illnesses and serious diseases—from ailing bodies to complications during childbirth, childhood illnesses, diarrhea, venereal disease, sexual impotence, convulsions, and nervous disorders. Herbalists, most of whom were women, gathered therapeutic plant materials in and near the Zambezi during the seasonal floods, drawing upon detailed knowledge learned from family members and other practitioners. In the delta, some consulted with Nzunzu, the spirit of the water, before exploring remote corners of the Zambezi in search of medicinal plants.321Curandeiras also provided medications to protect their patients against witchcraft, to prevent attacks by crocodiles and hippopotami, and to treat common rural mishaps, such as snakebites.322João Raposo, for instance, recalled using a plant in Caia called mghangha to treat the bite of the tchipiri snake.323In short, these villagers used their expert knowledge to promote health and sustain life in the rural communities they served.
Moreover, the natural flow regime of the Zambezi River itself helped to regulate the health of rural communities in the centuries before construction of Cahora Bassa. The annual flood cycle, for instance, flushed out stagnant water bodies, thereby reducing the fecundity of disease vectors, such as malarial mosquitoes. The river’s rapid flow also temporarily cleansed the water of schistosomiasis and other waterborne diseases.
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Long before the construction of Cahora Bassa, the Zambezi played a critical economic and social role in the lives of the people living and working adjacent to its shores. While European administrators and travelers generally saw the river very differently than the indigenous population, occasionally they agreed. Thus, when the British explorer Frederick Selous wrote, “there’s life in a draught of Zambesi water,”324and Carl Peters, his German counterpart, observed that the river’s “arteries infused life into whole countries,”325 their narratives overlapped with indigenous representations. For most foreign observers and government officials, however, the river had to be tamed before the region could prosper—which was the dominant development narrative that inspired the building of Cahora Bassa.
3 Harnessing the River
High Modernism and Building the Dam, 1965–75
On December 6, 1974, two pressure-driven steel gates, each weighing 220 tonnes, stopped the mighty Zambezi River in its course. After five years of toil by more than five thousand workers, the construction of Cahora Bassa was complete.326Portuguese colonial officials, representatives of the new Frelimo-led government, church leaders, engineers, hydrologists, and journalists who were present on that day marveled at the dam’s majestic 170-meter-high walls, its five massive General Electric turbines, and the vast man-made lake that would cover more than twenty-six hundred square kilometers.327The technical complexity and skill needed to erect the world’s fifth-largest hydroelectric installation in a remote corner of Mozambique also attracted considerable international attention. For its proponents, Cahora Bassa represented high modernism at its best—the ultimate confirmation that science and technological expertise, in the hands of a strong state, could conquer nature and reorder biophysical systems to serve humankind.328
Yet casting Cahora Bassa as a high-modernist triumph obscures a great deal more than it reveals. As Mitchell demonstrated in his study of colonial Egypt, capitalist modernization projects undertaken by authoritarian states tend to be permeated with violence or its ever-present threat.329In fact, coercion was a central feature of Cahora Bassa’s construction. Local African communities were forced to abandon their homes in the Songo highlands to make way for the construction of a segregated town for white workers recruited from abroad. Additionally, state officials often relied on conscripted labor to build both the infrastructure around the dam site and the dam itself. Moreover, even within the increasingly fortified confines of the dam site, colonial authorities used coercion to silence, repress, and discipline angry workers and suspected militants whom they feared might disrupt construction in some way.
The centrality of violence to the process of colonizing the Zambezi River and building Cahora Bassa demonstrated that the Portuguese regime had neither the political power nor the material resources to accomplish its ambitious economic goals. Frelimo’s determined diplomatic and military campaign to stop the dam’s construction, combined with the fiscal uncertainty of the chronically cash strapped colonial state, drove Portugal once again into the arms of South Africa, Mozambique’s wealthy neighbor. The resulting transnational alliance enabled Portugal to hold nationalist forces at bay long enough to complete the dam, although at the cost of developmental goals that were supposed to improve the lives of African communities in the area.
This chapter examines the origins of the dam project Portugal hoped would economically transform the Zambezi River valley. It chronicles the local, national, and transnational factors compelling Portugal to scale back its plans, making Cahora Bassa simply a provider of cheap energy for South Africa. Most of the chapter, however, explores the very different lived experiences of European and African workers, embedded in unequal ways in a highly racialized and inherently coercive labor process. The final section highlights Frelimo’s diplomatic and military efforts, with significant international support, to thwart Cahora Bassa’s construction. While the brutality of Portugal’s counterinsurgency measures ensured the triumphant unveiling of Cahora Bassa, in late 1974, as both a marvelous technical accomplishment and a symbolic defeat of the nationalist challenge, the dam’s completion was, in many ways, a pyrrhic victory, won at the expense of the region’s economy, environment, rural population, and, ultimately, control over Mozambique itself.
The Plan: A Study in High Modernism
For centuries, the mammoth Cahora Bassa gorge, located about 650 kilometers from the mouth of the Zambezi River, had both awed and frustrated Portuguese colonial planners330 and merchants, who complained that its falls were an impenetrable obstacle to their use of the Zambezi as a highway into the rich interior. Only in 1955—after the British had decided to construct a large hydroelectric project at Kariba, another 650 kilometers upriver from Cahora Bassa, between colonial Zambia and Zimbabwe—did Lisbon realize that taming the great river might be achievable.331
The symbolic power and economic promise of Kariba immediately captured the imagination of the Portuguese Overseas Ministry, which in May 1956 ordered its engineers in Mozambique to investigate the possibility of impounding the Zambezi at Cahora Bassa. Two months later, the ministry dispatched Professor A. A. Manzanares, a close adviser to the Portuguese leader António de Oliveira Salazar, to Mozambique, where he flew by helicopter—the only form of access—to the Cahora Bassa gorge. After he enthusiastically endorsed the project upon his return to Lisbon,332the Overseas Ministry, embracing his findings, issued a highly influential and optimistic report:
The basin of the Zambezi in Portuguese territory contains more economic possibilities for the future than any other river in Africa or even in the rest of the world. We must appreciate that in the Mozambique basin the potential energy of the river is roughly 50 billion KWH [50,000 megawatts] of which more than half can be achieved in a relatively short space. . . . The floods, when [Kariba and Cahora Bassa] are built, will become a memory, a spectre from past nightmares; and the lowlands formed over billions of years by the alluvial silt from Central Africa, product of primeval erosion, will be turned to productive use by the patience and tenacity of men.333
Acting with dispatch, it immediately established a river-basin authority under its direct control, which meant that, in effect, “the upper Zambesi basin, a quarter of all Mozambique, was to be taken out of the sphere of the administration in Lourenço Marques and run directly from Lisbon.”334
The Missão de Fomento e Povoamento de Zambeze (MFPZ)—which subsequently became the Gabinete do Plano do Zambeze (GPZ)—was charged with coordinating research, initiating feasibility studies, and establishing the blueprints for the development of the Zambezi.335Although both understaffed336 and underfunded for this mammoth task, between 1957 and 1961 it published twenty-seven preliminary studies of the climatic, geological, topographical, hydrological, and economic conditions in the Zambezi River basin. This vast region, which was twice
