Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development. Allen F. Isaacman

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 the area of Portugal, covered approximately 185,000 square kilometers.337Five years 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