Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development. Allen F. Isaacman
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from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, connecting its holdings in Angola and Mozambique. These imperial assertions, however, were challenged by Great Britain, by powerful mestizo warlords, and by inland African states like the Barue, whose chiefs vowed never to accept European rule.
England posed the most serious threat. Already dominating key sectors of the Portuguese metropolitan economy, British imperialists hoped to bring the fertile Manica highlands, the Shire valley, and the Zambezi valley into its empire. Beginning with David Livingstone in 1856, a wave of British explorers and missionaries “invaded” the Zambezi.159They wrote widely publicized books and newspaper articles detailing the horrors of the slave trade, the failure of the Portuguese to “civilize the natives,” and the racial and cultural degeneration of the prazeiros.160The subtext of their publications was that Lisbon was unable to govern the Zambezi valley effectively—making its colonial claims illusory.
By the 1870s, British interests had made inroads in the region. The Scottish missionaries forged a religious community in the Shire highlands, and the African Lakes Company, an English commercial venture, challenged Portugal’s trade monopoly by operating its own ships on the Zambezi River.161During the next decade, the British also incorporated portions of the Manica highlands, which Portugal considered an integral part of its territory, into their holdings in Southern Rhodesia. In 1890, to avert a looming war with Great Britain, Portugal had to renounce its claim to territory inland from the Zambezi in what later became Malawi and Zimbabwe162 This effectively destroyed its dream of creating a Central African empire linking Mozambique and Angola.
At the same time, Portugal faced serious military challenges from rebellious warlords who controlled powerful military states. The southern margin of the Zambezi River between Tete and the Indian Ocean was divided between Massangano and Gouveia’s Tonga confederation; Carazimamba, Kanyemba, and Matakenya dominated the zone from Tete to Zumbo; and Makanga and Massingire and the Makololo state163 controlled the region between the Shire River and the Undi’s territory, opposite Tete.164These conquest states built large stone fortresses, known as aringas, to defend their territory and control trade along the Zambezi, and all but the Makololo relied on large well-armed Chikunda forces to impose their hegemony over the indigenous populations.165They prospered by enslaving thousands of villagers living adjacent to the river.166
In an effort to co-opt these warlords and transform them into colonial conquerors, Portuguese officials provided them with sophisticated weapons and closed their eyes to the warlords’ clandestine involvement in slaving.167When this strategy failed, Lisbon had no choice but to bolster its military presence and aggressively attack the renegades. To do otherwise might have led to a British takeover of this region—a fear reinforced by British negotiations with the Makololo, Kanyemba, and the Barue kingdom.168Despite stiff opposition, between 1886 and 1901 Portuguese forces defeated one state after another.169
The warlords’ defeat and the retreat of the Gaza Nguni southward left the Barue as the only major regional state outside Portugal’s control.170In August 1902 an elite Portuguese force, aided by several thousand African infantry soldiers, launched a major attack on the Barue. The five thousand Barue soldiers proved no match for the heavily armed colonial army, which subdued them by the end of the year.171Sixteen years later, descendants of the Barue rebels rose up to protest chibalo (conscripted African labor), which they equated with slavery. It took Lisbon a year to crush the insurrection.172Only then, more than three hundred years after the Portuguese crown had claimed sovereignty over the Zambezi, did Lisbon effectively control this region.
The Zambezi as a Zone of Unrealized Wealth
From the moment the first Portuguese traders and adventurers moved up the river, Lisbon expected the Zambezi valley someday to yield handsome profits. Colonial officials believed the rumors of rich gold and silver deposits and later were confident that plantation agriculture would flourish along the river’s fertile floodplains. Their dreams of transforming the Zambezi valley into a vibrant economic zone, however, were never realized.
Portugal initially sought to control the river to gain access to the large gold mines it believed to exist in the interior. While explorers and traders never discovered the fabled mines of the queen of Sheba,173they did encounter a thriving local mining industry. In the southern hinterland’s streams and rivulets, Africans panned for gold, which they sold to Muslim traders at the inland fairs. By the seventeenth century, Portuguese adventurers were also prospecting for gold, both there and on the northern bank. Through conquest or rental agreements with local land chiefs, they obtained control of gold-producing areas, where they established bares (permanent mining camps). Because bare owners failed to introduce modern mining technology, yields from shallow veins and rivulets were low, and only a trickle of gold reached the coast. In fact, in 1821 gold represented less than 2 percent of the total value of exports.174The reputed silver mines proved even more illusory, and exploitation of the rich coal deposits at Moatize, across the river from Tete, began only in the early twentieth century.175
Colonial efforts to promote agriculture were no more successful, despite the rich alluvial soils adjacent to the river. For centuries, Portuguese officials had presumed that plantation agriculture would anchor the prazo system. While periodically decreeing that prazeiros grow coffee, sugar, rice, tobacco, and other cash crops, they bemoaned the settlers’ failure to select appropriate soils and seeds or to irrigate fields adjacent to the Zambezi.176With the exception of a handful of prazos in the delta producing rice, sugar, and wheat, commercial agriculture was nonexistent. In 1806 only twenty thousand kilograms of food were exported from the entire region,177and by 1821 such exports had declined by 90 percent.178Little changed during the remainder of the century, due to the prazeiros’ ignorance of modern farming methods, their unwillingness to invest in technology, the lack of transport and accessible markets, and the much higher returns from trading in slaves and ivory.179
Portugal’s decision in the 1870s to open the region to international commerce and Europe’s soaring demand for vegetable oils for soap and candle making spurred an agricultural revolution based on peasant production.180Nevertheless, by the end of the century, Lisbon had reversed its policy and begun again promoting plantation agriculture181 through long-term grants to concessionary companies. These firms employed conscripted African labor, which worked the fields to satisfy their tax obligations. In 1899 promulgation of a native labor code, which codified the existing system of unfree African labor in Mozambique, known as chibalo,182assured the concessionary companies an ample supply of workers.183This secure labor supply, especially in the Zambezi delta, allowed sugar production to skyrocket from 605 tons in 1893 to almost thirty thousand tons two decades later and ensured the profitability of the copra and sisal plantations that sprang up along the coast.184
Upriver cash crop production, by contrast, was negligible. Writing in the 1920s, the governor of Tete complained that the “practical effects of development [projects] was zero.”185To stimulate additional agricultural and mineral production in this region, Portugal built the Trans-Zambézia Railway in 1922 and, in 1935, the railway bridge across the Zambezi at Sena, thereby effectively linking the region, with its large coal deposits at Moatize, to the port of Beira.186Even with these limited state initiatives, economic development outside the delta remained illusory.187
Despite the new railroad, upriver transport continued to be problematic. Most goods traveling between Tete and the Indian Ocean went on canoes of various sizes, barges, and flat-bottomed boats. These small craft were subject to the vagaries of the mighty river and could carry only limited quantities. A small number of steamboats also plied the river, but, even for them, Tete was the end of the journey. The gorge at Cahora Bassa blocked passage to the interior, which, Portuguese officials believed, prevented development of the region. After World War II, colonial planners concluded that other large projects were necessary to promote modernization in the Zambezi. Within a decade, constructing a dam at Cahora Bassa had become the panacea for economic takeoff.
Constructing a Colonial Narrative
From more than three centuries of contact with the Zambezi valley, Portuguese officials and European explorers constructed a comprehensive narrative of the river and its environs, which was framed by racial and cultural stereotyping and ideas about the degenerative nature of the tropics188 and further shaped by their local guides and translators. While constraints of space preclude in-depth