Zambezi River

• June 2008 World Rivers Review: Legacy Issue
  

Fifty years ago, Tonga communities were forced to give up their traditional homeland during construction of Kariba Dam. Unforgiving terrain combined with the country's devolving political and economic situation have left the Zimbabwean Tonga facing greater challenges than their Zambian relatives, whose community well-being deteriorated following an inadequate resettlement. Starting in 2000, the Tonga-led Basilwizi Trust in Zimbabwe began helping rewrite the future of its people. International Rivers' Africa campaigner Terri Hathaway caught up with Boniface Mutale, Director of Basilwizi Trust. Born shortly after his family's resettlement, Mutale is leading one of the strongest efforts to combat the effects of displacement which continue to batter new generations of Tonga.

Kariba Dam, on the Zambezi River in what is now Zambia and Zimbabwe, was the engine for the African copper mining industry, generating wealth for colonialists, and then to spur development of the two countries after independence. It was the World Bank’s first dam project. It is also one of Africa's most notorious cases of a people wronged in the name of national development.

For a couple of weeks in late September, sooty plumes of black smoke billowed from the stacks of the Mozambique Aluminum (Mozal) smelter on the outskirts of the Mozambican capital, Maputo. A year after the plant opened, a cooling tower in the treatment plant corroded and gave way, spewing sulfur dioxide and toxic fluoride into the air. A company official admitted that fluoride was in fact being released, but was quick to claim, "While the black plume now issuing from the top of the treatment plant is unsightly, it is not dangerous."

Over the millennia, life in Southern Africa was measured by the ebb and flow of the great Zambezi River. Every year the river’s waters spilled over into its vast floodplains, irrigating subsistence crops, rejuvenating vital grasslands for wildlife and livestock, depositing nutrient–rich sediments in coastal mangroves, and triggering the lifecycles of countless species of plants and animals.

The Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River is one of Africa’s largest dams, and one with a particularly sorry legacy for those forced to make way for it. Just miles from the huge reservoir in the Zambezi Valley live several tribes who are among the poorest, most remote and least developed in the country. Their predicament is largely attributed to their forced removal from their riverside communities in the late 1950s for the construction of Kariba. For almost 50 years, they have lived in isolation and with few significant development initiatives.