state of large numbers of indigenous people, only in Mozambique were the victims of relocation herded into barbed-wire encampments (aldeamentos) to prevent them from aiding Frelimo guerrillas. The government also forcibly evicted several thousand more Africans living on the salubrious highlands near the dam site to make room for the construction of a segregated town for white workers and their families.
But it was not only peasants who suffered. Local African men who were conscripted to build the roads leading to the dam experienced another form of violence for the sake of Cahora Bassa, and the dam itself was literally built on the backs of thousands of African laborers enmeshed in a coercive and highly regimented labor regime.
These harsh realities highlight the central role of violence as a defining feature of Cahora Bassa’s history. Unlike in India and Brazil, for instance, where domestic struggles shaped the politics of dam construction,44in Mozambique external political and security considerations generated this violence. Because the hydroelectric project symbolized the military alliance between the Portuguese colonial state and apartheid South Africa, the surrounding region became a highly contested zone of confrontation between Frelimo guerrillas seeking to sabotage it and the Portuguese military, which, with logistical support from Pretoria, unleashed a wave of violence against the peasant population allegedly to prevent them from aiding Frelimo.
Even after both the dam’s completion and Mozambique’s independence, the violence continued. When South African–backed Renamo forces launched a military campaign to destroy the new nation’s economic infrastructure, Cahora Bassa’s power lines were inviting targets—since the apartheid economy did not require the energy at that moment. These attacks lasted for over fifteen years.
The Literature on Large Dams
The dam revolution generated a voluminous body of scholarly literature, detailed discussion of which falls outside of the scope of this study. Broadly speaking, there are two diametrically opposed schools of thought: one celebrating and promoting these megaprojects as developmentalist triumphs and the other highlighting their damaging social and environmental consequences.
Engineers, economists, development experts, state officials, and representatives of the dam industry have been the most vocal proponents of the celebratory school. Their influential publications date back to the completion of the Hoover Dam, in the 1930s.45For half a century thereafter, they controlled the terms of public debate, while promoting dams in all corners of the globe. Using a narrow cost-benefit analysis, they emphasized the transformative potential of hydroelectric projects, even while acknowledging some of their unintended negative consequences. Dams, they stressed, provided a source of cheap energy that would stimulate industrial production and electrify areas with no previous access to power. Harnessing rivers, in their view, would promote irrigation and flood control, facilitate river transport, and ensure a secure supply of clean water. Many also predicted a sharp increase in the number of fish in dam reservoirs, thereby increasing the potential income of commercial anglers. More recently, the dam industry and its allies have appropriated the discourse of the green energy movement to claim that hydroelectric projects are a cleaner source of fuel than coal, thermal, oil, or natural gas.46
In the 1970s, geographers and anthropologists concerned about the social costs of dislocation and the worrisome environmental effects of recently erected dams began to challenge this dominant narrative. They pointed to the devastating ecological and health consequences of a river’s inability to flow freely, since large dam reservoirs flooded fertile farmlands and rich forests, drowned wildlife, and destroyed medicinal plants. Downriver, altered flow regimes increased erosion, destroyed subsidiary channels, disrupted fish populations, increased salinization, and threatened vital mangrove forests. Human populations occupying river valleys also suffered sharp spikes in waterborne diseases, such as schistosomiasis, malaria, and gastroenteritis.47
Mounting evidence of large dams’ damaging effects helped fuel indigenous protest movements, particularly in Brazil, India, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey, and Zambia, and added urgency to academic debates.48These local insurgencies, supported by a growing transnational antidam movement,49highlighted for the world the traumatic social and cultural costs to riverine communities. Concerned scholars followed the lead of antidam activists, publishing accounts of forced displacement and the ways in which postdam flow regimes undermined traditional agricultural systems.50Other academics questioned whether providing cheap energy for cities and export industries at the expense of the rural poor was a sustainable development strategy or simply a reflection of who controlled the levers of state power.51
Although most of these debates focused on large dams in Asia and Latin America, Africanist scholars contributed by challenging the “heroic and often arrogant, modernizing dam-building agenda of the 1960s to the 1980s.”52Foremost among them was the eminent anthropologist Elizabeth Colson, whose foundational 1971 study The Social Consequences of Resettlement, based on her extensive fieldwork in the 1960s, described in painful detail how the world of more than fifty-seven thousand Gwembe Tonga was turned upside down by their forcible removal from their homelands in southern Zambia during construction of the Kariba Dam. Thayer Scudder, who worked with Colson, extended her analysis by publicizing the dam-induced poverty in the area surrounding Lake Kariba, one of the largest artificial lakes and reservoirs in the world.53Geographer William Adams, in his continentwide study, Wasting the Rain, documented how river development schemes disrupted floodplain ecologies and subverted farming and fishing.54Most recently, feminist scholar Dzodzi Tsikata’s Living in the Shadow of the Large Dams analyzed the experiences of lakeside and downstream communities affected by Ghana’s Volta River Project.
Other Africanists, both north and south of the Sahara, opened up new areas of inquiry. Timothy Mitchell’s provocative Rule of Experts, using the case of the Aswan High Dam to explore the inner world of technopolitics in the Egyptian state, showed how colonial and postcolonial experts celebrated the transformative power of dams while sidelining peasants’ concerns.55JoAnn McGregor’s innovative study, Crossing the Zambezi, situated the Kariba Dam’s construction within the 150-year history of the politics of landscape in the middle Zambezi, while Julia Tischler’s doctoral dissertation on Kariba analyzed the politics of development in the turbulent era of decolonialization.56Tsikata’s work on the Volta Dam raised important questions about the gendered effects of Africa’s hydroelectric projects, and Stephan Miescher’s current research, extending the analysis beyond political economy and ecology, will explore its cultural symbolism and Ghanaian attitudes toward modernity, development, and nationhood.57
Our work is informed by both the scholarly debate on Africa’s large dams and prior scholarship on Cahora Bassa, much of which focused on either the dam’s strategic dimensions or its effects on downriver flora and fauna. João Paulo Borges Coelho’s 1993 doctoral thesis, “Protected Villages and Communal Villages in the Mozambican Province of Tete (1968–1982),” detailed how the forced relocation of thousands of peasants—both those living in the area adjacent to Cahora Bassa and others residing in adjacent regions not affected by the dam—was a critical dimension of Lisbon’s counterinsurgency progam.58Keith Middlemas’s 1975 study, Cabora Bassa: Engineering and Politics in Southern Africa, documented the challenges of financing and constructing the dam, drawing on official government reports, correspondence between Lisbon and prospective investors, and over one hundred interviews with dam officials, African workers, Portuguese military commanders, and Frelimo guerrillas.59In his carefully researched doctoral thesis, “The Regulation of the Zambezi in Mozambique,” Peter Bolton examined the initial impact of the dam on the Zambezi River valley.60
Professor Brian Davies, a University of Cape Town zoologist, was part of a Portuguese research team in the 1970s investigating the anticipated ecological impacts of Cahora Bassa. After conducting pioneering studies downriver, he predicted that the dam would cause appreciable environmental destruction.61He spent the next thirty years mapping out the actual consequences, which were even worse than what he had predicted.62His work has been extended by Richard Beilfuss, a hydrologist who, with a team of Mozambican and foreign scientists, extensively researched environmental flows and sustainable management
