men and women we interviewed at the time of our meeting. As John Collins reminds us, we need to be aware of “the overdetermination of memory by immediate events.”114In the case of Cahora Bassa, many elders may have also romanticized what life was like before the dam,115either because they were, at the time they were interviewed, involved in ongoing efforts to pressure the government to restore the predam flow regime or because they knew about plans to construct a second dam at Mphanda Nkuwa. Other villagers deployed this claim to support their demand that the ruling party take responsibility for environmental recovery in the Zambezi valley. Similarly, antidam activists and some living near Mphanda Nkuwa invoked a pre–Cahora Bassa golden age, as part of a broader political discourse opposing construction of the new dam.116
This nostalgia probably also explains the tendency of some elders to attribute to the dam’s existence a variety of other ills, even when there is little evidence to support them. Several villagers, for example, asserted that, because the uncertain flows of the river discouraged animals from coming there in search of water, the small game they used to hunt had disappeared.117This explanation failed to consider the impacts of increasingly dense human settlements on the river’s margins and the destruction of wildlife habitats by relocated villagers who cleared the riverine woodlands for firewood, building materials, and to make charcoal.118
The politics of forgetting also complicates the present-day meaning of oral narratives. Sometimes individuals and groups forget simply because of the limitations of memory—as when people make the past more manageable by blending the specifics of everyday life into a set of more “generic memories.”119Indeed, accounts of patterned, normative behavior devoid of daily variations—as reflected in descriptions of “what we used to do”—characterized many of the stories about life before the dam. Forgetting, however, can also be a profoundly political act. As debates regarding memories of the Holocaust remind us, denial and suppression are common ways of reconfiguring both fragments of a collective past and the consciousness of individual historical actors.120Some of the elders we interviewed, for example, tended to downplay the more disturbing elements of their histories, such as the social tensions among aldeamento residents. Many were also reluctant to talk about adultery or witchcraft in these camps, although, when pressed, they acknowledged the presence of both. There was a similar tendency to gloss over the fact that male family members had worked as sipais (African police) or had fought in the colonial army. Such distortions require that we listen carefully and critically not only to the multiple voices in oral sources but also to the silences.121
Interpreting Zambezi valley oral sources becomes even more problematic due to the forced relocation of peasants into protected villages between 1970 and 1975 and the massive displacement of rural communities fleeing from Renamo attacks during the 1980s. These related processes destroyed communities, filled refugee villages with people from many different places, and severed their attachments to the specific physical sites associated with a remembered past. Since many stories about the past were grounded in particular “memory places” or “memoryscapes,”122displacement may have discouraged some from regularly reciting their historical memories—an activity necessary for their retention. Given the extraordinary instability in Mozambique during this period, we must be sensitive to Isabel Hofmeyr’s position that oral traditions lose much of their substance when divorced from the geographical and social setting of their performance.123That her position may be somewhat overstated is suggested by Heidi Gengenbach’s brilliant and comprehensive study of southern Mozambican women whose lives and communities were ravaged by Renamo attacks which forced them to flee their homelands.124Contrary to Hofmeyr, she found that physically displaced people did not necessarily cease to remember their past125 and that, even where some loss of memory occurred, its rate was uneven.126Thus, scholars must be sensitive both to the circumstances under which displaced people manage to hold on to their memories and to the strength of their remaining recollections.
How people reconstruct, interpret, and use the past has powerful relevance for the present and future, and awareness of what might be at stake in speaking publicly about Cahora Bassa certainly influenced responses to our questions. After many of these sessions, outspoken individuals—some angry, others solicitous—asked us to stress to government officials in Maputo how much rural people had suffered because of Cahora Bassa. Beatriz Maquina, for example, expressed her frustrations as follows:
We are very tired of being interviewed. Many people have come here [from the government and NGOs] to ask us questions, and they promised to bring us seeds, corn, other cereals and blankets. But, until today, we have not received anything and we continue to suffer. These promises were made during the time of the war with Renamo and even today. They promised us many things and promised to help us, but nothing ever happened. We do not have schools, a hospital, or anything else. We are tired of all these interviews. We want to know when we will receive these things promised to us. You in the city eat well and live well, and we continue to suffer.127
A few raised the issue of compensation, although most simply wanted the authorities to make the river run freely again.128Although we insisted that we were not working for the government and had no direct links to state officials, these exchanges underscore the ways in which research and representation cannot be divorced from relations of power, which meant, at a minimum, that they saw us as having access to and influence with those who mattered.129
Whatever the contemporary overtones and difficulties of interpretation, these oral accounts constitute the richest and most accurate body of evidence about both the changing world of the lower Zambezi valley and the lived experience of its rural residents. Like all other forms of historical evidence, however, oral testimonies require careful and critical reading.
The Book’s Architecture
This study focuses on the period from the 1960s, when the Portuguese began planning for Cahora Bassa, to 2007, when Mozambique finally gained majority ownership of the dam. We situate it, however, within a broader historical framework, beginning with Portuguese efforts, dating back to the sixteenth century, to dominate the Zambezi River valley and ending with the ever-present effect of Cahora Bassa on the daily lives of people living adjacent to the river.
Chapter 2 documents Portuguese efforts, dating back to the sixteenth century, to conquer and domesticate the Zambezi River and its hinterland. Through the long history of their encounters with the waterway and riverine communities, colonial authorities, travelers, geographers, and development experts forged a narrative that stressed the dangers of the unharnessed river and constructed the region as an insalubrious backwater occupied by primitive people and half-breed Portuguese with neither the will nor the capacity to exploit nature’s bounty. This chapter also explores local representations of the river before the dam, in which the idea of the Zambezi as a source of life coexisted with the notion of a capricious river that could flood their fields and destroy both their livelihoods and their lives.
Chapter 3 examines the construction of Cahora Bassa. Here we document the enormous technical problems the Portuguese had to overcome in a remote corner of Mozambique without any infrastructure. The chapter focuses on the labor process at the dam site, the highly racialized and regimented organization of work, and the contrasting experiences of European and African employees.
Chapter 4 explores the forced displacement of more than thirty thousand peasants from their ancestral homelands, which were later submerged under the man-made lake. Reconstruction of aspects of daily life within the aldeamentos relies primarily on the oral narratives of men and women who were herded into these barbed-wire encampments.
Chapter 5 shifts the angle of vision downriver. Cahora Bassa had far-reaching effects on the ecology of the Zambezi River valley and on the communities living adjacent to the waterway. The change in the river’s flow regime—above all the unpredictable discharges from the dam—jeopardized the alluvial farming practices on which hundreds of thousands of people had relied in the predam era. The dramatic decline in its sediment load, trapped behind the walls of the dam, also robbed farmlands of valuable nutrients and precipitated massive erosion along the riverbanks. Plant and animal
