the lake and their internment in aldeamentos. He also mentioned the harsh working conditions at the dam site. When we approached him at the conference’s conclusion, he informed us that he had been stationed at Songo in the early 1970s, where he ministered to the peasants and workers living in the area. Although a critic of Portuguese colonialism, he was committed to historical accuracy and, for that reason, he would only report what he had witnessed firsthand or had heard directly from one of his parishoners.103We have relied heavily on his observations.
Padre Gremi introduced us to parishioners who were, or had been, employed by the HCB. Absent his intervention, many of the aging employees would probably have been reluctant to speak about past or present working conditions. We interviewed them outside the earshot of company officials, at either our residence or their homes, often accompanied by Padre Gremi. These men detailed the harsh labor regime under which they worked, the major industrial accidents that went unreported in the colonial press, and their substandard living conditions. One of the most outspoken was Pedro da Costa Xavier, who had worked for the colonial state and the HCB for more than forty years. Although he had previously been a government tax collector and a company overseer, he described in detail the harsh working conditions at Songo and on the dam site.104
Our project also benefited from fieldwork conducted by Professor Wapu Mulwafu and three students from the University of Malawi’s Chancellor College. The recollections of elders residing near the confluence of the Shire and Zambezi Rivers contained valuable information about the social and ecological effects of Cahora Bassa on communities along the northern margin of the Zambezi, the effects of South Africa’s destabilization campaign on the region, and the plight of war refugees who sought sanctuary in Malawi.105Additionally, we draw on the voluminous fieldnotes of interviews British researcher Keith Middlemas conducted with colonial authorities, dam workers and managers, and Frelimo officials in 1970 and 1976.106
Upon analyzing this material, we realized that we could appreciate the full impact of Cahora Bassa on the peoples and environments of the lower Zambezi valley only if we understood how local communities perceived the proposed new dam at Mphanda Nkuwa. Toward that end, in 2008 and 2009, David Morton, an advanced graduate student at the University of Minnesota, interviewed peasants in Chirodzi-Sanangwe and Chococoma, villages near the dam site. Between 2009 and 2011, to learn more about this project, we also met with antidam activists and officials of the construction company planning Mphanda Nkuwa.
Because our study, above all else, concerns the lived experiences of riverside communities, their stories, memories, and representations figure most prominently. At the outset, we must stress that many of these memories gloss over the challenges and hardships that have characterized life along the Zambezi River for centuries. After all, irregular rainfall, periodic flooding, and other natural calamities, along with the uneven quality of the soils, imposed limits on agricultural production in the region. That many males had to leave the Zambezi valley in order to earn enough to pay their annual taxes and provide for their families clearly suggests the impoverished nature of the region, whose agricultural productivity was often insufficient. While life was less precarious for those who farmed along the alluvial plains adjacent to the river, these problems never entirely disappeared.107In fact, even in the rosier accounts of life before Cahora Bassa, there are muted references to seasonal hunger, food shortages, and natural disasters.
Such nostalgia about the predam period is understandable, since the elders with whom we spoke believe that Cahora Bassa is responsible for recent hardships. Given the stark reality of their present existence, it is hardly surprising that they failed to report recollections that ran counter to their characterization of life after Cahora Bassa. Even so, there are hints of such realities even in the more nostalgic accounts, which we do our best to present.
Despite the limitations of such interviews as historical evidence,108we are convinced that these oral texts, read critically, not only challenge the prevailing colonial and postcolonial formulations of Cahora Bassa’s history but also offer an alternative narrative—a detailed interior view of life before and after the construction of the dam. Taken together, they tell a story about the changing social and environmental worlds of the lower Zambezi—one that would have been completely lost to us were we limited to conventional documentary evidence.
The recollections of the women and men who know the river best provide important evidence of the centrality of the Zambezi ecosystems to African lives and livelihoods. Their stories offer unique insights about the agricultural capacity, biodiversity, and livability of the Zambezi floodplains when the river still ran free. Because of our concern that their nostalgic memories romanticized the predam period, wherever possible we corroborate their stories with earlier or contemporary written accounts.
The elders’ recollections also cast a revealing light on the devastating ecological, economic, social, and cultural consequences for peasant households of the colonial state’s appropriation of the river’s life-sustaining waters. Significantly, peasants’ ecological memories of the perturbations in hydrology and ecology wrought by the dam confirm the preliminary observations of environmental scientists, both at the time of its construction and more recently.109These accounts also reveal how peasants perceived, explained, and coped with the ecological changes caused by Cahora Bassa and creatively adapted to changing life in the river basin.110
Additionally, oral accounts highlight the ways in which local notions of time were radically different from those of the colonial and postcolonial authorities. In the collective memories of most rural elders, the divide between “life before” and “life after” the dam was a critical temporal marker.111State planners, on the other hand, operated on a developmental time scale. They stressed that Cahora Bassa had a “natural life” of well over fifty years before problems of sedimentation would pose a threat to the mammoth project. During this period, in their view, the dam would remain a potent symbol of state-driven development and an integral part of the drive toward modernity.
Like all oral testimonies, our interviews are constrained by, but also benefit from, their interior positionality. Because there is no single “authentic” voice capable of capturing the tumultuous lived experiences of people living along the river and because the impacts of the harnessed river varied dramatically from one microecological zone to another, we tried to conduct as broad a range of interviews as possible throughout the Zambezi valley. That the dam ended seasonal flooding, for instance, had far greater consequences in the Zambezi delta, where the majority of residents farmed in the vast floodplain, than it did in the area around Tete, where the narrower band of alluvial soil supported only a small rural elite. Gender, age, and occupation further contributed to the variety in rural perceptions of Cahora Bassa, and the testimonies of women and men, old and young, peasant farmers and fisherfolk, hunters and herbalists focused on very different dimensions of daily life.112Thus, for example, women, who were responsible for the household’s food security, stressed that, after construction of the dam, they coped with hunger by planting more cassava and searching the shoreline for roots and tubers—recalling that nyika (water lily) roots pounded into porridge were essential to their families’ survival. Fisherfolk, on the other hand, described the steady decline in their catch and their desperate use of finer and finer nets to trap young fish, even though they knew that this strategy would further deplete future fish stocks. Herbalists spoke of their inability to treat the sick, because the floods created by the dam’s unpredictable release of reservoir waters destroyed their medicinal plants. All these stories provided rare glimpses of fear, loss, and the indelible memory of impending chaos—moments of subjective reflection that historians have often found difficult to capture.113
We treat the diverse oral accounts produced through our interviews as significant social texts with hidden, multiple, and often contradictory meanings. Memories, whether individual or collective, do not exist outside the present; and problems of memory loss, repression, and reconstruction compound the challenges of interpretation, as does the impact of the interviewer’s perceived social position. Understanding why people remember what they do at particular moments, and why they narrate those memories in particular ways, requires not only recognizing the nostalgia for what it is,
