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

- 4 – The newly installed Frelimo government—after years of claiming that Cahora Bassa, by providing cheap energy to apartheid South Africa, would perpetuate white rule throughout the region—radically changed its position. Hailing the dam’s liberating potential, it expressed confidence that Cahora Bassa would play a critical role in Mozambique’s socialist revolution and its quest for economic development and prosperity.
- Thus, despite their very different economic agendas and ideological orientations, the Portuguese colonial regime, the postindependence socialist state, and its free-market successor all heralded the developmental promise of Cahora Bassa. Whether Portuguese or Africans held the reins of state power, the dam symbolized the ability of science and technology to master nature and ensure human progress.
- 4-5 – This book advances three central arguments. First, over the past three and one-half decades, Cahora Bassa has caused very real ecological, economic, and social trauma for Zambezi valley residents. All this is conspicuously absent from the widely publicized developmentalist narratives of Mozambique’s colonial Cahora Bassa in Broader Perspective w 5 and postcolonial states, which have been a critical feature of state efforts to dam the Zambezi River in Mozambique. Elderly African peasants,9 who had a long and intimate relationship with the Zambezi River, graphically describe how the dam devastatingly affected their physical and social world and recount their resiliency in coping and adjusting. These memories, which speak so powerfully about the daily lives and lived experiences of the rural poor, are either discounted or ignored in dominant discourses touting Cahora Bassa’s centrality to national development. This silencing is indicative of the unequal field of power in which the histories of the rural poor are typically embedded.
- 5 – The second argument is that extreme and continual violence has been a critical feature of state efforts to dam the Zambezi River in Mozambique. Bluntly stated, the history of Cahora Bassa reveals the willingness of an authoritarian but embattled colonial state, facing an armed nationalist movement and mounting criticism from the outside world, to put the full weight of its coercive power behind economic and strategic objectives it believed would strengthen its permanent hold over Mozambique. The forced labor used to build the roads to the dam site, the harsh labor regime at the dam itself, the displacement of thousands of peasants, and Renamo’s prolonged destabilization campaign demonstrate the extent to which violence is deeply implicated in the history of Cahora Bassa.
- This disregard for peasants’ concerns about Mphanda Nkuwa is yet another example of the state’s continuing efforts to silence the voices of the rural poor—a form of epistemic violence. In this respect, the present neoliberal government mimics the ways in which the late colonial state exercised and rationalized power.
- 6 – By this time, the Mozambican government had decided that two dams on the Zambezi were better than one, despite the human suffering and ecological destruction Cahora Bassa had inflicted. The rationale for constructing another dam at Mphanda Nkuwa was, as before, that foreign exchange would come from the sale of its energy—to South Africa and other energy-starved nations in the region. Rural electrification remained a secondary consideration, notwithstanding that only 7 percent of Mozambican households had access to electricity. In this regard, postindependence Mozambique continued the colonial ways of seeing, thinking, and acting. The persistent links between the postcolonial present and the colonial past is the third argument we advance.
- 7 – This study presents an alternative history of Cahora Bassa—one that seeks to recover, or bring to the surface, what the master narratives of Mozambique’s colonial and postcolonial state actors have suppressed.17 This version clearly demonstrates that human and environmental well-being are inextricably intertwined, that development projects cannot be separated from the politics of control over scarce resources, and that the critical question of what is being “developed”—and for whom—is shaped as much by transnational as national or local actors.
- Environmental policies and practices can never be divorced from relations of power. This is especially true when what is at stake is control over water, since no other natural resource is more important for the maintenance of life, society, and stable government. It is no surprise, then, that control of aquatic resources has provoked, and continues to provoke, conflict at local and national levels in Mozambique and elsewhere, especially in the global South.
- In the final analysis, most large state-driven development projects—whether dams or other initiatives that facilitate resource extraction and the export of cheap commodities—have not only failed to alleviate poverty and promote sustainable livelihoods but also often imperiled the lives of the poor. As long as such planned interventions lead to growing disparities in wealth and concomitant increases in hunger and poverty, which are the natural consequences of their market-driven calculus, for the overwhelming majority of people living in the global South there remains nothing but the delusion of development.
- 8 – 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.
- 9 – 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.
- 11 – 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.
- 13 – The present study makes three contributions to the literature on Cahora Bassa and the broader scholarship on the impact of large hydroelectric projects in Africa and the global South. Most writings on large dams have a strong presentist bias. Investigators typically begin their analyses either just before a dam’s construction or shortly thereafter. By contrast, we treat Cahora Bassa as part of a much longer history, dating back to the sixteenth century, of Portuguese attempts to colonize the Zambezi valley and domesticate one of Africa’s mightiest rivers. In summarizing that history, we also explore how European travelers and Portuguese functionaries forged a master narrative of the river as wild and dangerous—one that stands in stark contrast to indigenous representations of the Zambezi as a source of life and prosperity, which could be dangerous if not respected. Additionally, we look ahead—examining how the dam’s history may affect Mozambique’s decision to build a second dam at Mphanda Nkuwa, sixty kilometers downriver.
- 13-14 – Just as we have extended the temporal parameters of our study beyond the relatively short history of the Cahora Bassa Dam, so too have we broadened its spatial dimensions by extending our gaze downriver from the dam site and reservoir to the Zambezi delta and estuary. Most studies of large dams tend to explore the social and ecological consequences either around the dam site or in the river delta, rather than examining the entire river system. As part of this expanded geographic perspective, we also include material on the Kariba Dam, located approximately eight hundred kilometers upriver on the Zimbabwe-Zambia border, since the amount of water it discharged has had 14 w Introduction a significant impact on Cahora Bassa and the area downriver. To understand the changing fields of power in which Cahora Bassa’s history is embedded, it is necessary to consider the wider regional, transnational, and global forces operating during this period. Cold war geopolitics, the apartheid regime’s aggressive efforts at bolstering its hegemonic position in the region, Lisbon’s efforts to maintain a significant presence in postcolonial Mozambique, and pressure from the World Bank and the IMF have all figured prominently in the history of the dam.
- 14 – Finally, we have shifted our principal angle of vision from a state-centric developmental approach to one that explores the linkages between power inequities and environmental change—particularly the difficulties of securing water for the Zambezi valley’s rural poor and ecosystems. We focus on the interconnection between livelihood vulnerability and environmental changes provoked by the dam, and, because our emphasis is on the daily lives of affected rural communities, peasants’ stories, rather than the official modernizing discourse of the colonial regime or the postcolonial state, are at the center of our analysis.

