Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development. Allen F. Isaacman
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suggested by Heidi Gengenbach’s brilliant and comprehensive study of southern Mozambican women whose lives and communities were ravaged by Renamo attacks which forced them to flee their homelands.124Contrary to Hofmeyr, she found that physically displaced people did not necessarily cease to remember their past125 and that, even where some loss of memory occurred, its rate was uneven.126Thus, scholars must be sensitive both to the circumstances under which displaced people manage to hold on to their memories and to the strength of their remaining recollections.
How people reconstruct, interpret, and use the past has powerful relevance for the present and future, and awareness of what might be at stake in speaking publicly about Cahora Bassa certainly influenced responses to our questions. After many of these sessions, outspoken individuals—some angry, others solicitous—asked us to stress to government officials in Maputo how much rural people had suffered because of Cahora Bassa. Beatriz Maquina, for example, expressed her frustrations as follows:
We are very tired of being interviewed. Many people have come here [from the government and NGOs] to ask us questions, and they promised to bring us seeds, corn, other cereals and blankets. But, until today, we have not received anything and we continue to suffer. These promises were made during the time of the war with Renamo and even today. They promised us many things and promised to help us, but nothing ever happened. We do not have schools, a hospital, or anything else. We are tired of all these interviews. We want to know when we will receive these things promised to us. You in the city eat well and live well, and we continue to suffer.127
A few raised the issue of compensation, although most simply wanted the authorities to make the river run freely again.128Although we insisted that we were not working for the government and had no direct links to state officials, these exchanges underscore the ways in which research and representation cannot be divorced from relations of power, which meant, at a minimum, that they saw us as having access to and influence with those who mattered.129
Whatever the contemporary overtones and difficulties of interpretation, these oral accounts constitute the richest and most accurate body of evidence about both the changing world of the lower Zambezi valley and the lived experience of its rural residents. Like all other forms of historical evidence, however, oral testimonies require careful and critical reading.
The Book’s Architecture
This study focuses on the period from the 1960s, when the Portuguese began planning for Cahora Bassa, to 2007, when Mozambique finally gained majority ownership of the dam. We situate it, however, within a broader historical framework, beginning with Portuguese efforts, dating back to the sixteenth century, to dominate the Zambezi River valley and ending with the ever-present effect of Cahora Bassa on the daily lives of people living adjacent to the river.
Chapter 2 documents Portuguese efforts, dating back to the sixteenth century, to conquer and domesticate the Zambezi River and its hinterland. Through the long history of their encounters with the waterway and riverine communities, colonial authorities, travelers, geographers, and development experts forged a narrative that stressed the dangers of the unharnessed river and constructed the region as an insalubrious backwater occupied by primitive people and half-breed Portuguese with neither the will nor the capacity to exploit nature’s bounty. This chapter also explores local representations of the river before the dam, in which the idea of the Zambezi as a source of life coexisted with the notion of a capricious river that could flood their fields and destroy both their livelihoods and their lives.
Chapter 3 examines the construction of Cahora Bassa. Here we document the enormous technical problems the Portuguese had to overcome in a remote corner of Mozambique without any infrastructure. The chapter focuses on the labor process at the dam site, the highly racialized and regimented organization of work, and the contrasting experiences of European and African employees.
Chapter 4 explores the forced displacement of more than thirty thousand peasants from their ancestral homelands, which were later submerged under the man-made lake. Reconstruction of aspects of daily life within the aldeamentos relies primarily on the oral narratives of men and women who were herded into these barbed-wire encampments.
Chapter 5 shifts the angle of vision downriver. Cahora Bassa had far-reaching effects on the ecology of the Zambezi River valley and on the communities living adjacent to the waterway. The change in the river’s flow regime—above all the unpredictable discharges from the dam—jeopardized the alluvial farming practices on which hundreds of thousands of people had relied in the predam era. The dramatic decline in its sediment load, trapped behind the walls of the dam, also robbed farmlands of valuable nutrients and precipitated massive erosion along the riverbanks. Plant and animal life that had depended on the river for sustenance suffered as well. Our discussion of Cahora Bassa’s ecological effects relies heavily on both the oral testimonies and the scientific findings of a handful of researchers. While we have tried to assess and summarize the scientific data, as social historians we lack the technical expertise to explain fully the dam’s impact on the ecology of the Zambezi valley.
Chapter 6 focuses on displaced energy. It documents Cahora Bassa’s unique role as the largest dam in the world constructed to produce energy for export. Even after the end of Portuguese colonial rule and until today, virtually all its energy goes to South Africa. The chapter also details Frelimo’s long struggle to gain control over the dam, which remained in Portugal’s hands until 2007—thirty-two years after Mozambique achieved independence.
In “Legacies,” the final chapter, we review the impact of the dam on both the riverine communities and the biosphere. Despite Cahora Bassa’s traumatic history, the Frelimo government remains committed to a colonial-era plan to erect a second dam approximately seventy kilometers downriver. There are many striking parallels, and several significant differences, between the colonial and postcolonial projects. After examining the current rationale for the second dam, and the opposition that has emerged from a small but vocal antidam movement in the Mozambican capital, we discuss the concerns of and the expected outcomes for the two thousand residents who will have to make way for Mphanda Nkuwa, should this project proceed.
2 The Zambezi River Valley in Mozambican History
An Overview
Well before the Portuguese arrival in the Zambezi valley, in the sixteenth century, the Zambezi River had attracted Shona- and Chewa-speaking peoples who settled permanently along the banks of the river (see map 2.1),130as well as hunters, traders, and adventurers in search of gold, some of whom remained in the region. For over three centuries, the waterway also figured prominently in Portugal’s plans to control the Mozambican interior. The Cahora Bassa Dam was merely its most recent effort to colonize the Zambezi valley and domesticate the river.
During these centuries, the Zambezi was a porous frontier that both separated and connected the peoples living near the river.131While communities on each side recognized it as a boundary, people also traded across it, fished in it, and sometimes even farmed on both banks. Gradually the river became less significant as a frontier than as a zone of settlement. As these groups of African and other immigrants domesticated the Zambezi valley, they transformed the waterway into a valuable resource.
We start this chapter with an overview of the Zambezi valley’s strategic and changing significance as a highway into the interior, a home to the prazo estates, a zone of imperialist competition, and a site of unfulfilled economic development—themes that encapsulate much of the larger world’s encounters with the region. From this history, Europeans forged a master narrative—portraying the river as “wild and dangerous,” the indigenous population as “primitive,” and the descendants of the Portuguese and Goan settlers as “half-breeds” who fostered the slave trade and stunted economic development by failing to exploit the area’s natural resources. Portugal used these images of instability and violence to justify its conquest of the Zambezi valley, toward the end of the nineteenth century.
We then shift the angle of vision from a regional and transnational perspective and explore the impact of the Zambezi on the daily lives of the local populations. Their stories, based on a more sustained and intimate relationship with the river, are markedly