Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development. Allen F. Isaacman
the dam site, all concerning white workers. Moreover, because the dam site and the town of Songo were the domain of two Portuguese companies—Zamco, the consortium that built the dam, and Hidroeléctrica de Cahora Bassa (HCB), which subsequently owned and operated it—the limited extant labor documentation is in their archives, which remain closed to the public.93Nor did colonial authorities consider reporting on either life within the aldeamentos or the social and ecological consequences of Cahora Bassa’s construction.
More fundamentally, these sources are problematic because they are colonial texts produced by chroniclers whose perceptions and agendas were shaped by their race, nationality, class, gender, and status within the colonial hierarchy. While it is sometimes possible to discern faint echoes of African voices in the written words of colonial personnel—as, for example, in administrators’ reports of conversations with African chiefs—teasing out subaltern perspectives from such documents is very difficult. As Premesh Lalu argues, “to claim that subaltern consciousness, voice or agency can be retrieved through colonial texts is to ignore the organization and representation of colonized subjects as a subordinate proposition within primary discourses.”94Thus, one must read even the richest archival documents from the colonial period carefully and critically, “against the grain.”95While archival sources do not present a monolithic image of Cahora Bassa, the dominant narrative that emerges from these writings tends to obscure or disguise the realities of African rural life.
The wall of silence Lisbon imposed around Cahora Bassa during and after its construction compounds the inherent difficulty of utilizing colonial-era archival sources. The Portuguese government buried the findings of its own researchers when they raised concerns about the project and allowed only trusted journalists and international reporters to enter the region, which they classified as a strategic military zone. Even journalists and researchers with official clearance found their movements restricted to Songo and a few model aldeamentos. A Portuguese anthropologist studying the Tawara, a community living adjacent to the dam, acknowledged that he often had to rely on secondhand information, since “participant-observation was reduced to a minimum.”96
This policy of secrecy and nondisclosure continued into the postcolonial period. Despite nominal oversight by Mozambique’s energy ministry, the HCB still treated the dam as its own private domain and released almost no information about it. The Frelimo government, fearing Rhodesian sabotage, declared Cahora Bassa off-limits to most foreign researchers and journalists. Ideologically predisposed to pursuing rural development through large state projects, Frelimo’s Marxist-Leninist leadership discouraged public debate about the dam, labeling it a symbol of socialist transformation and modernity. In the 1980s, Renamo military campaigns turned the Zambezi valley into a major battleground whose violence disrupted all local social and environmental research efforts. That Mozambique’s national archives are not yet open for this period and that the Frelimo archives are in disarray97 exacerbate the evidentiary limitations. In chapters 6 and 7, when discussing Mozambique’s negotiations with Portugal over ownership of Cahora Bassa, its efforts to pressure the postapartheid South African state to increase the price paid for its electricity, and the status of the projected dam at Mphande Nkuwa, we had to rely on the publicly reported announcements of Mozambican officials. This was because the authorities, citing their confidential nature, were unwilling to speak candidly about these issues.
To address these challenges, we have relied on several reports concerning the feasibility of building a second dam at Mphanda Nkuwa produced by state-sponsored consultants, which include background material on the social and environmental effects of Cahora Bassa.98We have also examined documents and reports commissioned by nongovernmental organizations, environmental groups, and antidam activists, which, while often failing to capture the full complexity of realities on the ground, advance powerful critiques of the hydroelectric project.99The most valuable written sources for the postcolonial period are the meticulously researched hydrological and ecological research about the Zambezi River valley, on whose findings we draw throughout this book.100
The more than three hundred oral interviews of residents of riverside communities, missionaries, scientists, state officials, and antidam activists provide the principal evidence for most of this study. We began this project in 1998, while completing fieldwork for a book on runaway Chikunda slaves.101Two years later, Arlindo Chilundo, a Mozambican historian, and Allen Isaacman directed a research team from Universidade Eduardo Mondlane that studied the social and ecological consequences of Cahora Bassa.102Over two summers the team interviewed more than two hundred peasants and fisherfolk, living primarily on the southern margins of the Zambezi, whose recollections were recorded in public spaces, where members of the larger community could offer their thoughts. The interviews were public because, in rural communities, remembering and storytelling are preeminently social acts, in which both performance style and audience play crucial roles. In fact, the audience often intervened—either to elaborate on how their recollections were similar or different or to move the conversation to topics they thought were more interesting or significant.
We encountered several key informants by chance. Claúdio Gremi, an Italian Jesuit priest, was in the audience at the Songo conference. During the question-and-answer session, he wondered why none of the presenters had described the forced removal of peasants living near the lake and their internment in aldeamentos. He also mentioned the harsh working conditions at the dam site. When we approached him at the conference’s conclusion, he informed us that he had been stationed at Songo in the early 1970s, where he ministered to the peasants and workers living in the area. Although a critic of Portuguese colonialism, he was committed to historical accuracy and, for that reason, he would only report what he had witnessed firsthand or had heard directly from one of his parishoners.103We have relied heavily on his observations.
Padre Gremi introduced us to parishioners who were, or had been, employed by the HCB. Absent his intervention, many of the aging employees would probably have been reluctant to speak about past or present working conditions. We interviewed them outside the earshot of company officials, at either our residence or their homes, often accompanied by Padre Gremi. These men detailed the harsh labor regime under which they worked, the major industrial accidents that went unreported in the colonial press, and their substandard living conditions. One of the most outspoken was Pedro da Costa Xavier, who had worked for the colonial state and the HCB for more than forty years. Although he had previously been a government tax collector and a company overseer, he described in detail the harsh working conditions at Songo and on the dam site.104
Our project also benefited from fieldwork conducted by Professor Wapu Mulwafu and three students from the University of Malawi’s Chancellor College. The recollections of elders residing near the confluence of the Shire and Zambezi Rivers contained valuable information about the social and ecological effects of Cahora Bassa on communities along the northern margin of the Zambezi, the effects of South Africa’s destabilization campaign on the region, and the plight of war refugees who sought sanctuary in Malawi.105Additionally, we draw on the voluminous fieldnotes of interviews British researcher Keith Middlemas conducted with colonial authorities, dam workers and managers, and Frelimo officials in 1970 and 1976.106
Upon analyzing this material, we realized that we could appreciate the full impact of Cahora Bassa on the peoples and environments of the lower Zambezi valley only if we understood how local communities perceived the proposed new dam at Mphanda Nkuwa. Toward that end, in 2008 and 2009, David Morton, an advanced graduate student at the University of Minnesota, interviewed peasants in Chirodzi-Sanangwe and Chococoma, villages near the dam site. Between 2009 and 2011, to learn more about this project, we also met with antidam activists and officials of the construction company planning Mphanda Nkuwa.
Because our study, above all else, concerns the lived experiences of riverside communities, their stories, memories, and representations figure most prominently. At the outset, we must stress that many of these memories gloss over the challenges and hardships that have characterized life along the Zambezi River for centuries. After all, irregular rainfall, periodic flooding, and other natural calamities, along with the uneven quality of the soils, imposed limits on agricultural production in the region. That many males had to leave the Zambezi valley in order to earn enough to pay their annual taxes and provide for their families clearly suggests the impoverished nature of the region, whose agricultural productivity was often insufficient. While life was less