Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development. Allen F. Isaacman
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of the celebratory school. Their influential publications date back to the completion of the Hoover Dam, in the 1930s.45For half a century thereafter, they controlled the terms of public debate, while promoting dams in all corners of the globe. Using a narrow cost-benefit analysis, they emphasized the transformative potential of hydroelectric projects, even while acknowledging some of their unintended negative consequences. Dams, they stressed, provided a source of cheap energy that would stimulate industrial production and electrify areas with no previous access to power. Harnessing rivers, in their view, would promote irrigation and flood control, facilitate river transport, and ensure a secure supply of clean water. Many also predicted a sharp increase in the number of fish in dam reservoirs, thereby increasing the potential income of commercial anglers. More recently, the dam industry and its allies have appropriated the discourse of the green energy movement to claim that hydroelectric projects are a cleaner source of fuel than coal, thermal, oil, or natural gas.46
In the 1970s, geographers and anthropologists concerned about the social costs of dislocation and the worrisome environmental effects of recently erected dams began to challenge this dominant narrative. They pointed to the devastating ecological and health consequences of a river’s inability to flow freely, since large dam reservoirs flooded fertile farmlands and rich forests, drowned wildlife, and destroyed medicinal plants. Downriver, altered flow regimes increased erosion, destroyed subsidiary channels, disrupted fish populations, increased salinization, and threatened vital mangrove forests. Human populations occupying river valleys also suffered sharp spikes in waterborne diseases, such as schistosomiasis, malaria, and gastroenteritis.47
Mounting evidence of large dams’ damaging effects helped fuel indigenous protest movements, particularly in Brazil, India, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey, and Zambia, and added urgency to academic debates.48These local insurgencies, supported by a growing transnational antidam movement,49highlighted for the world the traumatic social and cultural costs to riverine communities. Concerned scholars followed the lead of antidam activists, publishing accounts of forced displacement and the ways in which postdam flow regimes undermined traditional agricultural systems.50Other academics questioned whether providing cheap energy for cities and export industries at the expense of the rural poor was a sustainable development strategy or simply a reflection of who controlled the levers of state power.51
Although most of these debates focused on large dams in Asia and Latin America, Africanist scholars contributed by challenging the “heroic and often arrogant, modernizing dam-building agenda of the 1960s to the 1980s.”52Foremost among them was the eminent anthropologist Elizabeth Colson, whose foundational 1971 study The Social Consequences of Resettlement, based on her extensive fieldwork in the 1960s, described in painful detail how the world of more than fifty-seven thousand Gwembe Tonga was turned upside down by their forcible removal from their homelands in southern Zambia during construction of the Kariba Dam. Thayer Scudder, who worked with Colson, extended her analysis by publicizing the dam-induced poverty in the area surrounding Lake Kariba, one of the largest artificial lakes and reservoirs in the world.53Geographer William Adams, in his continentwide study, Wasting the Rain, documented how river development schemes disrupted floodplain ecologies and subverted farming and fishing.54Most recently, feminist scholar Dzodzi Tsikata’s Living in the Shadow of the Large Dams analyzed the experiences of lakeside and downstream communities affected by Ghana’s Volta River Project.
