later, in 1966, the MFPZ produced a fifty-six-volume final report that confirmed the prior assessment that a dam would be highly beneficial to Mozambique.338
The core ideological rationale for Portugal’s decision to invest in large infrastructural projects, such as Cahora Bassa in Mozambique and the Cunene Dam in Angola, was its belief that the colonies in Africa (Mozambique, Angola, Guinea Bissau, Cabo Verde, and São Tomé) and Asia (Goa and Mação) were an integral part of the Portuguese nation. In the 1950s, to justify its continued colonialism in the face of decolonization elsewhere in Africa, the Salazar regime promoted Gilberto Freyre’s theory of lusotropicalism, which stressed the exceptional character of Portuguese colonialism and its absence of racism.339After relabeling the colonies as “overseas provinces,” Portugal could claim the unique status of being a transcontinental, multiracial state, which, it imagined, would make it a force in world politics and undermine the push for independence by nationalist movements in its colonies. Thus, for the Salazar regime, damming the Zambezi was both a powerful symbol of patriotic pride and a reaffirmation of Portugal’s long-term commitment to maintaining its African colonies at all costs. In 1970, Dr. Joaquim da Silva Cunha, the overseas minister, underscored the dam’s centrality to the future of the metropole: “Through [the construction of Cabora Bassa] we seek to create a further dynamic factor for the progress of Mozambique, for the good of all who live here, integrated in the Portuguese Homeland . . . without any discrimination of race or religion.”340The governor of Tete District,341site of the proposed dam, concurred. “Cabora Bassa is a very strong statement from our country,” he told a reporter from the Washington Post, which “means we are not going to give [Mozambique] up. It is determination shown on the ground.”342
In scale, rationale, and the political economy of its origins, the proposed dam at Cahora Bassa was radically different from its British counterpart. Kariba had ten turbines—double the number of the Portuguese project—and the reservoir was triple the size of the one at Cahora Bassa.343Kariba’s purpose was to fuel postwar industrialization and commercial agriculture in the recently established Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, by providing cheap electricity for the copper mines in colonial Zambia and for the European industries and farms in colonial Zimbabwe—the priority sectors of the federation’s economy.344The site of the region’s first large hydroelectric project was the subject of intense debate. Although building a dam at Kafue gorge made more technological and economic sense and would have required the relocation of only one thousand Tonga villagers,345Southern Rhodesian interests, which had greater political strength, prevailed, and Kariba became the site of the dam.346
By contrast, there was no debate within the Portuguese colonial state over the site or goals of Cahora Bassa, which, as originally conceived, were far more ambitious than Kariba. Portuguese planners saw Cahora Bassa as a multipurpose megadam designed to achieve a number of far-reaching economic, social, and political objectives—expanding regional productivity, enhancing the living conditions of the indigenous population, substantially increasing the number of Europeans in the Zambezi valley, and ending flooding.347With the rise of Frelimo, which began its military campaign in 1964,348added to the list was preventing Frelimo guerrillas from advancing beyond the Zambezi River into the economic heart of the colony. Along with a future dam to be built further downriver at Mphanda Nkuwa, colonial planners hoped that Cahora Bassa would generate a boundless source of cheap energy—energy that would both transform the colonial economy and bind Mozambique permanently to the Portuguese state.349
The dam at Cahora Bassa was originally supposed to provide hydroelectric power to stimulate agriculture, forestry, and industrial production in the Zambezi valley and to foster development of a commercial fishing industry on Lake Cahora Bassa.350Colonial planners additionally expected this new energy supply to facilitate the exploitation of abundant coal, iron, copper, and titanium deposits located in Tete District, and of bauxite and chrome in neighboring regions. Transporting these minerals down the Zambezi River to Chinde would transform this sleepy coastal port into a major gateway to international markets and the Zambezi itself into a bustling highway linking the rich interior to both the Indian Ocean and the wider world.351
Portuguese planners also expected local African communities to benefit greatly from the dam. They projected that the spin-off effects of its construction would improve the region’s roads and other physical infrastructures, stimulate commerce, and generate income that would be used to construct a network of rural schools and health posts.352By the early 1960s, Portugal’s colonial development narrative included a moral responsibility to improve the lives of its “backward subjects” and bring colonized peoples into the twentieth century under the “civilizing” tutelage of the Portuguese state.353Dr. Silva Cunha, during his visit to Cabora Bassa in November 1970, stressed the transforming social and cultural potential of the dam, declaring that Lisbon’s objective was “to tame the great river and transform it into a source of enhancement of the vast region contained within its river base, a resource that would be capable of giving the progress of the whole area a rapid, dynamic impulse.”354In short, the hydroelectric project reflected both Portugal’s “civilizing mission” and its commitment to remain in Africa indefinitely. Plans to build the dam also fit within the global discourse on development, which stressed that increasing per capita GNP would alleviate poverty.355
Colonial authorities further predicted that the economic development stimulated by Cahora Bassa would dramatically increase the size of the white settler population in the Zambezi valley. To house the up to eighty thousand Portuguese immigrants projected to join the planned agricultural communities (colonatos) on both banks of the Zambezi River downstream from Tete, they identified 1.5 million hectares suitable for irrigation and conducted agronomic and climatic investigations to determine which cash crops would best thrive there.356Like the mineral wealth to be exported through Chinde, the planners expected that agricultural and forest commodities produced on the colonatos would be channeled down the Zambezi for sale abroad.
Seasonal flooding was another ongoing problem the dam was supposed to solve. On four occasions between 1926 and 1958, the river overflowed the levees constructed by Sena Sugar Estates in 1926, causing serious losses. Located at Luabo and Mopeia, these plantations were an important source of foreign exchange for the colonial regime, and protecting their sugar crop was an important rationale for building Cahora Bassa.357Colonial officials also claimed that flooding regularly destroyed several million dollars worth of peasant produce.358
The last critical objective of the Cahora Bassa project—again, absent from Kariba—was to keep Frelimo out of the economic heart of the colony. Mounting pressure from the nationalist movement, which began operating in central Mozambique in 1966, drove much of the later planning and elevated the project’s urgency. Portuguese officials believed that the dam would help blunt guerrilla advances south of the strategic Zambezi River in two significant ways. First, they theorized that the lake behind the dam, stretching from Songo to Zumbo, which would be five hundred kilometers long and several kilometers wide, would pose a formidable geographic barrier to Frelimo’s otherwise easy access to the heart of Mozambique from its bases in Zambia and Malawi. Second, they envisioned the colonatos, which would include many former soldiers,359as armed settler communities that would provide a first line of defense against African guerrillas seeking to reach the capital, Lourenço Marques, and overthrow the colonial regime.
From the beginning, however, skeptics in Lisbon and Mozambique questioned whether a megadam was economically viable, arguing that its expense would place a heavy burden on the national budget and that substantial Portuguese investment either in the dam or in commercial agriculture and mining was unlikely. Critics also stressed that the scheme rested on unsubstantiated assumptions—that the dam would draw European settlers to the malaria-infested Zambezi valley, that the agricultural commodities those settlers produced would be competitive on the world market, and that the region’s minerals were both substantial and accessible. Mozambique’s inability to consume even 10 percent of the projected 2,075-megawatt output from Cahora Bassa’s turbines merely increased concerns about its viability.360
The escalating conflict with Frelimo posed a more immediate and concrete threat to the project’s
