and environmental well-being are inextricably intertwined, that development projects cannot be separated from the politics of control over scarce resources, and that the critical question of what is being “developed”—and for whom—is shaped as much by transnational as national or local actors.
Environmental policies and practices can never be divorced from relations of power. This is especially true when what is at stake is control over water, since no other natural resource is more important for the maintenance of life, society, and stable government. It is no surprise, then, that control of aquatic resources has provoked, and continues to provoke, conflict at local and national levels in Mozambique and elsewhere, especially in the global South.18
In the final analysis, most large state-driven development projects—whether dams or other initiatives that facilitate resource extraction and the export of cheap commodities—have not only failed to alleviate poverty and promote sustainable livelihoods but also often imperiled the lives of the poor. As long as such planned interventions lead to growing disparities in wealth and concomitant increases in hunger and poverty, which are the natural consequences of their market-driven calculus, for the overwhelming majority of people living in the global South there remains nothing but the delusion of development.
The Dam Revolution in Africa
In the second half of the twentieth century, worldwide construction of large dams19 increased exponentially—from approximately five thousand by 1950 to over fifty thousand by 2000.20According to Professor Kader Asmal, chair of the World Commission on Dams (WCD), “We dammed half our world’s rivers at unprecedented rates of one per hour, and at unprecendented scales of over 45,000 [large] dams.”21As a result, dam reservoirs submerged more than four hundred thousand square kilometers of the world’s most fertile land.22Although the pace of construction has slowed, a number of new dams—most notably China’s Three Gorges—were erected in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
In his monumental study of dams, Patrick McCully describes the appeal of such projects for political leaders as different as Jawaharlal Nehru, Mao Tse-tung, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin: “The gargantuan scale of large dams, and their seeming ability to bring powerful and capricious natural forces under human control, gives them a unique hold on the human imagination. Perhaps more than any other technology, massive dams symbolize the progress of humanity from a life ruled by nature and superstition to one where nature is ruled by science, and superstition vanquished by rationality.”23Nehru, for instance, invoked a sense of national pride, when observing the 226-meter-high Bhakra Dam, in northern India: “What a stupendous, magnificent work—a work which only that nation can take up which has faith and boldness!”24
The international community provided both material and moral support for these megaprojects. The World Bank, the largest financier of dams, funded more than six hundred dam projects in ninety-three countries during this period.25Other major lenders included the Inter-American and Asian Development Banks.26The Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) also financed dam construction, as did the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the British Overseas Development Administration (ODA).27
These dam proponents, however, uniformly ignored the fact that the construction of large dams also brought intense suffering for an estimated 30 to 60 million people worldwide—many already poor and disenfranchised.28Most large dams forced poor rural populations to abandon their historic homelands, which the river’s displaced water then submerged. In several cases, dams even had lethal consequences—the most tragic, perhaps, occurring in China’s Hunan Province, where a number of dam bursts in 1975 left more than two hundred thousand people dead.29
Africa, too, became part of the dam revolution. In the name of modernization and prosperity, especially in the developmentalist years after World War II, European colonial governments constructed major hydroelectric complexes—as well as other large infrastructural projects.30Ghana’s Akosombo Dam, for example, although originally conceived in the late colonial period, was erected under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah shortly after independence.31Nkrumah used the language of national development to explain his unequivocal support for this colonial project: “Newer nations, such as ours, which are determined by every possible means to catch up in industrial strength, must have electricity in abundance before they can expect any large-scale industrial advance. . . . That, basically, is the justification for the Volta River Project.”32
African leaders of all political persuasions embraced these projects with unbridled enthusiasm, as did their postcolonial successors. After all, dams reinforced the consolidation of state power in the countryside and were highly visible symbols of modernity and development. During the second half of the twentieth century, African governments constructed more than one thousand dams, including twenty megaprojects such as the Akasombo Dam in Ghana, the Lagdo Dam in Cameroon, the Kainji and Bakolori Dams in Nigeria, the Kossou Dam in Ivory Coast, and the Masinga Dam in Tanzania. Some of the most highly publicized dams in Africa—the Aswan High Dam, the Kariba Dam, and the Lesotho Highlands Water Project—cut across territorial frontiers.33By the end of the twentieth century, South Africa alone had more than 550 dams in operation.34
As elsewhere, the construction of large dams in Africa often had deleterious consequences. Megadams at Akasombo, Aswan, and Kariba flooded hundreds of thousands of hectares of fertile farmland.35The Akasombo, for example, which permanently inundated 4 percent of Ghana’s land area, forced more than eighty thousand Ghanaians to abandon their communities adjacent to the Volta River.36Similarly, the Aswan dam uprooted one hundred twenty thousand people in Egypt and Sudan, and, in the area of the Kariba Dam, fifty-seven thousand Gwembe Tonga lost their homelands.37In these and many other cases around the continent, the physical, social, and cultural worlds of displaced peoples turned upside down.
People located downriver from the dams also found their livelihoods in jeopardy and critical natural resources degraded.38Damming permanently altered a river’s flow regime—particularly the timing and extent of flooding along its banks. This disruption jeopardized long-established agricultural production systems that depended on seasonal flooding to enrich alluvial soils.39It also destroyed downriver fishing industries, increased waterborne diseases, eroded the shoreline and coast, degraded aquatic ecosystems, and caused declines in riparian animal and plant life.40Among the conclusions of a highly influential 2000 report by the WCD was the recognition that “in too many cases an unacceptable and often unnecessary price has been paid to secure these benefits [of dams], especially in social and environmental terms, by people displaced, by communities downstream, by taxpayers and by the natural environment.”41Rural Mozambicans living adjacent to the Zambezi River certainly paid that price.
Although the construction of Cahora Bassa shares much in common with hydroelectric projects elsewhere in both Africa and other regions of the global South, the political context and social dynamics of Mozambique’s megadam were unique. Cahora Bassa was the last “great” colonial infrastructure project in Africa. Whereas post–World War II British and French colonial planners tried to reshape the rural landscape of their African possessions through far-reaching river basin schemes and other large development projects,42Portuguese authorities invested little in Mozambique’s rural infrastructure—or those of its other African colonies of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and São Tomé. That all changed in the early 1960s when Portugal, as part of its antiguerrilla policy, began a number of infrastructural projects in the central and northern regions of the colony.
Military exigencies also explain why Cahora Bassa has the dubious status of being the world’s largest national hydroelectric project created to export energy.43Mozambique’s megadam, which cost so many rural families their livelihoods, land, and homes, existed solely to cement military ties between the Portuguese colonial administration and its apartheid neighbor, by exporting cheap energy to South Africa. In the process, the Mozambican countryside—even areas adjacent to the dam site—remained in the dark.
While the construction of large dams
