Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development. Allen F. Isaacman
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an integral part of African dam workers’ daily lives.
Even when, after independence, scholars and journalists documented the forced internment and labor abuses, the Frelimo government reproduced the colonial narrative that portrayed Cahora Bassa as an icon of economic development and progress and expressed confidence in the dam’s ability to transform the Zambezi valley and spread the fruits of socialism to rural populations. Yet, like all developmentalist states, postindependence Mozambique paid scant attention to the voices of the rural poor—the riverside communities whose concerns about the effects of the dam were lost in the noise surrounding socialist transformation. In 1987, when Frelimo abandoned its socialist project and implemented an IMF–World Bank structural adjustment program, Cahora Bassa figured prominently in its neoliberal development agenda. The optimistic discourse of Mozambican leaders—engineers and economists, stressing the untapped potential of the dam as a source of hydroelectricity—perpetuated the state’s developmentalist ideology and, once again, marginalized peasant concerns.71
In general, displacement is an inherent part of large-state development initiatives, and, whether intended or not, violence regularly accompanies massive infrastructural projects, such as dams. Nevertheless, development, as originally conceived in the aftermath of World War II,72was not supposed to involve the violent disruption of rural societies. Instead, it was built on the premise that “foreign aid and investment on favorable terms, the transfer of knowledge or production techniques, measures to promote health and education, and economic planning would lead impoverished countries to be able to become ‘normal’ market economies.”73Since development was a strategy to alleviate poverty, the rise in per capita GNP, which accompanied development would, according to economist Arthur Lewis, give “man greater control over his environment and thereby increase his freedom.”74At a global level, accelerated economic growth would narrow the gap between rich and poor, precipitating “modernization and economic take off.”75By the 1970s, advocates of neo-liberalism were proclaiming that unfettered markets were the key to development and to the optimal allocation of resources.76
Theorists on the left disagreed, pointing to the failures of large infrastructural projects, like dams—one prominent and typically destructive form of development—to alleviate poverty.77They contended that, rather than closing the gap, the unfettered functioning of the global market actually widened disparities between rich and poor.78This argument was sharpened by critical theorists who stressed that the “uneven development” inherent in capitalism had far-reaching and unequal social and spatial consequences that reinforced global hierarchies of power. By heightening the “contradictory relations of class, of gender, of town and countryside, of ethnicity and nationality,” uneven development created conflicts over scarce resources and struggles for social justice.79Other Marxist critics took a slightly different approach, maintaining that a capitalist modernization agenda further oppressed the working classes, while facilitating capitalist accumulation.80In its place, they offered a socialist model of development that would promote prosperity and social equality.81Feminist scholars, drawing on a variety of different social theories, instead focused on the power of patriarchy and the subordination of women under both developmental paths, which ignored or undervalued production for sustenance and survival in which women and children figured most prominently.82
Proponents of sustainable development—primarily environmental economists for whom the construction of megadams provoked obvious concerns—also criticized the tendency of developmentalists to privilege large infrastructural projects. They insisted that any analysis had to consider the long-term resilience, vulnerability and regenerative capacity of ecological systems, which were essential for sustained economic growth, along with inter- and intragenerational equity.83
In the past two decades, postdevelopmental theorists have argued that development cannot be equated with enlightenment and progress. Ferguson, for example, has maintained that Western notions of modernity were little more than “a set of discourses and practices that has produced and sustained the notion of ‘the Third World as an object’ to be developed” and that developmentalism shaped and legitimated the practices of both the postcolonial state and international development agencies, whose interests were closely aligned.84Arturo Escobar similarly criticizes developmentalism as a strategy by capitalist countries in the global North to secure control over scarce resources and former colonial subjects, which simultaneously intensified hunger and poverty in the very communities being “developed.”85The dam revolution is a case in point—the quintessential example of the delusion of development.
Although our study is informed by these criticisms of development, it would be an oversimplification to assume that development “is a self-evident process, everywhere the same and always tainted by its progressivist European provenance.”86In fact, local, national and transnational factors produce substantial variations over time and space, and even development’s coercive power, while still inseparable from larger processes of economic transformation and power relations, is rooted in local history and social relations.87
While not rejecting the notion of development per se, we recognize its inadequacy as an analytical concept.88For us, the critical issue is what exactly is being developed and for whom. Throughout the text, we employ the concept of sustainable livelihoods—itself a product of development theory—which stresses the inextricable interconnection between power, poverty, and environmental degradation,89since neither communities nor nations can ultimately sustain themselves if they pursue policies that adversely affect the nonhuman world.90In this study, we explore how the socioeconomic and ecological changes caused by Cahora Bassa adversely affected both people’s access to scarce resources and their capacity to use these resources effectively to enhance their daily lives.91To the extent that the dam limited peasants’ ability to achieve positive livelihood outcomes, it brought with it, instead, the delusion of development.
Reading Cahora Bassa—The Challenge of Sources
Archival sources provide much of the evidentiary base for chapters 2, 3, and 4. The Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique (AHM) in Maputo, Mozambique, and the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT) in Lisbon, Portugal, are the most important repositories of written documentation on the planning and construction of Cahora Bassa. The AHM contains numerous engineering and financial reports, as well as brief ecological and ethnographic surveys of the area to be affected by the dam, prepared under the auspices of the Missão do Fomento e Povoamento do Zambese (MFPZ), the state agency charged with overseeing the dam project. The archive is also a repository for reports from local administrators and military officials describing the forced resettlement scheme, rural opposition to the aldeamentos, the war effort against Frelimo, and official concerns about Frelimo’s advance along both margins of the Zambezi River.92
The ANTT houses the largest body of material on the strategic dimensions of the dam. Reports by the Portuguese secret police (Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado, or PIDE) and other security branches, along with those of colonial administrative officials, document the forced removal of peasants, the conditions of the proposed resettlement sites, and internal debates about the strategic desirability of relocating thousands of people from their homelands to protected villages. These sources reveal fissures within the Portuguese colonial regime, particularly between civilian administrators, who favored persuading rural communities to relocate voluntarily, and military commanders, who simply wanted to use force. Colonial intelligence reports, often based on accounts from African spies, describe the growing rural opposition to forced resettlement, the difficult position of loyalist chiefs who had to implement the villagization policy, and government fears that Frelimo would organize workers at the dam site. The ANTT also contains significant documentation of Portugal’s negotiations with South Africa concerning financial and security matters and of efforts by competing multinational corporations to win construction contracts. Additionally, there is an entire dossier about Lisbon’s attempts in the early 1970s to infiltrate and discredit the antidam movement, which had organized an international boycott of Cahora Bassa.
This voluminous documentation, however, has serious limitations. The most obvious is that colonial officials typically considered the opinions and experiences of the rural poor insignificant, rarely recording them for posterity. Even at the local level, European personnel tended to ignore the critical factors affecting the lives of African workers and peasants. For example, there were only