Light and Power for a Multiracial Nation

The Kariba Dam Scheme in the Central African Federation

J. Tischler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137268778
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia africana

'Modernisation' was one of the most pervasive ideologies of the twentieth century. Focusing on a case study of the Kariba Dam in central-southern Africa and based on an array of primary sources and interviews the book provides a nuanced understanding of development in the turbulent late 1950s, a time when most colonies moved towards independence.

1

Planning Kariba

1.1 Global high modernism and the Kariba Dam scheme

Once this colonial process has begun in any country, nobody can stop it. The native population grows, because it is more or less protected from strife and famine and disease. It becomes too big to subsist on the primitive agriculture which kept it alive before the process started. So it has to turn or be turned to industrial work to maintain itself; and industry has to be expanded to absorb it. A colony of this kind can never stand still [ … ]: it must either rush on towards becoming an industrial power, or else fall back towards famine and chaos worse than before it began.

Howarth (1961: 34)

This credo of modernisation theory succinctly summarises the rationale behind the Kariba Dam scheme, following the interpretation of David Howarth. In his 1961 book The Shadow of the Dam, the American journalist presents Kariba as a logical consequence of the powerful dynamics transforming the British Empire in the post-war period. Indeed, Central Africa was not ‘standing still’. Following the unification of Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland in 1953, the region underwent a period of unprecedented economic growth, boasting one of the highest expansion rates in the world.¹ At the same time, there were serious social tensions: white settlers’ aspirations to become completely independent from British control exerted considerable pressure on the colonial government, while nationalist movements in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland had also gathered momentum by protesting against the establishment of the Federation.

Howarth’s quotation also illustrates some of the core characteristics of colonial development and international modernisation in the 1950s

more generally and resonates with James Scott’s (1998: 4) notion of ‘high modernism’:

…a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.

As a point of departure for this history of the Kariba Dam, the following discussion shows how the project, seen from a macro-perspective, seems to fit into this framework. However, as this study zooms in on the nitty-gritty of planning and building the dam, ‘high modernism’ starts to lose its steely lustre.

David Howarth’s statement reflects both the thrill and the threat arising from the region’s rapid transformation. In his narrative, the Central African Federation was at a watershed moment: if it did not make itself into an industrialised power, it was bound to go under in chaos. Kariba was crucial in this reasoning, providing the Federation’s miningcentred economy with a reliable supply of cheap energy. The existing thermal power plants barely kept up with the needs of the prospering copper industry; moreover, coal transports from Southern Rhodesia to the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt on the congested railways were expensive and not always dependable. Great Britain, too, had a vital interest in a smooth exploitation of this largest source of copper in the Commonwealth, as the metropole profited massively from the post-war boom and required rising amounts for its own industries.²

Following the modernisation discourse of the time, planned economic expansion was required to rein in powerful and menacing social dynamics. While the idea that humankind was not subject to history but able to intervene and improve its lot has been traced back to the nineteenth century or even the Enlightenment age, the dramatic upheavals accompanying industrialisation – including unemployment, poverty, and rapid population growth – saw the emergence of a particular notion of ‘development’ as a means to control change and ameliorate its negative effects (cf. Cowen and Shenton 1995; 1996: 7–16). In the twentieth century, development became a central and increasingly urgent aim of colonial policy. Before and particularly after the Second World War, the British felt a pressing need to adopt a more proactive approach and discard the doctrine of self-sufficiency. When the British Conservative Party returned to government in 1951, it was faced with a situation of uncertainty and international tension, a fragile post-war economy, and overstretched military forces. The Kariba project took off in a decade that is now perceived as the beginning of the end of the British Empire, when foreign policy fiascos like the Suez affair in 1956 led to the demise of Britain as a colonial power, alongside with the rising anti-imperialism fuelled in particular by the United States and the United Nations (cf., for instance, Murphy 1995: 3–16; 1999: 156–65).

