Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development. Allen F. Isaacman
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of life and prosperity, even though unusually large floods sometimes destroyed their fields and swept away their homes.
The Zambezi as a Highway into the Interior
Long before the Portuguese arrival, the Zambezi River was a strategic highway for a vibrant commerce in gold, ivory, and slaves. Coastal Muslim traders, who had long served as the point men of Indian Ocean merchant capital, were already operating there by the fifteenth century. A century later, in 1511, António da Saldanha, a Portuguese chronicler, described dhows traveling up the Zambezi from the coastal port of Quelimane to the Lupata gorge. There, coastal traders paid the local Tonga land chiefs for the right to offload their wares, which local porters then carried to inland markets south of the Zambezi where Indian Ocean merchants exchanged cloth and a variety of other imported goods for gold, copper, ivory, and wax.132
For the Portuguese, the Zambezi valley was a wild and unfamiliar landscape—a malaria-infested, yellow fever–ridden frontier zone characterized by social disorder and decay. In the colonial imagination, it was both a landscape of fear and the gateway into the untapped mineral wealth of the interior. Their goals were to push the boundaries of civilization, dislodge the infidel Muslim traders, and exploit the region’s gold and silver, which those merchants were already purchasing. By the 1570s, Lisbon had established fortified settlements along the Zambezi at Sena and Tete that became the region’s administrative centers and garrison towns.133From Sena, located approximately two hundred kilometers from the coast, they were able to control river navigation between it and the Shire River. Tete, a further two hundred kilometers upriver, was a strategic point of entry into the south-central African interior. Lisbon later built a small commercial and military post further inland at Zumbo, on the northern bank of the Zambezi at its confluence with the Luangwa River (see map 1.2).
For almost three hundred years Sena, Tete, and Zumbo were at the center of the Portuguese commercial network. Portuguese and Goan merchants and prazeiros (Portuguese estate holders) dispatched caravans, ranging from ten to several hundred slaves, into the interior from these river-based trading stations. Each caravan, directed by a misambadzi (local trading specialist), traded both at fixed markets—like the fairs at Manica and Aruangua (see map 2.2)—and at villages along the route. By the end of the eighteenth century, these Zambezi-based caravans were traveling as far north as the Lunda homelands in the Congo and as far west as the rich gold producing areas in present-day Zimbabwe.134Incomplete statistics suggest that, for much the century, gold and ivory made up over 80 percent of the value of exports from the Zambezi valley.135
The nature of the trade changed dramatically in the nineteenth century, when the Zambezi valley became a major slave-trading zone. While only several hundred captives reached the coast in the 1750s, by 1821 the number was over five thousand—representing almost 90 percent of the value of exports.136Despite Lisbon’s 1836 abolition decree, sending slaves to the sugar plantations in Brazil, Cuba, and Mauritius continued for most of the century.137Because many of the slaves exported during this period came from communities living along both margins of the river, the lives of these villagers had become much more precarious.138
While commerce in gold, ivory, and slaves was extremely lucrative, often providing the merchants with profits of 500 percent or more,139for the local African canoemen, who were hired to transport these goods up and down the Zambezi on large canoes, it was quite dangerous.140They faced a tangle of challenges, not the least of which was its powerful current, especially during the rainy season. Canoeing downstream in the swollen river could be quite hazardous. When a canoe confronted a fast-moving current, it was nearly impossible for the paddlers to retain control of their boat, and, if it struck a submerged object, both their cargoes and their lives could be lost. Attacks from crocodiles and hippopotami posed additional threats. Daniel Rankin graphically described seeing “a canoe crunched like matchwood and flung with its occupants high in the air by one of these [hippos].”141There were also numerous rapids in the river, each with its own form of jutting rocks and swirling current. Getting caught in a whirlpool could bring the journey to a crashing end. The treacherous thirty-five-kilometer Lupata gorge between Sena and Tete—the “horror of canoe men”—took the lives of many boatmen, when their canoes crashed against the rocks.142Surviving the Lupata gorge was no guarantee of a safe arrival in Tete, however. “The currents as we near Tete seem as strong as those of the Lupata,” wrote John Kirk, and “are even more dangerous.”143Further upriver, the notorious cataracts at Cahora Bassa were still worse.144
The Zambezi as Home of the Prazos
While a small military presence at Sena, Tete, and Zumbo may have been sufficient to protect commerce along the river, it did not ensure Portugal’s political control over the strategic Zambezi waterway and its environs. To establish such sovereignty, Lisbon sought to co-opt the Portuguese nationals already residing there and to turn them into agents of the state. As early as the 1580s, Portuguese merchants and adventurers had begun to amass large tracts of land along both margins of the Zambezi. With the aid of armed slaves, whom they had acquired through trade and previous conquests, they imposed their rule over the local populations living adjacent to the river and upland.145Although these individuals were not initially acting in the name of the crown, Lisbon quickly came to appreciate their potential as colonial agents. In return for swearing fealty, paying annual rents, and providing soldiers to reinforce the small garrisons in Sena and Tete, the settlers received royal titles to their crown estates, called prazos da corôa.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, there were more than 125 prazos,146mostly between Tete and the mouth of the Zambezi. The prazeiros lived off both the taxes (musonkho) and agricultural produce paid by the peasants who resided on their estates and the profits they derived from trading in slaves and ivory. The owners of the largest estates, such as Cheringoma and Gorongoza, collected taxes from more than two thousand peasant villages147 and commanded slave armies of several thousand.148
The crown estates had a long history, spanning almost three centuries, but did little to consolidate Lisbon’s political control over the Zambezi valley. While the prazeiros were supposed to be loyal subjects, they were not,149and officials trying to enforce Lisbon’s dictates often felt their wrath. According to one knowledgeable observer, among any “group of twenty prazeros each one has nineteen enemies; however, all are the enemy of the governor.”150Nor could the governor muster the military force needed to challenge the autonomy of the prazeiro community and impose Lisbon’s authority, since, until the late nineteenth century, the one hundred to three hundred soldiers stationed in the valley151 were poorly armed, poorly trained, and poorly organized.152
The prazeiros’ changing racial and cultural identities further subverted Lisbon’s claim of sovereignty over the Zambezi valley. By 1777, 67 percent of the settler population was racially mixed; twenty-five years later it was 10 percent higher.153Miscegenation typically led to a profound shift in the cultural practices of prazeiro families. The longer they lived in the Zambezi, the more likely they were to adopt local languages, artifacts, practices, and worldviews.154This cultural hybridity further intensified the prazeiros’ ambivalence toward the metropole.155
Between 1800 and 1850, the colonial presence in the Zambezi region declined even further. Due to growing absentee ownership, severe droughts, and locust attacks, Gaza Nguni raids, and the tendency of the prazeiros to enslave their subjects—which precipitated peasant flight and Chikunda slave revolts—the prazo system declined dramatically; by the middle of the century, only twenty prazos were still functioning.156Lisbon’s hold over Zumbo was equally precarious, and in 1836 attacks by the Mburuma Nsenga forced the Portuguese to withdraw.157By the middle of the century, only the towns of Tete and Sena, both of which were in a state of decay and under siege from surrounding chieftaincies and renegade prazeiros,158remained in Portuguese hands.
The Zambezi as a Contested Colonial Terrain
Despite its declining economic significance, the Zambezi River valley remained politically strategic. Although Portugal’s political influence and presence were effectively limited to the two enclaves at Sena and Tete, it used their existence to justify its claims to a vast swath of territory extending well into contemporary Malawi and Zimbabwe. Lisbon even imagined that