Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development. Allen F. Isaacman
these problems never entirely disappeared.107In fact, even in the rosier accounts of life before Cahora Bassa, there are muted references to seasonal hunger, food shortages, and natural disasters.
Such nostalgia about the predam period is understandable, since the elders with whom we spoke believe that Cahora Bassa is responsible for recent hardships. Given the stark reality of their present existence, it is hardly surprising that they failed to report recollections that ran counter to their characterization of life after Cahora Bassa. Even so, there are hints of such realities even in the more nostalgic accounts, which we do our best to present.
Despite the limitations of such interviews as historical evidence,108we are convinced that these oral texts, read critically, not only challenge the prevailing colonial and postcolonial formulations of Cahora Bassa’s history but also offer an alternative narrative—a detailed interior view of life before and after the construction of the dam. Taken together, they tell a story about the changing social and environmental worlds of the lower Zambezi—one that would have been completely lost to us were we limited to conventional documentary evidence.
The recollections of the women and men who know the river best provide important evidence of the centrality of the Zambezi ecosystems to African lives and livelihoods. Their stories offer unique insights about the agricultural capacity, biodiversity, and livability of the Zambezi floodplains when the river still ran free. Because of our concern that their nostalgic memories romanticized the predam period, wherever possible we corroborate their stories with earlier or contemporary written accounts.
The elders’ recollections also cast a revealing light on the devastating ecological, economic, social, and cultural consequences for peasant households of the colonial state’s appropriation of the river’s life-sustaining waters. Significantly, peasants’ ecological memories of the perturbations in hydrology and ecology wrought by the dam confirm the preliminary observations of environmental scientists, both at the time of its construction and more recently.109These accounts also reveal how peasants perceived, explained, and coped with the ecological changes caused by Cahora Bassa and creatively adapted to changing life in the river basin.110
Additionally, oral accounts highlight the ways in which local notions of time were radically different from those of the colonial and postcolonial authorities. In the collective memories of most rural elders, the divide between “life before” and “life after” the dam was a critical temporal marker.111State planners, on the other hand, operated on a developmental time scale. They stressed that Cahora Bassa had a “natural life” of well over fifty years before problems of sedimentation would pose a threat to the mammoth project. During this period, in their view, the dam would remain a potent symbol of state-driven development and an integral part of the drive toward modernity.
Like all oral testimonies, our interviews are constrained by, but also benefit from, their interior positionality. Because there is no single “authentic” voice capable of capturing the tumultuous lived experiences of people living along the river and because the impacts of the harnessed river varied dramatically from one microecological zone to another, we tried to conduct as broad a range of interviews as possible throughout the Zambezi valley. That the dam ended seasonal flooding, for instance, had far greater consequences in the Zambezi delta, where the majority of residents farmed in the vast floodplain, than it did in the area around Tete, where the narrower band of alluvial soil supported only a small rural elite. Gender, age, and occupation further contributed to the variety in rural perceptions of Cahora Bassa, and the testimonies of women and men, old and young, peasant farmers and fisherfolk, hunters and herbalists focused on very different dimensions of daily life.112Thus, for example, women, who were responsible for the household’s food security, stressed that, after construction of the dam, they coped with hunger by planting more cassava and searching the shoreline for roots and tubers—recalling that nyika (water lily) roots pounded into porridge were essential to their families’ survival. Fisherfolk, on the other hand, described the steady decline in their catch and their desperate use of finer and finer nets to trap young fish, even though they knew that this strategy would further deplete future fish stocks. Herbalists spoke of their inability to treat the sick, because the floods created by the dam’s unpredictable release of reservoir waters destroyed their medicinal plants. All these stories provided rare glimpses of fear, loss, and the indelible memory of impending chaos—moments of subjective reflection that historians have often found difficult to capture.113
We treat the diverse oral accounts produced through our interviews as significant social texts with hidden, multiple, and often contradictory meanings. Memories, whether individual or collective, do not exist outside the present; and problems of memory loss, repression, and reconstruction compound the challenges of interpretation, as does the impact of the interviewer’s perceived social position. Understanding why people remember what they do at particular moments, and why they narrate those memories in particular ways, requires not only recognizing the nostalgia for what it is, but also probing what might have been at stake for the men and women we interviewed at the time of our meeting. As John Collins reminds us, we need to be aware of “the overdetermination of memory by immediate events.”114In the case of Cahora Bassa, many elders may have also romanticized what life was like before the dam,115either because they were, at the time they were interviewed, involved in ongoing efforts to pressure the government to restore the predam flow regime or because they knew about plans to construct a second dam at Mphanda Nkuwa. Other villagers deployed this claim to support their demand that the ruling party take responsibility for environmental recovery in the Zambezi valley. Similarly, antidam activists and some living near Mphanda Nkuwa invoked a pre–Cahora Bassa golden age, as part of a broader political discourse opposing construction of the new dam.116
This nostalgia probably also explains the tendency of some elders to attribute to the dam’s existence a variety of other ills, even when there is little evidence to support them. Several villagers, for example, asserted that, because the uncertain flows of the river discouraged animals from coming there in search of water, the small game they used to hunt had disappeared.117This explanation failed to consider the impacts of increasingly dense human settlements on the river’s margins and the destruction of wildlife habitats by relocated villagers who cleared the riverine woodlands for firewood, building materials, and to make charcoal.118
The politics of forgetting also complicates the present-day meaning of oral narratives. Sometimes individuals and groups forget simply because of the limitations of memory—as when people make the past more manageable by blending the specifics of everyday life into a set of more “generic memories.”119Indeed, accounts of patterned, normative behavior devoid of daily variations—as reflected in descriptions of “what we used to do”—characterized many of the stories about life before the dam. Forgetting, however, can also be a profoundly political act. As debates regarding memories of the Holocaust remind us, denial and suppression are common ways of reconfiguring both fragments of a collective past and the consciousness of individual historical actors.120Some of the elders we interviewed, for example, tended to downplay the more disturbing elements of their histories, such as the social tensions among aldeamento residents. Many were also reluctant to talk about adultery or witchcraft in these camps, although, when pressed, they acknowledged the presence of both. There was a similar tendency to gloss over the fact that male family members had worked as sipais (African police) or had fought in the colonial army. Such distortions require that we listen carefully and critically not only to the multiple voices in oral sources but also to the silences.121
Interpreting Zambezi valley oral sources becomes even more problematic due to the forced relocation of peasants into protected villages between 1970 and 1975 and the massive displacement of rural communities fleeing from Renamo attacks during the 1980s. These related processes destroyed communities, filled refugee villages with people from many different places, and severed their attachments to the specific physical sites associated with a remembered past. Since many stories about the past were grounded in particular “memory places” or “memoryscapes,”122displacement may have discouraged some from regularly reciting their historical memories—an activity necessary for their retention. Given the extraordinary instability in Mozambique during this period, we must be sensitive to Isabel Hofmeyr’s position that oral traditions lose much of their substance when divorced from the geographical and social setting of their performance.123That