of the dam in public discussions. Absent from public discourse were the experiences, conversations, and ideas of peasants who lived with the consequences of its existence. Official adulation for the hydroelectric project muted the voices of these men and women, in a form of displacement whose epistemological violence was no less painful than the physical violence peasants experienced because of the dam.
That Portuguese authorities silenced critical discussion of Cahora Bassa is hardly surprising, given the colonial regime’s highly authoritarian character and its tendency to stifle any dissent. For all the fanfare about improving the quality of life for rural Mozambicans, Cahora Bassa’s ultimate purpose was to cement a security alliance between the Portuguese colonial state and apartheid South Africa. The dam was integral to Portugal’s antiguerrilla military strategy and a symbol of its commitment to retain its African empire. Even in government circles, there could be no debate about Cahora Bassa. European planners, scientists, or district administrators who raised questions about the potentially devastating effects of the megadam on local communities and environments were ignored, censored, or removed from their positions.69
The colonial version of history rested on the premise that the Portuguese were the guardians of progress, civilization, and modernity.70In its master narrative, the colonial state produced order, as opposed to the chaos and disorder of the precolonial past, which left no place for state-sanctioned violence. To the extent that colonial authorities acknowledged the violence that did occur, they cast it as an unintended or unfortunate, but necessary, consequence of “progress.” Thus, Lisbon claimed that, compared to the dislocations caused by other large dam projects in Africa, only twenty-eight thousand people—a relatively small number—would be relocated due to Cahora Bassa and that problems associated with peasant relocation were amenable to technical solutions, such as selecting fertile sites and digging wells and boreholes. Colonial officials also contended that the inconvenience of forced resettlement was a trivial price to pay for the wide-ranging benefits Cahora Bassa would deliver.
Since the state prohibited scholars, journalists, and international observers from entering the areas of the Zambezi valley where aldeamentos (protected villages) were located, rural families herded into the protected villages had no channel through which to communicate their version of events to the outside world and no power to challenge the sanitized fiction of official discourse. Like displaced peasants, the African workers whose labor built Cahora Bassa could share stories of suffering only with one another. Portuguese accounts of the dam’s construction similarly displaced evidence of the ongoing violence and exploitation and depicted the construction site as a harmonious multiracial workplace. No one reported the coercion and intimidation, the grueling work schedules and inadequate living conditions, or the industrial accidents that were an integral part of African dam workers’ daily lives.
Even when, after independence, scholars and journalists documented the forced internment and labor abuses, the Frelimo government reproduced the colonial narrative that portrayed Cahora Bassa as an icon of economic development and progress and expressed confidence in the dam’s ability to transform the Zambezi valley and spread the fruits of socialism to rural populations. Yet, like all developmentalist states, postindependence Mozambique paid scant attention to the voices of the rural poor—the riverside communities whose concerns about the effects of the dam were lost in the noise surrounding socialist transformation. In 1987, when Frelimo abandoned its socialist project and implemented an IMF–World Bank structural adjustment program, Cahora Bassa figured prominently in its neoliberal development agenda. The optimistic discourse of Mozambican leaders—engineers and economists, stressing the untapped potential of the dam as a source of hydroelectricity—perpetuated the state’s developmentalist ideology and, once again, marginalized peasant concerns.71
In general, displacement is an inherent part of large-state development initiatives, and, whether intended or not, violence regularly accompanies massive infrastructural projects, such as dams. Nevertheless, development, as originally conceived in the aftermath of World War II,72was not supposed to involve the violent disruption of rural societies. Instead, it was built on the premise that “foreign aid and investment on favorable terms, the transfer of knowledge or production techniques, measures to promote health and education, and economic planning would lead impoverished countries to be able to become ‘normal’ market economies.”73Since development was a strategy to alleviate poverty, the rise in per capita GNP, which accompanied development would, according to economist Arthur Lewis, give “man greater control over his environment and thereby increase his freedom.”74At a global level, accelerated economic growth would narrow the gap between rich and poor, precipitating “modernization and economic take off.”75By the 1970s, advocates of neo-liberalism were proclaiming that unfettered markets were the key to development and to the optimal allocation of resources.76
Theorists on the left disagreed, pointing to the failures of large infrastructural projects, like dams—one prominent and typically destructive form of development—to alleviate poverty.77They contended that, rather than closing the gap, the unfettered functioning of the global market actually widened disparities between rich and poor.78This argument was sharpened by critical theorists who stressed that the “uneven development” inherent in capitalism had far-reaching and unequal social and spatial consequences that reinforced global hierarchies of power. By heightening the “contradictory relations of class, of gender, of town and countryside, of ethnicity and nationality,” uneven development created conflicts over scarce resources and struggles for social justice.79Other Marxist critics took a slightly different approach, maintaining that a capitalist modernization agenda further oppressed the working classes, while facilitating capitalist accumulation.80In its place, they offered a socialist model of development that would promote prosperity and social equality.81Feminist scholars, drawing on a variety of different social theories, instead focused on the power of patriarchy and the subordination of women under both developmental paths, which ignored or undervalued production for sustenance and survival in which women and children figured most prominently.82
Proponents of sustainable development—primarily environmental economists for whom the construction of megadams provoked obvious concerns—also criticized the tendency of developmentalists to privilege large infrastructural projects. They insisted that any analysis had to consider the long-term resilience, vulnerability and regenerative capacity of ecological systems, which were essential for sustained economic growth, along with inter- and intragenerational equity.83
In the past two decades, postdevelopmental theorists have argued that development cannot be equated with enlightenment and progress. Ferguson, for example, has maintained that Western notions of modernity were little more than “a set of discourses and practices that has produced and sustained the notion of ‘the Third World as an object’ to be developed” and that developmentalism shaped and legitimated the practices of both the postcolonial state and international development agencies, whose interests were closely aligned.84Arturo Escobar similarly criticizes developmentalism as a strategy by capitalist countries in the global North to secure control over scarce resources and former colonial subjects, which simultaneously intensified hunger and poverty in the very communities being “developed.”85The dam revolution is a case in point—the quintessential example of the delusion of development.
Although our study is informed by these criticisms of development, it would be an oversimplification to assume that development “is a self-evident process, everywhere the same and always tainted by its progressivist European provenance.”86In fact, local, national and transnational factors produce substantial variations over time and space, and even development’s coercive power, while still inseparable from larger processes of economic transformation and power relations, is rooted in local history and social relations.87
While not rejecting the notion of development per se, we recognize its inadequacy as an analytical concept.88For us, the critical issue is what exactly is being developed and for whom. Throughout the text, we employ the concept of sustainable livelihoods—itself a product of development theory—which stresses the inextricable interconnection between power, poverty, and environmental degradation,89since neither communities nor
