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Cahora Bassa Dam on the Zambezi River, built in the early 1970s during the final years of Portuguese rule, was the last major infrastructure project constructed in Africa during the turbulent era of decolonization. Engineers and hydrologists praised the dam for its technical complexity and the skills required to construct what was then the world's fifth-largest mega-dam. Portuguese colonial officials cited benefits they expected from the dam - from expansion of irrigated farming and European settlement, to improved transportation throughout the Zambezi River Valley, to reduced flooding in this area of unpredictable rainfall. \"The project, however, actually resulted in cascading layers of human displacement, violence, and environmental destruction. Its electricity benefited few Mozambicans, even after the former guerrillas of FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) came to power; instead, it fed industrialization in apartheid South Africa.\" (Richard Roberts) This in-depth study of the region examines the dominant developmentalist narrative that has surrounded the dam, chronicles the continual violence that has accompanied its existence, and gives voice to previously unheard narratives of forced labor, displacement, and historical and contemporary life in the dam's shadow.

In 1969, Portugal and South Africa signed an agreement that enabled the apartheid regime effectively to extend its tentacles of empire over the proposed dam at Cahora Bassa. Located in the heart of central Mozambique, far from the South African frontier, the dam became a security project masked as a development initiative. Cahora Bassa, including the massive lake behind the dam, rather than becoming the multi-purpose dam originally envisaged by Portuguese planners, was transformed into a strategic security project designed to blunt the advance into southern Mozambique of the liberation movement the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) and, by extension, its ally the African National Congress (ANC). In this way, the colonial regime and its apartheid ally hoped to prevent attacks against Mozambique's major colonial urban areas of Beira and Lourenço Marques. From Pretoria's perspective, it was preferable to fight the ANC in central Mozambique rather than along the Limpopo river - southern Mozambique's frontier with South Africa. The hydro-electric project at Cahora Bassa also ensured South Africa's energy security. The 1969 agreement guaranteed that 82 per cent of the electricity generated there would be exported to South Africa at well below the world price. This article examines the vital role played by South African interests in financing, constructing, and defending the dam site at Songo, which resulted in the dam's deterritorialisation and allowed South Africa to incorporate Cahora Bassa as an outpost of empire. It also explores the ways in which Pretoria held the dam hostage after Mozambique became independent, as part of a broader process of destabilising its socialist neighbour to the north. Even after the dismantling of the apartheid regime in 1994, the new ANC-led government resisted efforts to abrogate the colonial agreement, and Songo remained a foreign enclave. Although Mozambique regained sovereignty over the dam site in 2007, even today, most of the electricity generated by Cahora Bassa is exported to South Africa, at a price that remains a state secret.

Violence and repression characterized every stage of Cahora Bassa's history.\\n Due to bureaucratic hurdles, it took until 2006 to get the group officially registered. Because registration required that all leaders be simultaneously present in Tete City to sign the necessary paperwork, the leadership team was composed solely of people who lived there, since no one else could afford the cost and inconvenience of such a trip. [...]are there more efficient and less costly ways of electrifying the countryside and stimulating local economies with solar and wind power and smaller dams, as a number of environmentalists suggest?

Intonations tells the story of how Angola's urban residents in the late colonial period (roughly 1945–74) used music to talk back to their colonial oppressors and, more importantly, to define what it meant to be Angolan and what they hoped to gain from independence. A compilation of Angolan music is included in CD format. Marissa J. Moorman presents a social and cultural history of the relationship between Angolan culture and politics. She argues that it was in and through popular urban music, produced mainly in the musseques (urban shantytowns) of the capital city, Luanda, that Angolans forged the nation and developed expectations about nationalism. Through careful archival work and extensive interviews with musicians and those who attended performances in bars, community centers, and cinemas, Moorman explores the ways in which the urban poor imagined the nation. The spread of radio technology and the establishment of a recording industry in the early 1970s reterritorialized an urban-produced sound and cultural ethos by transporting music throughout the country. When the formerly exiled independent movements returned to Angola in 1975, they found a population receptive to their nationalist message but with different expectations about the promises of independence. In producing and consuming music, Angolans formed a new image of independence and nationalist politics.

This paper describes the history of an initiative to digitize a postcolonial archive on the struggle for freedom in Southern Africa. The authors outline the intellectual architecture of the project and the complex epistemological, political, and technical challenges that they confronted in their endeavor to construct a digital archive that might help reorient scholarly debates on the struggle for liberation.

Introduction : Cahora Bassa in broader perspective -- The Zambezi River Valley in Mozambican history : an overview -- Harnessing the river : high modernism and building the dam, 1965/75 -- Displaced people : forced eviction and life in the protected villages, 1970/75 -- The Lower Zambezi : remaking nature, transforming the landscape, 1975/2007 -- Displaced energy -- Legacies

Hydroelectric dams in Africa are among colonialism’s most enduring legacies. They stand fixed in the landscape, changing the world around them while they stubbornly resist significant change. Almost fifty years after its completion, the Cahora Bassa Dam continues to impoverish the more than half a million residents of the lower Zambezi valley and to devastate the region’s local ecosystems and wildlife. Mozambique’s legal sovereignty over the dam has not significantly altered this reality. Despite the state’s assertions that Cahora Bassa and the river were now national assets, which could reduce poverty and promote “development,” its vulnerable position in the global

That few citizens of Mozambique have, to this day, derived any real benefit from the massive hydroelectric project on the Zambezi River is one of the harsh realities of Mozambique’s postcolonial history. Rather than promoting national economic development or sustainable livelihoods for the people living adjacent to the river, the dam instead robbed Mozambique of precious energy. By harnessing the river’s flow regime to meet the needs of the South African state, Cahora Bassa deprived rural communities in the Zambezi valley of the life-sustaining nutrients that had supported human society and local ecosystems for centuries. Additionally, peasants and the urban