and other natural disasters, which occurred with some regularity,261and the region’s uncertain and relatively brief rainy season could still cause food shortages during the hungry months of February and March, when families had already typically consumed last year’s grain harvest and were anxiously awaiting this year’s first cereals. A number of elders stressed that, even before the construction of the dam, villagers were at the mercy of a sometimes capricious climate.262Moreover, when we raised the question of predam flooding, several elderly villagers acknowledged that the river could be unpredictable and dangerous and a threat to the stable productive agronomic system that had been practiced for centuries in the region.263
Local chroniclers gave catastrophic floods in the Zambezi valley powerfully descriptive names to ensure that people remembered their world gone awry.264The longest and most devastating flood was the 1952 Cheia M’bomane (“the flood that destroyed everything”). Marosse Inácio and his neighbors recounted how the waters “descended on their village suddenly at night. Although, in desperation, people climbed to the roofs of their huts to get away from the water, the storm swept the huts into the river. Many people drowned in the raging water. Few had canoes to escape.”265Six years later, Cheia N’sasira (“the flood that forced people to live on top of termite mounds”) devastated numerous communities living adjacent to the river. Limpo Nkuche explained how “many people died, while those who were fortunate enough to survive lost all their worldly possessions, including their livestock.”266Hydrological data confirm that severe flooding occurred in those years (see table 2.1).
Even when the river did not reach such levels, it still inundated many fields and could undermine the food security of hardworking families, as occurred in 1948 and 1963.267Bento Estima and Joseph Ndebvuchena, for instance, remembered how periodic flooding caused life to be uncertain along the river’s edge: “Before the dam, sometimes there was hunger. It depended on the rains. In times of drought, people cultivated maize, sugarcane, and vegetables on their plots near the river. When they farmed near the river, however, they faced the possibility of having their crops destroyed by the floods.”268
Thus, living adjacent to the river was more precarious than most villagers at first acknowledged. While capricious floods increased the possibility of losing an entire year’s agricultural production,269wildlife posed a more frequent threat to their food security. Without firearms, which the state prohibited them from owning, cultivators could do little to protect their alluvial gardens from hippopotami that ravaged their crops. As Luís Manuel recalled, “the only thing we could do was to go to the administration and ask them to send European hunters to kill these beasts.”270Such assistance was not always forthcoming, causing frustrated peasants sometimes to abandon their riverine gardens.271
Yet elders also stressed how the Zambezi valley ecosystem and the river itself helped hard-pressed families survive in times of scarcity. Oral recollections of foraging for wild fruit during droughts suggest the great diversity of tree species that could provide minimal sustenance.272During the hungry season, women and children regularly augmented their food supply by gathering edible roots, tubers, plants, and berries that grew along the river’s edge.273The most common wild foods harvested in the Tete region during these months were nyika (water lily roots), mpambadza (wild lily bulbs), mboa (wild mushrooms), nyezi (a cocoyam tuber), wild sorghum, and the berries of the maçanica bush.274Nyika was a significant famine food that grew in abundance near the river in the Mutarara-Inhangoma region, particularly in Lake Nbazema and in the riverine zone around Sena.275When gatherers returned home with nyika, they dried the root, peeled off the hard exterior, and pounded the flesh into a fine grain for porridge. In the nearby Shire valley colonial authorities reported in 1948 that “whole communities have lived on [nyika] without any other food at all for weeks at a time.”276In addition, according to João Raposo of Caia, aquatic plants could be harvested from the river waters and consumed when food was scarce.277Nevertheless, to get through the year, many had to rely on wage remittances from kin working in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Malawi.278A Portuguese official estimated that over ten thousand people from the Songo region alone were working in Zimbabwe in the 1960s.279
Fishing
The Zambezi’s rich and varied fish population also played a vital role in the local food economy by supplying an extremely important source of protein.280The more than forty species of fish281 living in the river system in the predam period also depended on the Zambezi’s annual flood cycle for their survival. “The qualities of a river change drastically from the low-water to the high-water season. . . . During floods . . . the water spreads over a large area, where there is an abundance of inundated and rapidly growing vegetation serving both as food and shelter for the fish, and there is a large amount of insects, worms and mollusks available to the fish which migrate onto the flood plains. . . . Floods appear to be essential for reproductive success, and growth and survival of the young fish is improved during years with large floods.”282From December through April, rising floodwaters triggered crucial changes in the feeding and reproductive behavior of fish and other aquatic organisms. “Reproduction, feeding and growth show seasonal variations depending on the water level. Reproduction of most species occurs just before or during the floods. . . . Feeding is most intense during the floods and most fish are then in peak conditions.”283
Although the principal fisheries were located both in the floodplains between the Lupata gorge and the Zambezi’s confluence with the Shire River and in the lower floodplains and delta extending to the sea, fishermen also exploited the rich lakes, rivulets, and estuaries connected to the Zambezi. According to one study, the estimated total catch in the delta alone—before the construction of Cahora Bassa—ranged from thirty to fifty thousand tons per year.284Even on the lower-yielding southern bank of the river near Tete, fishing provided a significant source of food for riparian households.285
Historically, fishing was a gendered economic activity to which many men devoted much time, energy, and skill (see fig. 2.3). Drawing on knowledge handed down by their fathers and grandfathers, fishermen deployed numerous intricate techniques to maximize their catch. Not surprisingly, men’s fishing stories highlighted, and possibly exaggerated, the tremendous bounty of the river, rather than the labor and expertise required for successful fishing. Khumbidzi Pastor, for example, recalled proudly that most adult men simply baited machonga (fishing weirs), moored them in the river each evening, and “the next day we would remove the machonga and they would be filled with fish.”286Skilled canoemen were said to spear fish while standing on the sides of their boats, while young boys caught fish with hooks and lines—and even with their hands—in dammed-up pools and rivulets adjacent to the Zambezi.287These combined efforts yielded substantial catches of prized bream, tigerfish, catfish, and eel, which fishermen hauled back to their temporary villages for drying or smoking.288Women typically sold excess fish at inland markets.
An understudied subject in the environmental history of southern and Central Africa, fishing required considerably more ingenuity and skill than these simple narratives suggest.289For one thing, the labor process and choice of technique were highly dependent on location and time of year. During the dry season, groups of fishermen established temporary camps on the edges of the floodplains or on the small islands adjacent to their villages. When the river was low, they waded in with simple gill nets and baskets to catch their prey, sometimes with the assistance of their wives and older children. Floodplain fishing was attractive because it neither required substantial investments in nets or canoes nor was labor intensive. Although the fish were smaller during the dry season, yields were still relatively high, and fishermen were less likely to be attacked by crocodiles or hippos hidden in the water.290Women also participated in dry-season fishing, through a practice known as mlembwe, in which groups of women converged in the shallow pools and grasslands near the water’s edge and scooped up the fish in sheets and baskets.291Although this allowed women to contribute substantial quantities of protein to their family’s diet, it was not considered a serious form of fishing: “Women during that time could not seriously go into the water to catch fish. We could only go into the water to do mlembwe. We would
