Dams, Displacement and the Delusion of Development: The Case of Cahora Bassa

The history of Cahora Bassa reveals the persistence of “colonialism’s afterlife.” Under the 1974 Lusaka Peace Accord, which set the stage for Mozambique’s independence, in return for assuming the US$550 million debt incurred in building Cahora Bassa, Hidroeléctrica de Cahora Bassa (HCB), a Portuguese para-statal, received 82% of the shares, with the remainder going to the Mozambican government. The Constitution of the Cahora Bassa Dam, signed between Portugal and Frelimo on June 23, 1975, which memorialized this agreement, granted HCB the right to manage the dam until Mozambique repaid the construction debt. Because it was unable to do so until 2007, for 32 years after independence a Portuguese company retained effective control of the hydroelectric project operating the dam, determining the outflows of water, and negotiating the sale of virtually all of its electricity to South Africa.
Over the past three and one-half decades, Cahora Bassa has caused very real ecological, economic, and social trauma for Zambezi Valley residents. All of this is conspicuously absent from the widely publicized developmentalist narratives of Mozambique’s colonial and post-colonial states, which have been a critical feature of state efforts to dam the Zambezi River in Mozambique. Elderly African peasants, 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.

Allen Isaacman is Professor of African History at the University of Minnesota.

Sponsored by the Department of Sociology, the Department of History, and the African Studies Research Focus Group

jwil 26.iv.2012