Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development. Allen F. Isaacman
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the difficulties of securing water for the Zambezi valley’s rural poor and ecosystems. We focus on the interconnection between livelihood vulnerability and environmental changes provoked by the dam, and, because our emphasis is on the daily lives of affected rural communities, peasants’ stories, rather than the official modernizing discourse of the colonial regime or the postcolonial state, are at the center of our analysis.
In adopting this strategy, we do not dismiss the role of the colonial state or its successor. Nor do we ignore the possibility of dissenting voices within the Portuguese and Frelimo administrations. To the contrary, we examine whatever critical debates and divergent views about the dam periodically surfaced. Although some documentation from the colonial period exists, because Mozambique’s postcolonial archives remain closed, and producing cheap hydroelectric power continues to be a high priority of the Frelimo government, high-level disagreements about Cahora Bassa and the proposed dam at Mphanda Nkuwa generally remain shrouded in secrecy.64
Thanks to the work of such authors as Timothy Mitchell, James Scott, and James Ferguson, we know a great deal about “the rule of experts,” what it means to see like a state, and the totalitarian aspects of modernist state planning.65Using these concepts, we have sought to write a social history of a development project in which the rural poor are not simply objects of state planning but play a significant role as actors in the story. This shift in the angle of vision helps us to understand how top-down developmentalism affected the organization of agriculture, the utilization of labor, the exploitation of microecological systems, the development of innovative fishing techniques, and the general resiliency of affected populations.
Displacement for Development
In the name of development, state-planned and -executed large dam projects have disrupted the lives and livelihoods of millions of people throughout the global South. “Development-induced displacement,” to borrow the language of Peter Vandergeest, most often affects the poorest and most marginalized communities.66It also can have calamitous consequences for the physical and cultural worlds in which poor communities reside. Displacement for development certainly happened at Cahora Bassa, and the history of that destructive process is the narrative core of this study.
In the chapters that follow, we employ the term displace in two slightly different ways.67In its most conventional usage, as described in the next several paragraphs, displace means to remove or shift someone or something from its customary physical location. We use displace in this sense to capture the lived experiences of riverine communities that were violently dislodged and relocated to so-called protected villages when Lake Cahora Bassa inundated their historic homelands. Displace also refers to the forced removal of African villages located on the salubrious Songo highlands when those lands were taken over by Zamco, the multinational corporation that constructed the dam.68The term displacement also captures the experience of peasants living downriver who had to abandon fertile alluvial plains and island gardens when unpredictable discharges from the dam flooded these highly valued cultivated spaces.
In addition to people, Cahora Bassa literally displaced animals, plants, and soils. A few examples will illustrate this point. Herds of elephant, wildebeest, and kudu, among other wildlife that roamed the savannas and forests in the region adjacent to the river, either drowned or fled when the dam reservoir was filled. By sharply reducing the volume of river flow in the lower Zambezi, the dam increased salinization in the biologically diverse delta wetlands, leading over time to the replacement of freshwater grasses with more salt-tolerant species, able to thrive in the brackish water. And, because Cahora Bassa dramatically impeded the silt from traveling downriver, the mineral-starved water below the dam recaptured sediment loads by eating away at the riverbanks. This caused erosion that displaced large quantities of precious alluvial soil.
By converting the natural power of the Zambezi River into electricity for South Africa, the dam also displaced energy from Mozambique. Its primary function was to produce electricity, but not for local consumption. Instead, Cahora Bassa transported up to 1,450 megawatts over a 1,800-kilometer network of pylons stretching from Songo to the power grids of South Africa. This energy was, and continues to be, used to power South African mines, farms, and cities, while the vast majority of Mozambicans who live in the lower Zambezi valley remain without access to electricity and the economic activities it makes possible. In short, the dam converted one of Mozambique’s most vital natural resources into an export commodity, principally for the economic benefit of its powerful neighbor.
The dam robbed energy from the region in another, less obvious way. By harnessing the once powerful Zambezi so that it no longer flowed freely, the dam prevented the river from accomplishing all its previous essential work. In addition to blocking the flow of water and silt, the dam walls trapped substantial amounts of organic and inorganic material that had previously fertilized the alluvial soils of the floodplains, creating optimal conditions for agriculture in an environment where erratic rainfall and poor soils made farming a precarious enterprise. As a result, riparian human communities as well as other forms of plant and animal life permanently lost essential energy-supplying nutrients.
We employ the term displace in a second, very different way to connote a less tangible process of dislodging and replacing. Here we have in mind the ways in which dominant colonial and postcolonial narratives of Cahora Bassa’s history have rendered inaudible the stories and experiences of the Zambezi valley’s riverine peoples. This silencing is due, of course, to the asymmetrical power relations surrounding the production and dissemination of knowledge about state-sponsored development projects. The Portuguese colonial state and its postcolonial successors all maintained a wall of silence around Cahora Bassa, authorizing only official representations of the dam in public discussions. Absent from public discourse were the experiences, conversations, and ideas of peasants who lived with the consequences of its existence. Official adulation for the hydroelectric project muted the voices of these men and women, in a form of displacement whose epistemological violence was no less painful than the physical violence peasants experienced because of the dam.
That Portuguese authorities silenced critical discussion of Cahora Bassa is hardly surprising, given the colonial regime’s highly authoritarian character and its tendency to stifle any dissent. For all the fanfare about improving the quality of life for rural Mozambicans, Cahora Bassa’s ultimate purpose was to cement a security alliance between the Portuguese colonial state and apartheid South Africa. The dam was integral to Portugal’s antiguerrilla military strategy and a symbol of its commitment to retain its African empire. Even in government circles, there could be no debate about Cahora Bassa. European planners, scientists, or district administrators who raised questions about the potentially devastating effects of the megadam on local communities and environments were ignored, censored, or removed from their positions.69
The colonial version of history rested on the premise that the Portuguese were the guardians of progress, civilization, and modernity.70In its master narrative, the colonial state produced order, as opposed to the chaos and disorder of the precolonial past, which left no place for state-sanctioned violence. To the extent that colonial authorities acknowledged the violence that did occur, they cast it as an unintended or unfortunate, but necessary, consequence of “progress.” Thus, Lisbon claimed that, compared to the dislocations caused by other large dam projects in Africa, only twenty-eight thousand people—a relatively small number—would be relocated due to Cahora Bassa and that problems associated with peasant relocation were amenable to technical solutions, such as selecting fertile sites and digging wells and boreholes. Colonial officials also contended that the inconvenience of forced resettlement was a trivial price to pay for the wide-ranging benefits Cahora Bassa would deliver.
Since the state prohibited scholars, journalists, and international observers from entering the areas of the Zambezi valley where aldeamentos (protected villages) were located, rural families herded into the protected villages had no channel through which to communicate their version of events to the outside world and no power to challenge the sanitized fiction of official discourse. Like displaced peasants, the African workers whose labor built Cahora Bassa could share stories of suffering only with one another. Portuguese accounts of the dam’s construction similarly displaced evidence of the ongoing violence and exploitation and depicted the construction site as a harmonious multiracial workplace. No one reported the coercion and intimidation, the grueling