Other Africanists, both north and south of the Sahara, opened up new areas of inquiry. Timothy Mitchell’s provocative Rule of Experts, using the case of the Aswan High Dam to explore the inner world of technopolitics in the Egyptian state, showed how colonial and postcolonial experts celebrated the transformative power of dams while sidelining peasants’ concerns.55JoAnn McGregor’s innovative study, Crossing the Zambezi, situated the Kariba Dam’s construction within the 150-year history of the politics of landscape in the middle Zambezi, while Julia Tischler’s doctoral dissertation on Kariba analyzed the politics of development in the turbulent era of decolonialization.56Tsikata’s work on the Volta Dam raised important questions about the gendered effects of Africa’s hydroelectric projects, and Stephan Miescher’s current research, extending the analysis beyond political economy and ecology, will explore its cultural symbolism and Ghanaian attitudes toward modernity, development, and nationhood.57
Our work is informed by both the scholarly debate on Africa’s large dams and prior scholarship on Cahora Bassa, much of which focused on either the dam’s strategic dimensions or its effects on downriver flora and fauna. João Paulo Borges Coelho’s 1993 doctoral thesis, “Protected Villages and Communal Villages in the Mozambican Province of Tete (1968–1982),” detailed how the forced relocation of thousands of peasants—both those living in the area adjacent to Cahora Bassa and others residing in adjacent regions not affected by the dam—was a critical dimension of Lisbon’s counterinsurgency progam.58Keith Middlemas’s 1975 study, Cabora Bassa: Engineering and Politics in Southern Africa, documented the challenges of financing and constructing the dam, drawing on official government reports, correspondence between Lisbon and prospective investors, and over one hundred interviews with dam officials, African workers, Portuguese military commanders, and Frelimo guerrillas.59In his carefully researched doctoral thesis, “The Regulation of the Zambezi in Mozambique,” Peter Bolton examined the initial impact of the dam on the Zambezi River valley.60
Professor Brian Davies, a University of Cape Town zoologist, was part of a Portuguese research team in the 1970s investigating the anticipated ecological impacts of Cahora Bassa. After conducting pioneering studies downriver, he predicted that the dam would cause appreciable environmental destruction.61He spent the next thirty years mapping out the actual consequences, which were even worse than what he had predicted.62His work has been extended by Richard Beilfuss, a hydrologist who, with a team of Mozambican and foreign scientists, extensively researched environmental flows and sustainable management of the Zambezi River over the last two decades.63Their extremely important studies of wetland and wildlife conservation, particularly in the Zambezi delta, have provided invaluable information on the long-term ecological effects of Cahora Bassa. Our debt to all these scholars, but particularly to Beilfuss and his colleagues, is evident in the frequency with which we cite their work.
The present study makes three contributions to the literature on Cahora Bassa and the broader scholarship on the impact of large hydroelectric projects in Africa and the global South. Most writings on large dams have a strong presentist bias. Investigators typically begin their analyses either just before a dam’s construction or shortly thereafter. By contrast, we treat Cahora Bassa as part of a much longer history, dating back to the sixteenth century, of Portuguese attempts to colonize the Zambezi valley and domesticate one of Africa’s mightiest rivers. In summarizing that history, we also explore how European travelers and Portuguese functionaries forged a master narrative of the river as wild and dangerous—one that stands in stark contrast to indigenous representations of the Zambezi as a source of life and prosperity, which could be dangerous if not respected. Additionally, we look ahead—examining how the dam’s history may affect Mozambique’s decision to build a second dam at Mphanda Nkuwa, sixty kilometers downriver.
Just as we have extended the temporal parameters of our study beyond the relatively short history of the Cahora Bassa Dam, so too have we broadened its spatial dimensions by extending our gaze downriver from the dam site and reservoir to the Zambezi delta and estuary. Most studies of large dams tend to explore the social and ecological consequences either around the dam site or in the river delta, rather than examining the entire river system. As part of this expanded geographic perspective, we also include material on the Kariba Dam, located approximately eight hundred kilometers upriver on the Zimbabwe-Zambia border, since the amount of water it discharged has had a significant impact on Cahora Bassa and the area downriver. To understand the changing fields of power in which Cahora Bassa’s history is embedded, it is necessary to consider the wider regional, transnational, and global forces operating during this period. Cold war geopolitics, the apartheid regime’s aggressive efforts at bolstering its hegemonic position in the region, Lisbon’s efforts to maintain a significant presence in postcolonial Mozambique, and pressure from the World Bank and the IMF have all figured prominently in the history of the dam.
Finally, we have shifted our principal angle of vision from a state-centric developmental approach to one that explores the linkages between power inequities