variety of birds, mammals, and reptiles, while the floodplains themselves were spawning grounds for riverine and anadromous fish and provided dry-season grazing for wildlife.214Coastal estuaries and mangrove forests, central elements of the delta and estuarine environment, were also a fertile breeding ground for shrimp.215The Zambezi flood flows played an extremely important role in maintaining the delicate biochemistry of this unique ecosystem—the pulsing floodwaters during the rainy season flushed accumulated salt from the coastal floodplains, helping to ensure the proper balance between tidal saltwater and riverine freshwater.
For the human residents of the lower Zambezi valley, however, the most valuable effect of the annual flooding cycle was the supply of life-sustaining nutrients deposited along the alluvial plains as the floodwaters receded every April, which, for centuries, supported farming communities and aquatic ecosystems. The annual replenishment of nutrients from the flooding Zambezi was responsible for the rich dark soils (known in local languages as makande, ndrongo, or matope) of the river-fed plains, whose high moisture retention and rich mineral content made them the most desirable agricultural sites in the region. Like fish, wildlife, and other elements of the Zambezi ecosystem, which depended for their survival on the regularity of the natural flow regime, peasant households historically relied on the annual inundation of the floodplains for the very basics of life—fertile soil for growing food crops, dry-season pasture for livestock, and habitats that produced abundant supplies of fish and game. For all these reasons, before Cahora Bassa’s construction, flooding was considered a normal, welcome phase of the agricultural year, around which riverine communities planned their food supply and other household routines, rather than a destructive or traumatic event. “The water used to flood once a year,” recalled José Jone. “People moved to the murumucheias [higher lands] until the waters disappeared. Then we returned home.”216This seasonal pattern of flooding underpinned the organization and viability of a “diversified production system that incorporated flood recession agriculture, livestock management, fishing, gathering and hunting,”217all of which were essential for the food security of peasant households throughout the lower Zambezi valley.
At times, however, the river was also an extremely destructive force—a fact generally not stressed in the oral narratives. The earliest report of flooding in the Zambezi delta was in the mid-1500s, and extreme flooding occurred periodically over the next three centuries.218In the twentieth century there were reports of twenty-one large floods,219and hydrological data collected between 1925 and 1955—a period about which most elders would have heard—at Mutarara, on the northern bank of the Zambezi River opposite Sena, and at Marromeu, further downriver in the delta, indicate nine seasons of extreme flooding provoked by heavy rains before the construction of Cahora Bassa (see table 2.1). Richard Beilfuss and David dos Santos describe the catastrophic flooding in the delta in the mid-twentieth century:
In 1939, the delta reached its highest water levels in recorded history . . . , overtopp[ing] the dikes that were built in 1926 to protect the sugar estates at Marromeu and Luabo, and inundat[ing] most of the 1.2 million ha. delta. The dikes were overtopped again in 1940 and 1944, during what was probably the wettest period in the twentieth century. The most prolonged flooding on record occurred in 1952 . . . , caus[ing] extensive damage to houses and crops on the delta plains. . . . For the fourth time since 1926, the dikes protecting Marromeu and Luabo were overtopped. . . . In 1958, . . . the delta again experienced extreme flooding. . . . Water levels in the delta reached near-record levels, and exceeded catastrophic flood levels for 26 days. Large numbers of Cape buffalo and waterbuck were purportedly drowned by these large floods.220Since the delta’s flooding was due to heavy rainfall and runoff upriver, the destructive flooding of the river during these years necessarily would have adversely affected those living and farming in the Tete-Sena area.
Recession Agriculture in the Floodplain
Everywhere, those interviewed agreed that the floodplain’s rich, dark soil made it the most sought after and densely populated agricultural zone in the region.221One elder described the fertility of riparian land in almost magical terms: “We used to just have to drop a seed in to the soil here and it would grow into a tree.”222Beatriz Maquina, an elderly woman who had farmed in the Chipalapala region her entire life, stressed the agricultural significance of the rich alluvial soils: “Makande land located near the banks of the river always gave us good production. We cultivated a great deal of sorghum as well as some maize.”223Joaquim Sacatucua of Caia echoed her view: “We call the soil ndrongo. It is very fertile, which is why so many people settled here. Because of the rich land we had food, even when the rains did not come.”224Writing in the mid-1960s, a Portuguese planner working for the Missão de Fomento e Povoamento de Zambeze (MFPZ) observed that adjacent to the Zambezi River the population density was much higher, because the environment there “permit[ted] the cultivation of a number of crops throughout the year on the alluvial plains” and provided much more food than “in the rain-fed interior where peasants practice[d] shifting agriculture”225 (see fig. 2.2).
So desirable were floodplain plots that, in areas where the band of alluvial soil was narrow, competition for access to makande soil was intense. In the Chirodzi-Sanangwe region, for instance, a handful of powerful families jealously guarded their claims to river-fed gardens that had passed down from one generation to another.226In the delta, families residing in upland areas historically forged marriage alliances with those living near the river so that they would have access to food in times of famine.227Peasants living on the southern side of the Zambezi often traveled long distances to work floodplain gardens, sometimes even traversing the river to cultivate small alluvial plots on the northern bank.228Ernest Kalumbi, who lived near Sena, recounted that, long ago, “we would cross the river to the other side [Inhangoma]—that’s where we had our pumpkins and maize. These fields were good because they could stay wet for a long time and we would have a very good food crop each year.”229In 1961 colonial scientists surveying the delta confirmed the area’s fertility: “On the Inhangoma, the Zambezi floods ensure that the soils, which already are very rich in the principal nutrients, have a water content that permits the cultivation cycle to continue year after year without large decreases of the yields.”230
Drawing on shared experiential and historical knowledge of local environments, acquired through years of trial and error, rural communities along the Zambezi had adapted their farming practices to the fluctuating rainfall, uneven soil quality, and seasonal flood cycle that defined the region’s growing season. The result was a food production system calibrated to the Zambezi’s flood regime, which rested on the cultivation of multiple fields in different microecological zones to minimize risk and maximize the benefits of varying soil, moisture, and light conditions. Peasants worked river-fed plots in a rotating sequence with upland fields in the somewhat less fertile mixed clay-loam soils of the floodplain’s upper terrace—known as mpumbo and tchetca—or in the rocky ntchenga soils of the surrounding savanna and uplands, which were the most difficult to farm and produced significantly lower yields than riverside gardens.231As Paulo Mayo recalled, pointing to his floodplain garden from his hillside field, in the past “we could gather crops like maize, sorghum, and millet in our fields here, we could grow maize, [sweet] potatoes, and beans in another field in the floodplains, and the third field could be rice. We did this because it afforded us food guarantees and protection.”232David Livingstone’s observations of the region confirm these assertions. He found “the country . . . fertile in the extreme” with “old gardens continu[ing] to yield after they are uncared for.”233Writing thirty years later, Frederick Selous observed that “the natives seemed very well off for food; and the soil . . . must be very fertile.”234Local officials and travelers agreed with his assessment, reporting that sorghum, millet, corn, beans, sugar, and rice would easily grow there.235
Others confirmed the agronomic wisdom of this time-tested system. Maurício Alemão, an elderly peasant who had lived in Chicoa Velha, before he was displaced by the dam, remembered the reliable bounty of the cluster of alluvial and upland fields he had left behind: “In Chicoa Velha we could farm the entire year. In the dry season, we farmed on the banks of the river, and
