Paper short abstract:

Cahora Bassa is the largest dam the world built to produce energy for export. This paper explores how the originally designed to promote rural development in Mozambique was transformed into a project producing cheap energy for the apartheid regime displacing hundreds of thousands of peasants.

Paper long abstract:

In 1965, when Portugal proposed constructing a dam at Cahora Bassa, colonial officials envisioned that numerous benefits would flow from the US$515 million hydroelectric project and the managed environment it would produce. These included the expansion of irrigated farming, increased mineral output, improved river transportation and reduced flooding in this zone of unpredictable and sometimes excess rainfall.

Despite these pronouncements, the realities on the ground forced Portugal to drastically modify its vision for the dam. During the period of construction, the growing success of the liberation struggle against Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique turned the dam into a focal point in a larger regional struggle, and Cahora Bassa became a security project, which the minority regime in South Africa and the Portuguese regim masked as a development initiative

In return for South Africa's strategic assistance in the fight against FRELIMO, Portugal agreed to export to South Africa the vast majority of the energy that Cahora Bassa would produce at an artificially low price. This 1969 agreement transformed Cahora Bassa from the multi-purpose hydroelectric project into a dam whose function was to provide energy to South African industry at a fraction of the world price. For more then a million peasants displaced by the dam or living down river the effects were devastating as they were for the different riparian ecological zones. Control over Cahora Bassa was part of the apartheid regime's ambitious plan to integrate it and other dams in Lesotho, Angola, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe into one centralized power grid.