Throughout, HCB management ignored these needs. For Mozambicans, Cahora Bassa was a living symbol of the violent and oppressive past and a constant reminder that independence did not guarantee resource sovereignty.13
In the mid-1990s, Frelimo began a campaign to wrest control of Cahora Bassa and its energy from Portugal. Lisbon, however, summarily rejected all Mozambique’s attempts to reduce or erase the price it would have to pay to own the dam. To enhance its bargaining power, the Mozambican government then threatened to revive a colonial plan to build a second dam downriver at Mphanda Nkuwa, which would reduce Cahora Bassa’s profitability. In 2007, under increasing pressure from Mozambique and its postapartheid South African ally, Portugal finally agreed to sell two-thirds of its shares in Cahora Bassa for $700 million (see chapter 6).
By this time, the Mozambican government had decided that two dams on the Zambezi were better than one, despite the human suffering and ecological destruction Cahora Bassa had inflicted. The rationale for constructing another dam at Mphanda Nkuwa was, as before, that foreign exchange would come from the sale of its energy—to South Africa and other energy-starved nations in the region. Rural electrification remained a secondary consideration, notwithstanding that only 7 percent of Mozambican households had access to electricity. In this regard, postindependence Mozambique continued the colonial ways of seeing, thinking, and acting. The persistent links between the postcolonial present and the colonial past is the third argument we advance.
We first became interested in the history of Cahora Bassa in 1997, when we visited Songo, the town adjacent to the dam site, to attend a Ministry of Culture–sponsored conference about the dam.14The list of participants was impressive. It included the manager of Cahora Bassa, who recounted the engineering feat of the dam’s construction and the valiant attempts to keep it functioning, despite repeated Renamo attacks. Prominent scientists provided richly detailed accounts of the effects of the postdam river flow regime on the flora and fauna of the lower Zambezi valley. Historians presented papers on topics ranging from changing Zambezi flood patterns to the political economy of the dam. While more than fifty experts participated in the Songo colloquium,15absent were the voices of the African workers whose labor actually built Cahora Bassa and of the rural poor whose lives it changed forever—except through the presentations of a few sympathetic Europeans, who could offer, at best, only partial renditions of what local people remembered of the dam’s history.16We quickly realized how little we knew about its impact on Songo-area workers and peasants, not to mention the rural communities downriver, whose gardens and grazing lands no longer benefited from the Zambezi’s seasonal irrigation and whose fishing lagoons Cahora Bassa had greatly reduced.
This study presents an alternative history of Cahora Bassa—one that seeks to recover, or bring to the surface, what the master narratives of Mozambique’s colonial and postcolonial state actors have suppressed.17This version clearly demonstrates that human and environmental well-being are inextricably intertwined, that development projects cannot be separated from the politics of control over scarce resources, and that the critical question of what is being “developed”—and for whom—is shaped as much by transnational as national or local actors.
Environmental policies and practices can never be divorced from relations of power. This is especially true when what is at stake is control over water, since no other natural resource is more important for the maintenance of life, society, and stable government. It is no surprise, then, that control of aquatic resources has provoked, and continues to provoke, conflict at local and national levels in Mozambique and elsewhere, especially in the global South.18
In the final analysis, most large state-driven development projects—whether dams or other initiatives that facilitate resource extraction and the export of cheap commodities—have not only failed to alleviate poverty and promote sustainable livelihoods but also often imperiled the lives of the poor. As long as such planned interventions lead to growing disparities in wealth and concomitant increases in hunger and poverty, which are the natural consequences of their market-driven calculus, for the overwhelming majority of people living in the global South there remains nothing but the delusion of development.
The Dam Revolution in Africa
In the second half of the twentieth century, worldwide construction of large dams19 increased exponentially—from approximately five thousand by 1950 to over fifty thousand by 2000.20According to Professor Kader Asmal, chair of the World Commission on Dams (WCD), “We dammed half our world’s rivers at unprecedented rates of one per hour, and at unprecendented scales of over 45,000 [large] dams.”21As a result, dam reservoirs submerged more than four hundred thousand square kilometers of the world’s most fertile land.22Although the pace of construction has slowed, a number of new dams—most notably China’s Three Gorges—were erected in the