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

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      During these centuries, the Zambezi was a porous frontier that both separated and connected the peoples living near the river.131While communities on each side recognized it as a boundary, people also traded across it, fished in it, and sometimes even farmed on both banks. Gradually the river became less significant as a frontier than as a zone of settlement. As these groups of African and other immigrants domesticated the Zambezi valley, they transformed the waterway into a valuable resource.

      We start this chapter with an overview of the Zambezi valley’s strategic and changing significance as a highway into the interior, a home to the prazo estates, a zone of imperialist competition, and a site of unfulfilled economic development—themes that encapsulate much of the larger world’s encounters with the region. From this history, Europeans forged a master narrative—portraying the river as “wild and dangerous,” the indigenous population as “primitive,” and the descendants of the Portuguese and Goan settlers as “half-breeds” who fostered the slave trade and stunted economic development by failing to exploit the area’s natural resources. Portugal used these images of instability and violence to justify its conquest of the Zambezi valley, toward the end of the nineteenth century.

      We then shift the angle of vision from a regional and transnational perspective and explore the impact of the Zambezi on the daily lives of the local populations. Their stories, based on a more sustained and intimate relationship with the river, are markedly different. For them, the river was, above all else, a source of life and prosperity, even though unusually large floods sometimes destroyed their fields and swept away their homes.

      The Zambezi as a Highway into the Interior

      Long before the Portuguese arrival, the Zambezi River was a strategic highway for a vibrant commerce in gold, ivory, and slaves. Coastal Muslim traders, who had long served as the point men of Indian Ocean merchant capital, were already operating there by the fifteenth century. A century later, in 1511, António da Saldanha, a Portuguese chronicler, described dhows traveling up the Zambezi from the coastal port of Quelimane to the Lupata gorge. There, coastal traders paid the local Tonga land chiefs for the right to offload their wares, which local porters then carried to inland markets south of the Zambezi where Indian Ocean merchants exchanged cloth and a variety of other imported goods for gold, copper, ivory, and wax.132

      For the Portuguese, the Zambezi valley was a wild and unfamiliar landscape—a malaria-infested, yellow fever–ridden frontier zone characterized by social disorder and decay. In the colonial imagination, it was both a landscape of fear and the gateway into the untapped mineral wealth of the interior. Their goals were to push the boundaries of civilization, dislodge the infidel Muslim traders, and exploit the region’s gold and silver, which those merchants were already purchasing. By the 1570s, Lisbon had established fortified settlements along the Zambezi at Sena and Tete that became the region’s administrative centers and garrison towns.133From Sena, located approximately two hundred kilometers from the coast, they were able to control river navigation between it and the Shire River. Tete, a further two hundred kilometers upriver, was a strategic point of entry into the south-central African interior. Lisbon later built a small commercial and military post further inland at Zumbo, on the northern bank of the Zambezi at its confluence with the Luangwa River (see map 1.2).