Violent opposition in the colonies, too, accounted for policy changes – most notably the Mau Mau shock,³ industrial strikes, and organised nationalism. Resistance in the colonies furthermore linked up with anti-colonial pressure groups operating both in the metropoles and internationally. The Cold War intensified existing tensions, as Western powers feared that disaffected colonies would provide breeding grounds for socialist mobilisation.⁴ Against this backdrop, the situation in southcentral Africa proved particularly complicated, since Britain struggled with anti-colonial nationalism from two fronts: Southern Rhodesian settlers’ aspirations for a white-dominated independent nation were perceived as a major threat to social peace, while African political organisations became increasingly radical and outspoken. Determined to avoid South Africa’s answer to the problem of race relations – apartheid and separate development – the British Government decided to experiment with ‘multiracialism’ and ‘partnership’ in the new Central African Federation (Marks 1999: 563–5; Murphy 2005: xxxiv–lix).

Britain’s efforts to control these changes culminated in what Low and Lonsdale (1976: 12) have famously termed the ‘second colonial occupation’. To some extent a revival of earlier, welfare-centred and interventionist approaches in the 1930s, British post-war developmentalism was marked by significantly increased provision of development funds, personnel and technical assistance. In a shorter time frame, it was a means to ‘reinvigorate and relegitimise empire’; at a longer-term perspective, development was to prepare the dependencies’ future, indeed far-future, independence. At the same time, the post-war era also saw an internationalisation of the development drive, as multilateral organisations like the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) entered the arena, gradually detaching north–south intervention from the established colonial networks.⁵

Both colonial and international modernisers employed a technocratic rhetoric in line with their confidence in scientific planning. In the language of leading ‘action intellectuals’ in modernisation theory and development economics, hunger and poverty were symptoms of ‘underdevelopment’, which were to be remedied by ‘development’. Previous development efforts, most notably the United States’ New Deal and the activities of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), were perceived as blueprints that could be replicated in other contexts.⁶ Processes of scientisation also became manifest in the British Colonial Office (CO), where the civil servant who ‘knew his natives’ was gradually replaced by the technical expert, specialising in particular subject areas such as health, agriculture, or medicine (Cooper 2005: 37; cf. also Clarke 2007). Although the colonial development initiative had already lost some of its original impetus when Kariba was being planned (cf. Eckert 2007: 102), the mega-project – which increased the Federation’s energy supplies by three times⁷ – bears the mark of the positivistic optimism, the hubris, and radicalness of post-war high modernism.

In describing a process that unfolds the same way everywhere, David Howarth taps into the universalism characteristic of modernisation discourse, which located all human societies on the same historical trajectory of ‘progress’.⁸ The imperative of development implied that all societies had to break radically with ‘tradition’ and ‘backwardness’ in order to enter ‘modernity’. If the poorer (i.e. ‘underdeveloped’) countries did not successfully adapt, they were doomed to collapse, as famous development economists like Arthur Lewis postulated (Lewis 1954; cf. also Cooper 1996: 380; Tignor 2006: 93). While this dichotomous approach can be easily dismissed as arrogant and oppressive, it also had empowering effects. Here, development adopted a ‘transitive meaning’: since differences between societies were framed in terms of quantity, not substance, poorer countries could catch up with the prosperous West, whose experience would help to accelerate the transition process (Rist 2006: 73–4). The idea of development as ‘everyman’s road to utopia’ (Arndt 1987: 1) needs to be set against the cultural essentialism of indirect rule or trusteeship, as Cooper and Packard (1997: 9) remind us:

One cannot appreciate the power of the development idea without realizing that the possibility that modern life and improved living standards could be open to all, regardless of race or history of colonial subjugation, was in the 1950s a liberating possibility, eagerly seized by many people in the colonies.

