In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

122 5 w The Lower Zambezi Remaking Nature, Transforming the Landscape, 1975–2007 In Mozambique, as elsewhere, the social and ecological impact of damming on communities downriver has attracted less attention than either the dam’s construction or the forced displacement of thousands of peasants whose homelands were submerged. While researchers studying similar megadam projects have documented the devastating eviction of millions of rural poor from their homelands,1 the radical transformation of physical landscapes around dams, and the inundation of treasured cultural sites,2 they have often ignored the less visible, but often more deleterious, consequences for downriver communities.3 thus, little is known about the millions of river basin families who have been adversely affected around the world and even less about dams’ impact on downriver ecosystems. With the noticeable exception of a handful of scientists, those researchers, policymakers, and journalists who studied cahora Bassa, have focused almost exclusively on the political economy of the dam. Some have analyzed the diplomatic efforts of the new mozambican government to gain ownership of the hydroelectric project from Portugal; others have explored the complex negotiations between maputo and Pretoria over the price for electricity exported to South africa. military analysts have documented the efforts of renamo forces, with the support of the apartheid regime, to cut the dam’s pylons and terrorize riverine communities, while state planners and international agencies have debated cahora Bassa’s role in the socialist or neoliberal development agendas of successive mozambican governments. conspicuously absent from these discussions is examination of the environmental and social effects of cahora Bassa on the Zambezi river basin. only within the past decade or so have scholars turned their attention to the Remaking Nature, Transforming the Landscape, 1975–2007 w 123 devastation of local ecosystems or the destruction of wildlife vital to the food security of riverine communities. although cahora Bassa produced real ecological and personal trauma for more than half a million people living in the lower Zambezi valley,4 local stories of suffering or of stubborn resilience in the face of adversity have received little attention. as elsewhere in the world, riparian communities in central mozambique—with their rich knowledge of environments lost in the rush to harness the river’s life-giving power—were relegated to the sidelines of history. cahora Bassa’s far-reaching negative consequences for the lower Zambezi watershed, which began the moment the steel gates closed, are beyond dispute.5 Since late 1974 the waters of the middle Zambezi have been channeled through the turbines of cahora Bassa, greatly diminishing, and at times reversing, the historic flooding and dry-season cycles of the river’s plains. the imposed flow regime has also altered the geomorphology of the lower Zambezi valley—creating new pressures on the people and biota living there. this damage is the direct result of Portugal’s energy policy, which used cahora Bassa to convert water, a free common resource necessary for the survival of all living things, into an export commodity created to meet the electricity demands of South africa’s mines, industries, cities, and farms. Because all that mattered under the new energy export system was the production of hydroelectric power, South africa’s needs dictated the magnitude, timing, duration, and frequency of water released from the dam, regardless of the possible effects on agriculture, fisheries, and wildlife downstream. Significantly, even during the fifteen-year period when renamo sabotaged the dam pylons to prevent energy from being exported (see chapter 6), although the dam was generating virtually no power, the HcB kept the reservoir as full as possible to maximize hydropower generation potential. Water that could just as easily have been released to meet the survival needs of downriver communities and ecosystems was instead withheld; it was only discharged just before the rainy season to ensure that, were there a major flood, the raging river would not overtop and destroy the dam.6 the Zambezi had become an “organic machine,”7 controlled by operators who did not fully understand or care about the local consequences of what they had created. this chapter explores how the dam has transformed the natural and social landscapes of the Zambezi river basin over the last three and a half decades. While physical and social worlds are always in flux and people and nature continually interact with and shape each other, what makes the postdam era—a very brief moment in the long history of the Zambezi valley—unique is the speed and scale of...

Share