of Cahora Bassa’s ecological effects relies heavily on both the oral testimonies and the scientific findings of a handful of researchers. While we have tried to assess and summarize the scientific data, as social historians we lack the technical expertise to explain fully the dam’s impact on the ecology of the Zambezi valley.
Chapter 6 focuses on displaced energy. It documents Cahora Bassa’s unique role as the largest dam in the world constructed to produce energy for export. Even after the end of Portuguese colonial rule and until today, virtually all its energy goes to South Africa. The chapter also details Frelimo’s long struggle to gain control over the dam, which remained in Portugal’s hands until 2007—thirty-two years after Mozambique achieved independence.
In “Legacies,” the final chapter, we review the impact of the dam on both the riverine communities and the biosphere. Despite Cahora Bassa’s traumatic history, the Frelimo government remains committed to a colonial-era plan to erect a second dam approximately seventy kilometers downriver. There are many striking parallels, and several significant differences, between the colonial and postcolonial projects. After examining the current rationale for the second dam, and the opposition that has emerged from a small but vocal antidam movement in the Mozambican capital, we discuss the concerns of and the expected outcomes for the two thousand residents who will have to make way for Mphanda Nkuwa, should this project proceed.
2 The Zambezi River Valley in Mozambican History
An Overview
Well before the Portuguese arrival in the Zambezi valley, in the sixteenth century, the Zambezi River had attracted Shona- and Chewa-speaking peoples who settled permanently along the banks of the river (see map 2.1),130as well as hunters, traders, and adventurers in search of gold, some of whom remained in the region. For over three centuries, the waterway also figured prominently in Portugal’s plans to control the Mozambican interior. The Cahora Bassa Dam was merely its most recent effort to colonize the Zambezi valley and domesticate the river.
During these centuries, the Zambezi was a porous frontier that both separated and connected the peoples living near the river.131While communities on each side recognized it as a boundary, people also traded across it, fished in it, and sometimes even farmed on both banks. Gradually the river became less significant as a frontier than as a zone of settlement. As these groups of African and other immigrants domesticated the Zambezi valley, they transformed the waterway into a valuable resource.
We start this chapter with an overview of the Zambezi valley’s strategic and changing significance as a highway into the interior, a home to the prazo estates, a zone of imperialist competition, and a site of unfulfilled economic development—themes that encapsulate much of the larger world’s encounters with the region. From this history, Europeans forged a master narrative—portraying the river as “wild and dangerous,” the indigenous population as “primitive,” and the descendants of the Portuguese and Goan settlers as “half-breeds” who fostered the slave trade and stunted economic development by failing to exploit the area’s natural resources. Portugal used these images of instability and violence to justify its conquest of the Zambezi valley, toward the end of the nineteenth century.
We then shift the angle of vision from a regional and transnational perspective and explore the impact of the Zambezi on the daily lives of the local populations. Their stories, based on a more sustained and intimate relationship with the river, are markedly different. For them, the river was, above all else, a source of life and prosperity, even though unusually large floods sometimes destroyed their fields and swept away their homes.
The Zambezi as a Highway into the Interior
Long before the Portuguese arrival, the Zambezi River was a strategic highway for a vibrant commerce in gold, ivory, and slaves. Coastal Muslim traders, who had long served as the point men of Indian Ocean merchant capital, were already operating there by the fifteenth century. A century later, in 1511, António da Saldanha, a Portuguese chronicler, described dhows traveling up the Zambezi from the coastal port of Quelimane to the Lupata gorge. There, coastal traders paid the local Tonga land chiefs for the right to offload their wares, which local porters then carried to inland markets south of the Zambezi where Indian Ocean merchants exchanged cloth and a variety of other imported goods for gold, copper, ivory, and wax.132
For the Portuguese, the Zambezi valley was a wild and unfamiliar landscape—a malaria-infested, yellow fever–ridden frontier zone characterized by social disorder and decay. In the colonial imagination, it was both a landscape of fear and the gateway into the untapped mineral wealth of the interior. Their goals were to push the boundaries of civilization, dislodge the infidel Muslim traders, and exploit the region’s gold and silver, which those merchants were already purchasing. By the 1570s, Lisbon had established fortified settlements along the Zambezi at Sena and Tete that became the region’s administrative centers and garrison towns.133From Sena, located approximately two hundred kilometers from the coast, they were able to control river navigation between it and the Shire River. Tete, a further two hundred kilometers upriver, was a strategic point of entry into the south-central African interior. Lisbon later built a small commercial and military post further inland at Zumbo, on the northern bank of the Zambezi at its confluence with the Luangwa River (see map 1.2).
For almost three hundred years Sena, Tete, and Zumbo were at the center of the Portuguese commercial network. Portuguese and Goan merchants and prazeiros (Portuguese estate holders) dispatched caravans, ranging from ten to several hundred slaves, into the interior from these river-based trading stations. Each caravan, directed by a misambadzi (local trading specialist), traded both at fixed markets—like the fairs at Manica and Aruangua (see map 2.2)—and at villages along the route. By the end of the eighteenth century, these Zambezi-based caravans were traveling as far north as the Lunda homelands in the Congo and as far west as the rich gold producing areas in present-day Zimbabwe.134Incomplete statistics suggest that, for much the century, gold and ivory made up over 80 percent of the value of exports from the Zambezi valley.135
The nature of the trade changed dramatically in the nineteenth century, when the Zambezi valley became a major slave-trading zone. While only several hundred captives reached the coast in the 1750s, by 1821 the number was over five thousand—representing almost 90 percent of the value of exports.136Despite Lisbon’s 1836 abolition decree, sending slaves to the sugar plantations in Brazil, Cuba, and Mauritius continued for most of the century.137Because many of the slaves exported during this period came from communities living along both margins of the river, the lives of these villagers had become much more precarious.138
While commerce in gold, ivory, and slaves was extremely lucrative, often providing the merchants with profits of 500 percent or more,139for the local African canoemen, who were hired to transport these goods up and down the Zambezi on large canoes, it was quite dangerous.140They faced a tangle of challenges, not the least of which was its powerful current, especially during the rainy season. Canoeing downstream in the swollen river could be quite hazardous. When a canoe confronted a fast-moving current, it was nearly impossible for the paddlers to retain control of their boat, and, if it struck a submerged object, both their cargoes and their lives could be lost. Attacks from crocodiles and hippopotami posed additional threats. Daniel Rankin graphically described seeing “a canoe crunched like matchwood and flung with its occupants high in the air by one of these [hippos].”141There were also numerous rapids in the river, each with its own form of jutting rocks and swirling current. Getting caught in a whirlpool could bring the journey to a crashing end. The treacherous thirty-five-kilometer Lupata gorge between Sena and Tete—the “horror of canoe men”—took the lives of many boatmen, when their canoes crashed against the rocks.142Surviving the Lupata gorge was no guarantee of a safe arrival in Tete, however. “The currents as we near