To achieve this accessible modernity – as Howarth’s quotation illustrates – societies had to industrialise or go under. Influential experts increasingly equated development with economic growth, taking quantifiable indicators, such as output growth or per capita income, as benchmarks to measure progress (Arndt 1987: 2, 24, 52–3; Staples 2006: 10–11).⁹ The primacy of ‘rational’ economics also came to characterise British administrative policy. What authorities could agree on, despite intra-departmental differences, was that economic progress should be prioritised over the far more controversial question of political development.¹⁰

The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland itself was a testimony to this narrowly economic view on what constituted progress. Alerted by the example of apartheid South Africa, the reluctant British Government under Attlee had discarded its initial scruples and promoted partnership against fierce African opposition in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Behind this ‘mixture of multi-racial idealism and commercial opportunism’ there was the simple hope that material advances would alleviate all other conflicts. If the white minority did not have to fear for their privileges and their high standard of living, they would be more inclined to accept a gradual rise in African political participation, which was to be promoted slowly but determinedly enough to avoid revolt.¹¹ In the face of the Federation’s rapid economic take-off – fuelled by a high level of investment and internal savings, a large inflow of foreign capital and the immigration of skilled workers – these calculations apparently proved right.¹² In local and international discourses, Kariba became the epitome of the Federation itself, symbolising the attempt to navigate around white and black nationalism by increasing prosperity.

This view of Kariba as a central symbol of post-war high modernism and its universalising, narrow development regime is just the beginning of this story – not the end of it. As has been the case with similar large-scale projects across time and around the world, the Federation’s new dam emerged from a multi-layered struggle of inclusion and exclusion. While Kariba is, in many respects, a story about injustice and discrimination, the hydroelectricity project also opened up new spaces which various actors managed to exploit to their benefit.

1.2 ‘Scientific’ decision-making?

High modernism’s hubris, the belief in the calculability and malleability of social, economic, and ecological processes, can be traced back to the rising importance of scientific knowledge in the twentieth century.¹³ Critical accounts of modernisation discuss how politicians and experts formed powerful alliances, putting into practice a particular form of knowledge – formalised, supposedly universally valid science – while ignoring local specificities. ‘White elephants’, failed mega-projects, bear testimony to the positivistic faith in objective truths and the disregard for alternative, what one might call local or indigenous, knowledge forms (cf., for instance, Scott 1998; van Laak 1999). In the colonial context, science has been discussed as a ‘direct technique of domination’, used by colonial or settler elites to pursue and legitimise sectional interests (Dubow 2000: 2–3). The following discussion about the role of scientific knowledge in the Kariba decision-making process complicates this interpretation, as ‘rational’ scientific inquiry got caught up in emotionally charged debates. Moreover, experts eventually faced the limits of calculability and conceded that major decisions would have to be taken on the basis of faith rather than facts.

Hydroelectric planning in the two Rhodesias had already commenced during the Second World War, when political leaders and copper magnates were eager to overcome the constraints of coal supplies and the almost exhausted railway system (Scudder 2005: 5; Butler 2008: 320). Hydropower appeared to be the best solution to supplement or supplant the existing thermal stations. Provisional plans centred on the three great rivers in Central Africa: the Shire in Nyasaland, the Northern Rhodesian Kafue, and the Zambesi along the Northern and Southern Rhodesian border. Early on, two distinct lobbies crystallised around the latter two, dividing the white communities in each territory. Both the Northern Rhodesian pro-Kafue faction and the Southern Rhodesian settlers in favour of locating the dam at the Kariba Gorge on the Zambesi hired their own experts to prove that they were championing the better project. In 1947, the Central African Council appointed a commission to investigate the feasibility of building a dam at Kafue or Kariba, respectively.¹⁴ Priorities changed several times, until – in view of the urgent energy requirements of the Copperbelt – British and Rhodesian authorities made up their minds to start with the better researched Kafue scheme and wait with Kariba for a few years.¹⁵

When, with the establishment of the Federation in 1953, responsibilities for hydroelectric development shifted ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Planning Kariba
• 2. The Resettlement: Planning and Implementation
• 3. Intervening in the Kariba Dam Project
• 4. Building the Kariba Dam
• 5. The End of Joint Development: Planning Lake Kariba
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index