policies that adversely affect the nonhuman world.90In this study, we explore how the socioeconomic and ecological changes caused by Cahora Bassa adversely affected both people’s access to scarce resources and their capacity to use these resources effectively to enhance their daily lives.91To the extent that the dam limited peasants’ ability to achieve positive livelihood outcomes, it brought with it, instead, the delusion of development.
Reading Cahora Bassa—The Challenge of Sources
Archival sources provide much of the evidentiary base for chapters 2, 3, and 4. The Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique (AHM) in Maputo, Mozambique, and the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT) in Lisbon, Portugal, are the most important repositories of written documentation on the planning and construction of Cahora Bassa. The AHM contains numerous engineering and financial reports, as well as brief ecological and ethnographic surveys of the area to be affected by the dam, prepared under the auspices of the Missão do Fomento e Povoamento do Zambese (MFPZ), the state agency charged with overseeing the dam project. The archive is also a repository for reports from local administrators and military officials describing the forced resettlement scheme, rural opposition to the aldeamentos, the war effort against Frelimo, and official concerns about Frelimo’s advance along both margins of the Zambezi River.92
The ANTT houses the largest body of material on the strategic dimensions of the dam. Reports by the Portuguese secret police (Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado, or PIDE) and other security branches, along with those of colonial administrative officials, document the forced removal of peasants, the conditions of the proposed resettlement sites, and internal debates about the strategic desirability of relocating thousands of people from their homelands to protected villages. These sources reveal fissures within the Portuguese colonial regime, particularly between civilian administrators, who favored persuading rural communities to relocate voluntarily, and military commanders, who simply wanted to use force. Colonial intelligence reports, often based on accounts from African spies, describe the growing rural opposition to forced resettlement, the difficult position of loyalist chiefs who had to implement the villagization policy, and government fears that Frelimo would organize workers at the dam site. The ANTT also contains significant documentation of Portugal’s negotiations with South Africa concerning financial and security matters and of efforts by competing multinational corporations to win construction contracts. Additionally, there is an entire dossier about Lisbon’s attempts in the early 1970s to infiltrate and discredit the antidam movement, which had organized an international boycott of Cahora Bassa.
This voluminous documentation, however, has serious limitations. The most obvious is that colonial officials typically considered the opinions and experiences of the rural poor insignificant, rarely recording them for posterity. Even at the local level, European personnel tended to ignore the critical factors affecting the lives of African workers and peasants. For example, there were only passing references to labor conditions at the dam site, all concerning white workers. Moreover, because the dam site and the town of Songo were the domain of two Portuguese companies—Zamco, the consortium that built the dam, and Hidroeléctrica de Cahora Bassa (HCB), which subsequently owned and operated it—the limited extant labor documentation is in their archives, which remain closed to the public.93Nor did colonial authorities consider reporting on either life within the aldeamentos or the social and ecological consequences of Cahora Bassa’s construction.
More fundamentally, these sources are problematic because they are colonial texts produced by chroniclers whose perceptions and agendas were shaped by their race, nationality, class, gender, and status within the colonial hierarchy. While it is sometimes possible to discern faint echoes of African voices in the written words of colonial personnel—as, for example, in administrators’ reports of conversations with African chiefs—teasing out subaltern perspectives from such documents is very difficult. As Premesh Lalu argues, “to claim that subaltern consciousness, voice or agency can be retrieved through colonial texts is to ignore the organization and representation of colonized subjects as a subordinate proposition within primary discourses.”94Thus, one must read even the richest archival documents from the colonial period carefully and critically, “against the grain.”95While archival sources do not present a monolithic image of Cahora Bassa, the dominant narrative that emerges from these writings tends to obscure or disguise the realities of African rural life.
The wall of silence Lisbon imposed around Cahora Bassa during and after its construction compounds the inherent difficulty of utilizing colonial-era archival sources. The Portuguese government buried the findings of its own researchers when they raised concerns about the project and allowed only trusted journalists and international reporters to enter the region, which they classified as a strategic military zone. Even journalists and researchers with official clearance found their movements restricted to Songo and a few model aldeamentos. A Portuguese anthropologist studying the Tawara, a community living adjacent to the dam, acknowledged that he often had to rely on secondhand information, since “participant-observation was reduced to a minimum.”96
This policy of secrecy and nondisclosure continued into the postcolonial period. Despite nominal oversight by Mozambique’s energy ministry, the HCB still treated the dam as its own private domain and released almost no information about it. The Frelimo government, fearing Rhodesian sabotage, declared Cahora Bassa off-limits to most foreign researchers and journalists. Ideologically predisposed to pursuing rural development through large state projects, Frelimo’s Marxist-Leninist leadership discouraged public debate about the dam, labeling it a symbol of socialist transformation and modernity. In the 1980s, Renamo military campaigns turned the Zambezi valley into a major battleground whose violence disrupted all local social and environmental research efforts. That Mozambique’s national archives are not yet open for this period and that the Frelimo archives are in disarray97 exacerbate the evidentiary limitations. In chapters 6 and 7, when discussing Mozambique’s negotiations with Portugal over ownership of Cahora Bassa, its efforts to pressure the postapartheid South African state to increase the price paid for its electricity, and the status of the projected dam at Mphande Nkuwa, we had to rely on the publicly reported announcements of Mozambican officials. This was because the authorities, citing their confidential nature, were unwilling to speak candidly about these issues.
To address these challenges, we have relied on several reports concerning the feasibility of building a second dam at Mphanda Nkuwa produced by state-sponsored consultants, which include background material on the social and environmental effects of Cahora Bassa.98We have also examined documents and reports commissioned by nongovernmental organizations, environmental groups, and antidam activists, which, while often failing to capture the full complexity of realities on the ground, advance powerful critiques of the hydroelectric project.99The most valuable written sources for the postcolonial period are the meticulously researched hydrological and ecological research about the Zambezi River valley, on whose findings we draw throughout this book.100
The more than three hundred oral interviews of residents of riverside communities, missionaries, scientists, state officials, and antidam activists provide the principal evidence for most of this study. We began this project in 1998, while completing fieldwork for a book on runaway Chikunda slaves.101Two years later, Arlindo Chilundo, a Mozambican historian, and Allen Isaacman directed a research team from Universidade Eduardo Mondlane that studied the social and ecological consequences of Cahora Bassa.102Over two summers the team interviewed more than two hundred peasants and fisherfolk, living primarily on the southern margins of the Zambezi, whose recollections were recorded in public spaces, where members of the larger community could offer their thoughts. The interviews were public because, in rural communities, remembering and storytelling are preeminently social acts, in which both performance style and audience play crucial roles. In fact, the audience often intervened—either to elaborate on how their recollections were similar or different or to move the conversation to topics they thought were more interesting or significant.
We encountered several key informants by chance. Claúdio Gremi, an Italian Jesuit priest, was in the audience at the Songo conference. During the question-and-answer session, he wondered why none of the presenters had described