Thanks to the work of such authors as Timothy Mitchell, James Scott, and James Ferguson, we know a great deal about “the rule of experts,” what it means to see like a state, and the totalitarian aspects of modernist state planning.65 Using these concepts, we have sought to write a social history of a development project in which the rural poor are not simply objects of state planning but play a significant role as actors in the story. This shift in the angle of vision helps us to understand how top-down developmentalism affected the organization of agriculture, the utilization of labor, the exploitation of microecological systems, the development of innovative fishing techniques, and the general resiliency of affected populations.

14-15 – In the name of development, state-planned and -executed large dam projects have disrupted the lives and livelihoods of millions of people throughout the global South. “Development-induced displacement,” to borrow the language Cahora Bassa in Broader Perspective w 15 of Peter Vandergeest, most often affects the poorest and most marginalized communities.66 It also can have calamitous consequences for the physical and cultural worlds in which poor communities reside. Displacement for development certainly happened at Cahora Bassa, and the history of that destructive process is the narrative core of this study.
15 – In the chapters that follow, we employ the term displace in two slightly different ways.67 In its most conventional usage, as described in the next several paragraphs, displace means to remove or shift someone or something from its customary physical location. We use displace in this sense to capture the lived experiences of riverine communities that were violently dislodged and relocated to so-called protected villages when Lake Cahora Bassa inundated their historic homelands. Displace also refers to the forced removal of African villages located on the salubrious Songo highlands when those lands were taken over by Zamco, the multinational corporation that constructed the dam.68 The term displacement also captures the experience of peasants living downriver who had to abandon fertile alluvial plains and island gardens when unpredictable discharges from the dam flooded these highly valued cultivated spaces.
- Displacement — when you seek to make massive displacements of resources, you end up massively displacing people, soil, biota, etc.
15-16 – The dam robbed energy from the region in another, less obvious way. By harnessing the once powerful Zambezi so that it no longer flowed freely, the 16 w Introduction dam prevented the river from accomplishing all its previous essential work. In addition to blocking the flow of water and silt, the dam walls trapped substantial amounts of organic and inorganic material that had previously fertilized the alluvial soils of the floodplains, creating optimal conditions for agriculture in an environment where erratic rainfall and poor soils made farming a precarious enterprise. As a result, riparian human communities as well as other forms of plant and animal life permanently lost essential energy-supplying nutrients.
16 – We employ the term displace in a second, very different way to connote a less tangible process of dislodging and replacing. Here we have in mind the ways in which dominant colonial and postcolonial narratives of Cahora Bassa’s history have rendered inaudible the stories and experiences of the Zambezi valley’s riverine peoples. This silencing is due, of course, to the asymmetrical power relations surrounding the production and dissemination of knowledge about state-sponsored development projects.
18-19 – In the past two decades, postdevelopmental theorists have argued that development cannot be equated with enlightenment and progress. Ferguson, for example, has maintained that Western notions of modernity were little more than “a set of discourses and practices that has produced and sustained the notion of ‘the Third World as an object’ to be developed” and that developmentalism shaped and legitimated the practices of both the postcolonial state and international development agencies, whose interests were closely aligned.84 Arturo Escobar similarly criticizes developmentalism as a strategy by capitalist countries in the global North to secure control over scarce resources and former colonial subjects, which simultaneously intensified hunger and poverty Cahora Bassa in Broader Perspective w 19 in the very communities being “developed.”85 The dam revolution is a case in point—the quintessential example of the delusion of development.
19 – Although our study is informed by these criticisms of development, it would be an oversimplification to assume that development “is a self-evident process, everywhere the same and always tainted by its progressivist European provenance.”86 In fact, local, national and transnational factors produce substantial variations over time and space, and even development’s coercive power, while still inseparable from larger processes of economic transformation and power relations, is rooted in local history and social relations.
19 – While not rejecting the notion of development per se, we recognize its inadequacy as an analytical concept.88 For us, the critical issue is what exactly is being developed and for whom. Throughout the text, we employ the concept of sustainable livelihoods—itself a product of development theory—which stresses the inextricable interconnection between power, poverty, and environmental degradation,89 since neither communities nor nations can ultimately sustain themselves if they pursue policies that adversely affect the nonhuman world.90 In this study, we explore how the socioeconomic and ecological changes caused by Cahora Bassa adversely affected both people’s access to scarce resources and their capacity to use these resources effectively to enhance their daily lives.91 To the extent that the dam limited peasants’ ability to achieve positive livelihood outcomes, it brought with it, instead, the delusion of development.

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

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