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

his monumental study of dams, Patrick McCully describes the appeal of such projects for political leaders as different as Jawaharlal Nehru, Mao Tse-tung, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin: “The gargantuan scale of large dams, and their seeming ability to bring powerful and capricious natural forces under human control, gives them a unique hold on the human imagination. Perhaps more than any other technology, massive dams symbolize the progress of humanity from a life ruled by nature and superstition to one where nature is ruled by science, and superstition vanquished by rationality.”23Nehru, for instance, invoked a sense of national pride, when observing the 226-meter-high Bhakra Dam, in northern India: “What a stupendous, magnificent work—a work which only that nation can take up which has faith and boldness!”24

      The international community provided both material and moral support for these megaprojects. The World Bank, the largest financier of dams, funded more than six hundred dam projects in ninety-three countries during this period.25Other major lenders included the Inter-American and Asian Development Banks.26The Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) also financed dam construction, as did the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the British Overseas Development Administration (ODA).27

      These dam proponents, however, uniformly ignored the fact that the construction of large dams also brought intense suffering for an estimated 30 to 60 million people worldwide—many already poor and disenfranchised.28Most large dams forced poor rural populations to abandon their historic homelands, which the river’s displaced water then submerged. In several cases, dams even had lethal consequences—the most tragic, perhaps, occurring in China’s Hunan Province, where a number of dam bursts in 1975 left more than two hundred thousand people dead.29

      Africa, too, became part of the dam revolution. In the name of modernization and prosperity, especially in the developmentalist years after World War II, European colonial governments constructed major hydroelectric complexes—as well as other large infrastructural projects.30Ghana’s Akosombo Dam, for example, although originally conceived in the late colonial period, was erected under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah shortly after independence.31Nkrumah used the language of national development to explain his unequivocal support for this colonial project: “Newer nations, such as ours, which are determined by every possible means to catch up in industrial strength, must have electricity in abundance before they can expect any large-scale industrial advance. . . . That, basically, is the justification for the Volta River Project.”32

      African leaders of all political persuasions embraced these projects with unbridled enthusiasm, as did their postcolonial successors. After all, dams reinforced the consolidation of state power in the countryside and were highly visible symbols of modernity and development. During the second half of the twentieth century, African governments constructed more than one thousand dams, including twenty megaprojects such as the Akasombo Dam in Ghana, the Lagdo Dam in Cameroon, the Kainji and Bakolori Dams in Nigeria, the Kossou Dam in Ivory Coast, and the Masinga Dam in Tanzania. Some of the most highly publicized dams in Africa—the Aswan High Dam, the Kariba Dam, and the Lesotho Highlands Water Project—cut across territorial frontiers.33By the end of the twentieth century, South Africa alone had more than 550 dams in operation.34

      As elsewhere, the construction of large dams in Africa often had deleterious consequences. Megadams at Akasombo, Aswan, and Kariba flooded hundreds of thousands of hectares of fertile farmland.35The Akasombo, for example, which permanently inundated 4 percent of Ghana’s land area, forced more than eighty thousand Ghanaians to abandon their communities adjacent to the Volta River.36Similarly, the Aswan dam uprooted one hundred twenty thousand people in Egypt and Sudan, and, in the area of the Kariba Dam, fifty-seven thousand Gwembe Tonga lost their homelands.37In these and many other cases around the continent, the physical, social, and cultural worlds of displaced peoples turned upside down.

      People located downriver from the dams also found their livelihoods in jeopardy and critical natural resources degraded.38Damming permanently altered a river’s flow regime—particularly the timing and extent of flooding along its banks. This disruption jeopardized long-established agricultural production systems that depended on seasonal flooding to enrich alluvial soils.39It also destroyed downriver fishing industries, increased waterborne diseases, eroded the shoreline and coast, degraded aquatic ecosystems, and caused declines in riparian animal and plant life.40Among the conclusions of a highly influential 2000 report by the WCD was the recognition that “in too many cases an unacceptable and often unnecessary price has been paid to secure these benefits [of dams], especially in social and environmental terms, by people displaced, by communities downstream, by taxpayers and by the natural environment.”41Rural Mozambicans living adjacent to the Zambezi River certainly paid that price.

      Although the construction of Cahora Bassa shares much in common with hydroelectric projects elsewhere in both Africa and other regions of the global South, the political context and social dynamics of Mozambique’s megadam were unique. Cahora Bassa was the last “great” colonial infrastructure project in Africa. Whereas post–World War II British and French colonial planners tried to reshape the rural landscape of their African possessions through far-reaching river basin schemes and other large development projects,42Portuguese authorities invested little in Mozambique’s rural infrastructure—or those of its other African colonies of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and São Tomé. That all changed in the early 1960s when Portugal, as part of its antiguerrilla policy, began a number of infrastructural projects in the central and northern regions of the colony.

      Military exigencies also explain why Cahora Bassa has the dubious status of being the world’s largest national hydroelectric project created to export energy.43Mozambique’s megadam, which cost so many rural families their livelihoods, land, and homes, existed solely to cement military ties between the Portuguese colonial administration and its apartheid neighbor, by exporting cheap energy to South Africa. In the process, the Mozambican countryside—even areas adjacent to the dam site—remained in the dark.

      While the construction of large dams in Africa and elsewhere involved the forcible relocation by the 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,