Cabora Bassa : Engineering and Politics in Southern Africa
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Cabora Bassa : engineering and politics in Southern Africa http://www.aluka.org/action/showMetadata?doi=10.5555/AL.SFF.DOCUMENT.crp3b10006 Use of the Aluka digital library is subject to Aluka’s Terms and Conditions, available at http://www.aluka.org/page/about/termsConditions.jsp. By using Aluka, you agree that you have read and will abide by the Terms and Conditions. Among other things, the Terms and Conditions provide that the content in the Aluka digital library is only for personal, non-commercial use by authorized users of Aluka in connection with research, scholarship, and education. The content in the Aluka digital library is subject to copyright, with the exception of certain governmental works and very old materials that may be in the public domain under applicable law. Permission must be sought from Aluka and/or the applicable copyright holder in connection with any duplication or distribution of these materials where required by applicable law. Aluka is a not-for-profit initiative dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of materials about and from the developing world. For more information about Aluka, please see http://www.aluka.org Cabora Bassa : engineering and politics in Southern Africa Author/Creator Middlemas, Keith Publisher Weidenfeld and Nicolson (London) Date 1975 Resource type Books Language English Subject Coverage (spatial) Mozambique Source Northwestern University Libraries, Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, 627.80967 M627c Rights By kind permission of Keith Middlemas and Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a division of The Orion Publishing Group. Description This book looks at Mozambique's Cabora Bassa dam "as a lens through which to see southern Africa's political and economic developments as a whole." This dam, in particular, was chosen because it "offered a marvellous range of questions: its status as a development project; the difficulties of engineering, climate, transport, geography, and the problems of men working in harsh conditions in an inhospitable land; its political as weel as economic significance for Mozambique and for southern Africa; and its strategic importance in Portugal's colonial wars." Format extent 379 pages (length/size) http://www.aluka.org/action/showMetadata?doi=10.5555/AL.SFF.DOCUMENT.crp3b10006 http://www.aluka.org P f rica na P f rica na 627ý?0967 f.'ý627c LLS Cabora Bassa Other books by KEITH MIDDLEMAS: The Master Builder The Clydesiders Baldwin (with A.J.L. Barnes) Diplomacy of Illusion Editor of Thomas Jones' Whitehall Diary 3 vols FRONTISPIECE The gorge of the Zambezi in 1965 before work began. Cabora Bassa Engineering and politics in Southern Africa Keith Middlemas WEIDENFELD AND NICOLSON LONDON )/ ,2, Keith Middlemas 1975 Weidenfeld and Nicolson 11 St John's Hill London SW 11 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 0 297 76994 4 Printed by Tinling (1973) Limited, Prescot, Merseyside (a member of the Oxley Printing Group Ltd) No Mar tanta tormenta e tanto dano Tantos zvezes a morte apercebida! N a terra tanta guerra, tanto engano Tanta necessidade avorrecida! By sea such storms and such disaster So many times about to die! On land such wars and such betrayal And such malevolent fate! LUIS DE CAMOES, Os Lusiades, Canto I, 106. 'Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one result - the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.' ENGELS to J. Bloch, in K6nigsberg, 21 September 1890. To our son, Hugo Contents Introduction 1 Part 1 1 Mais cedo o mais tarde 9 2 Building a consortium 41 3 Contractors' politics 66 Part 2 4 Preparation 89 5 Building 107 6 Revolt in Mozambique 131 7 The propaganda war 160 8 Completion 186 Part 3 9 Development or exploitation? 209 10 Towards economic autonomy 235 11 Que d Moqambique? 259 Part 4 12 Mozambique and Southern Africa 281 13 The Portuguese crisis 308 14 Sequel 335 Index 359 Illustrations FRONTISPIECE The gorge of the Zambezi in 1965 before work began (Ministerio do Ultramar) 1 & 2 Architect's impressions of the dam at various stages (G. R. Campbell, ARIBA) 3 The gorge looking upstream with the coffer dams and outlet of south diversion tunnel (Senhor Carlos Alberto Vieira, Lourenco Marques) 4 Intakes for the pen-stocks, leading down to the powerhouse, partly completed (Senhor Carlos Alberto Vieira) 5 Main wall of the dam looking downstream. Summer 1973 (Senhor Carlos Alberto Vieira) 6 Aerial view of the site, October 1973 (Senhor Carlos Alberto Vieira) 7 The wall and the sluice gates half completed (Senhor Carlos Alberto Vieira) 8 Heavy plant in use in the surge chambers (Senhor Carlos Alberto Vieira) 9 Main chamber of the powerhouse with the first generating sets in place (Senhor Carlos Alberto Vieira) 