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

the dam was supposed to solve. On four occasions between 1926 and 1958, the river overflowed the levees constructed by Sena Sugar Estates in 1926, causing serious losses. Located at Luabo and Mopeia, these plantations were an important source of foreign exchange for the colonial regime, and protecting their sugar crop was an important rationale for building Cahora Bassa.357Colonial officials also claimed that flooding regularly destroyed several million dollars worth of peasant produce.358

      The last critical objective of the Cahora Bassa project—again, absent from Kariba—was to keep Frelimo out of the economic heart of the colony. Mounting pressure from the nationalist movement, which began operating in central Mozambique in 1966, drove much of the later planning and elevated the project’s urgency. Portuguese officials believed that the dam would help blunt guerrilla advances south of the strategic Zambezi River in two significant ways. First, they theorized that the lake behind the dam, stretching from Songo to Zumbo, which would be five hundred kilometers long and several kilometers wide, would pose a formidable geographic barrier to Frelimo’s otherwise easy access to the heart of Mozambique from its bases in Zambia and Malawi. Second, they envisioned the colonatos, which would include many former soldiers,359as armed settler communities that would provide a first line of defense against African guerrillas seeking to reach the capital, Lourenço Marques, and overthrow the colonial regime.

      From the beginning, however, skeptics in Lisbon and Mozambique questioned whether a megadam was economically viable, arguing that its expense would place a heavy burden on the national budget and that substantial Portuguese investment either in the dam or in commercial agriculture and mining was unlikely. Critics also stressed that the scheme rested on unsubstantiated assumptions—that the dam would draw European settlers to the malaria-infested Zambezi valley, that the agricultural commodities those settlers produced would be competitive on the world market, and that the region’s minerals were both substantial and accessible. Mozambique’s inability to consume even 10 percent of the projected 2,075-megawatt output from Cahora Bassa’s turbines merely increased concerns about its viability.360

      The escalating conflict with Frelimo posed a more immediate and concrete threat to the project’s feasibility. Until the mid-1960s, nationalist forces had focused their military activities on the northern districts of Cabo Delgado and Niassa (see map 3.1). In 1968, however, Frelimo launched a coordinated diplomatic and military campaign to thwart the construction of Cahora Bassa—including a guerrilla offensive in Tete District, the dam’s home. It made no effort to conceal its intentions, vowing in Mozambique Revolution, Frelimo’s English-language periodical, to destroy Cahora Bassa because it represented “a hostile act against the Mozambican people.”361The colonial government found the Tete offensive especially worrisome; not only did it actually endanger Cahora Bassa, but, if Frelimo were able to cross the Zambezi River, it would gain access to the more populous southern half of Mozambique—a region that included the white highlands of Manica and Sofala and the cities of Beira and Lourenço Marques.

      The combination of economic uncertainty and mounting security threats compelled planners to rethink both the purpose and timeline of the project. Anxious to guarantee a market for hydroelectric power and to obtain military support for the embattled colonial state, Portugal turned to neighboring South Africa, where sufficient capital existed to finance the dam’s construction—and whose own power requirements were projected to double between 1967 and 1980.362Counting on the racist politics of the white minority regime, Portuguese proponents of the dam lobbied for a combined energy and military agreement with South Africa.363