Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development. Allen F. Isaacman
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According to the first trope, before the region’s vast resources could be extracted, it was necessary to tame the wild, malaria-infested river. Explorers and officials repeatedly documented the dangers posed by the powerful currents, jutting rocks, and menacing gorges, which jeopardized commerce and blunted passage inland. For commerce and Christianity to flourish, the river had to be domesticated and the natural barriers destroyed. Writing about the limitations imposed by the Cahora Bassa gorge, Livingstone noted, “if we can blast away the rocks which obstruct the passage, [i]t will be like opening wide the gates which barred the interior for ages.”189Colonial authorities also lamented the unpredictable floods, which washed over the banks and destroyed peasants’ fields and, more recently, company plantations. From the middle of the sixteenth century, they documented rainy-season floods, which seemed to recur every ten years or so.190Flood control, in fact, became one argument for constructing the Cahora Bassa Dam (see chapter 3).
That the degenerate settler community and the backward indigenous population had both failed to take advantage of the well-endowed Zambezi region was the second trope. According to Kirk, “there is not one white man or one who may call himself white, in the whole district . . . without venereal diseases. . . . The consequence is that all have skin diseases and when they have children, they are miserably syphilitic both in mind and body.”191A century later, a senior colonial official echoed this assessment—lamenting that the indolent and ignorant estate holders “do not go in for any physical exercise, nourish themselves on a heavy and excessive diet, and delight in the abuse of sexual pleasures.”192Portuguese authorities regularly complained that the debauchery of the estate holders subverted development.193According to Governor Sebastião Xavier Botelho, writing early in the nineteenth century, so did their ignorance: “The [prazeiros along the coast] plant the cane out of season and without any knowledge of the most appropriate and suitable lands for this endeavor; and the crop failure is then attributed to the quality of the land rather than the ignorance of the cultivator. If the production of sugarcane is poorly planned, it is no worse than the sugar cultivation on the Tete prazos in which they use inappropriate machinery, which conserves neither time nor manpower.”194
Others attributed the lack of productivity in the fertile river valley to the ignorance and laziness of the Africans. Consider how Livingstone wove together themes of the region’s divine-given fecundity with its unproductiveness: “The cultivated spots are mere dots compared to the broad fields of rich soil which is never either grazed or tilled. Pity that the plenty in store for all, from our Father’s bountiful hands, is not enjoyed by more.”195Colonial authorities shared his views, which became the ideological justification for forced labor. “It was imperative,” wrote Joaquim Mousinho de Albuquerque, a Portuguese high commissioner in 1899, “to instill a work ethic among the indigenous population and eliminate the indolent habits of the savages.”196Twenty-five years later, the governor of Tete echoed these sentiments, characterizing many of the “tribes” under his jurisdiction as “ill-disposed to work,” “docile,” and “thieves.”197To compensate for the slothful Africans, development required that more Portuguese migrate to the Zambezi valley.198
The ability of technology and science to overcome the obstacles of the river and permit exploitation of the region’s resources was the third trope. The time and dedication explorers and government officials devoted to cartographical, geological, and agronomic notations of the Zambezi were just one indication of their faith in scientific knowledge. Carl Peters, a German explorer, predicted that “European science would easily succeed in revolutionizing the country.”199Portuguese officials saw the growth of modern plantations, construction of new railways, and development of the river as keys to unlocking the region’s wealth and ensuring progress under the Portuguese flag.200In 1912, for example, the governor of the district of Quelimane argued passionately that “the salvation of the Zambezi and its transformation into a major agricultural zone” depended on the construction of several railway lines.201The completion of the Trans-Zambezi Railway a decade later, followed by the railroad bridge across the Zambezi at Sena, were steps in that direction. Nevertheless, eliminating the Cabora Bassa gorge as a barrier into the interior and constructing a dam on that site remained prerequisites to effective domestication of the river and exploitation of the Zambezi valley’s rich natural resources.
Local Perspectives:
“In the Past, the Zambezi Gave Us Wealth”202
For the Shona- and Chewa-speaking communities who had settled on the southern and northern margins of the Zambezi well before the arrival of the Portuguese (see map 2.1),203the river was neither a dangerous force of nature requiring domestication nor a form of wealth waiting to be tapped by scientists who, alone, knew the value of the riches it contained. While examples of livelihood insecurity—the river’s erratic character and the hardships that flooding, crocodiles, and hippopotami caused, for example—are embedded in their oral narratives of environmental harmony in the pre-Cahora Bassa period, their stories about the Zambezi emphasized the river’s positive meanings for the rural communities living near its shores.
From their perspective, for centuries the Zambezi had provided a safe and bountiful supply of fresh running water for drinking, cooking, washing, and bathing. It had nourished the reeds African men used to weave mats and baskets and the trees they needed to build homes and canoes. It was also an important waterway that facilitated local commerce in agricultural produce, honey, wax, fish, meat, iron, and indigenously produced cloth, and, even before the Portuguese arrived, a flourishing trade with Indian Ocean merchants. Additionally, the river yielded powerful medicines that combated illness and infection and was the location of many sacred sites. Above all else, it provided the nutrients needed to fertilize cultivators’ alluvial gardens and to support the fish populations that were a crucial source of protein in African diets.
In short, the Zambezi, despite its unpredictability, had “given wealth” to African communities by sustaining and providing life. Thus, despite the nostalgia that is evident in their recollections, representations of the river in contemporary oral narratives highlight its intrinsic benefits and life-giving properties, rather than the hazards—or development potential—stressed by outsiders, making them an important counter to European discourses about the Zambezi.
In the following section, we highlight how Africans living in the lower Zambezi valley described the river’s role in their everyday lives before the construction of Cahora Bassa. Based on oral and archival materials from the area stretching downriver from the dam to the Zambezi delta, this summary provides insights into the river’s history and its varied impacts on local communities, environments, and production systems. Oral accounts stress the extraordinary agricultural capacity, biodiversity, and livability of the Zambezi floodplains while the river remained in African hands and provide glimpses of the devastating microecological and economic consequences that followed for peasant households when the colonial state appropriated control over its life-sustaining waters.
The Lower Zambezi Ecosystem
The lower Zambezi extends from Cahora Bassa to the expansive delta and enters the sea through a mosaic of alluvial grasslands and swamp forest, covering an area of 225,000 square kilometers. In the mountainous area, from Cahora Bassa to Tete city, the river runs through a narrow valley (five hundred meters wide) with bedrock outcrops adjacent to the waterway. Downstream from Tete, it broadens to a width of several kilometers. Only at the fast-swirling Lupata gorge, 320 kilometers from its mouth, does the river narrow appreciably. Otherwise, the banks are low and fringed with reeds, with alluvial gardens located along both shores. The Shire River flows from Lake Malawi into the Zambezi about 160 kilometers from the sea. Just south is the fertile delta, a triangular area covering 1.2 million hectares. The rich delta floodplain, whose width can reach several hundred kilometers, historically supported hundreds of thousands of rural villages. The delta’s savanna and woodlands provided wood for fuel and housing along with wild fruits and medicinal plants and sustained a wide variety of wildlife, including the largest population of Cape buffalo in Africa.204
Before the construction of any upriver dams, the most important factor shaping the physical environment of the lower Zambezi valley—and the welfare of all species inhabiting the river and its neighboring lowlands—was the Zambezi’s annual flood cycle. The complex ecological dynamics of the lower