10 Beam crane lowering one of the sets into position (Senhor Carlos Alberto Vieira) 11 Converter sub-station on the plateau above the gorge with banks of thyristors on insulated platforms (Senhor Carlos Alberto Vieira) 12 Upstream view of the highest flood, April 1974 (Senhor Carlos Alberto Vieira) 13 Looking downstream, August 1974 (Senhor Carlos Alberto Vieira) x List of Illustrations 14 Aerial view of the site, August 1974 (Senhor Carlos Alberto Vieira) 15 Samora Machel, President of Frelimo, with other Frelimo members (Popperfoto) Maps and Diagrams Province of TFete 88 Mozambique 92 Cabora Bassa, dam and reservoir 121 Cabora Bassa plant 122 Southern Africa 226 Introduction Great public works are rarely conceived in simple terms. Underlying them are layers of political and strategic motives, compromise, and international horse- trading. The dams of Africa are no exception - Aswan, Kariba, Volta, Inge. This book began as an attempt to describe the origins and construction of one major project, treating it not simply as a matter of engineering, human endeavour, or economic benefit, but rather outlining its total impact. The Cabora Bassa dam offered a marvellous range of questions: its status as a development project; the difficulties of engineering, climate, transport, geography, and the problems of men working in harsh conditions in an inhospitable land; its political as well as economic significance for Mozambique and for southern Africa; and its strategic importance in Portugal's colonial wars. Thus it was possible to ask not only why the dam was built, and whether it was profitable, but for whom, and in whose real interest. Was it a form of development, aid, or exploitation? Was it, as the chairman of the construction company claimed, a perfect example of capitalist enterprise in a technically free situation, or was it undertaken in artificial circumstances similar to those governing construction of the Tanzam Railway or the Aswan High Dam? Cabora Bassa also afforded an opportunity to study the operations of at least one multinational company in close detail, and a means to assess the weight of its leverage in developing African countries. In foresaking the one-dimensional approach, characteristic of cost benefit analysis or of the meticulous series of sociological and anthropological Kariba Studies, an attempt is CABORA BASSA made here to use Cabora Bassa as a lens through which to see southern Africa's political and economic developments as a whole. This way it is hoped to avoid the distortion inevitable when starting with generalities. The method has its own obvious distortions, but may possibly be less constrained by ideological assumptions since it starts, literally, with the dam itself, and works outwards in an investigation of how the massive investment it entailed affected the affairs of Mozambique and its neighbouring states. The result may be of some value in testing existing models of development and political relationships. During the four years after this book was begun, in 1970, change in Mozambique cut across long-established patterns in southern Africa, helped to unpin the shaky structure of the Portuguese empire, and profoundly affected the cohesion of South Africa and Rhodesia as well as that of Zambia, Tanzania and Malawi. As Frelimo (Frente para a Liberaqdo da Mocambique) waged an increasingly successful war, the conflict in Mozambique highlighted Russian and Chinese involvement in African affairs, and the concern of the Western powers for their strategic interests in the Indian Ocean. Finally, in 1974, the Portuguese revolution, and Mozambique's subsequent independence, created a strange situation for the author - who some years earlier had watched the British empire in Africa decline - as the hypothesis of his text became established fact. Until recently, to observers outside the Portuguese-speaking community, Mozambique was an area of darkness. Much of this book, therefore, charts the course of the transition of Cabora Bassa and the imperial development scheme of which it was a part, from the dreams of a handful of civil servants in the Overseas Ministry to its completion in the face of war and final disintegration, as Portugal forcibly discovered its true twentieth-century dimensions. At the same time it was possible to analyze, for example, Portugal's relations with South Africa, which took the major share in financing the scheme, and the reasons behind the colonial policy of the Caetano Government. The history of Frelimo has been sketched, not only because of its fundamental importance to the story, but to refute the muddled thinking which so often 'identifies Introduction 3 nationalism with socialism, the peasantry with the proletariat, anti-imperialism with anti-capitalism',, and to suggest the existence of factors common to many African liberation movements.