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95 4 w Displaced People Forced Eviction and Life in the Protected Villages, 1970–75 Just as lisbon sought to construct a wall of silence around cahora Bassa, it tried to render invisible the experiences of the thousands of peasants forcibly transplanted from their homelands along the life-sustaining Zambezi river to the aldeamentos. to the extent that senior officials addressed the complexities of relocating thousands of peasants whose homelands would be inundated by the dam, they framed the move in narrow technical terms, focusing on the need to establish aldeamentos on fertile lands with adequate water supplies.1 the governor of tete, at a 1968 strategic planning meeting, assured local administrators from the affected areas—who were concerned that uprooted peasants would react negatively to being forced to relocate—that, if these conditions were satisfied, relocated africans would enjoy “a social transformation and elevation in the quality of their lives.”2 colonial planners also insisted that the long-term economic benefits to the colony of a dam at cahora Bassa would far outweigh any short-term disruptions to the lives of displaced riverine communities, and they underestimated the extent to which resettlement would shake the very foundations of the relocated communities. Given tete district’s low population density of 1.7 people per square kilometer, they expected that relocating rural families to make way for the dam’s reservoir would have only inconsequential social costs.3 this figure was misleading, however, because the population density along the southern bank of the Zambezi—the area to be flooded—was 11.7 per square kilometer, as compared to 1.5 per square kilometer in the remainder of the district.4 moreover, Portuguese officials contended that moving twentyfive thousand mozambicans was insignificant compared to the much larger numbers relocated due to dam construction elsewhere in africa. 96 w Displaced People Written documentation chronicling the displacement of rural communities from the area of the dam is almost nonexistent, because aldeamentos were closed to all foreign observers, other than select journalists whose access was limited to several so-called model villages. Similarly, since colonial record keepers focused on the aldeamentos’ military and strategic dimensions, mozambican archives contain little about the eviction and relocation of peasant families to arid lands that were ill suited for agriculture and animal husbandry. even less is known of the daily lives of the men, women, and children who were forced to rebuild their homes and livelihoods within these settlements virtually from scratch, of the highly regimented world in which the evacuees were forcibly embedded, or of the resulting crises of social reproduction. to tell this important story, we rely on the voices, memories, and representations of the people driven into the resettlement camps to make way for the megadam and its company town. their stories clearly demonstrate the highly traumatic nature of forced resettlement. not only did those relocated lose control over their physical space, access to critical economic and cultural resources, and the power to decide where and how to live,5 but they found themselves in a world fraught with physical suffering and new forms of social, cultural, and political conflict. in the harsh surroundings of the “protected villages,” memories of the homes, communities, and livelihoods they had left behind both sustained and saddened them. While those memories are clearly nostalgic, their core narratives and images form a collective biography of cahora Bassa’s peasant victims that reveals much about the race—and gender—dynamics of both political power and environmental control in the later years of Portuguese colonialism. DISPLACING PEASAN TS: TH E PLAN AND ITS A NTECEDENTS long before the governor of tete made his confident pronouncements, the Portuguese colonial state had imposed a far-reaching program of forced villagization in northern mozambique in response to the first wave of Frelimo attacks in 1964.6 during the next four years, modeled on counterinsurgency initiatives developed in malaysia and Vietnam,7 it hastily constructed a network of aldeamentos into which it forcibly relocated two-thirds of the african population of niassa and almost half the population of cabo delgado.8 the program’s objective was to isolate nationalist guerrillas from their peasant base of support and to deprive them of food, critical intelligence, and new recruits. as in malaysia and Vietnam, there were two other potential advantages to concentrating previously dispersed communities in “protected villages.” Such concentration made it easier for colonial authorities to try to win the “hearts and minds” of the rural population, thereby...

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