Whispers from the Depths: The Kariba Story

By Mike Wickins

Liz and Mike Wickins' book Whispers from the Depths ... The Kariba Story is more than just the story of the building of the Kariba Dam in the mid-1950s. Built in just five years against overwhelming odds, the dam is a monument to engineering excellence. Shrouded in political undertones, the construction of the dam was vital for the hydroelectric power it would provide for Zambia's burgeoning copper industry. Little thought, however, appears to have been given to the future of the human and animal populations who lived in the valley that would be inundated when the dam was completed. The question has to be asked: Was this awe-inspiring man-made creation achieved at too high a cost in terms of the human suffering and environmental devastation it caused? Central to the story of Kariba was the fate of the Tonga people who had for centuries lived in the Gwembe Valley, due to be flooded when the sluice gates were finally closed to halt the flow of the mighty Zambezi River. Approximately 57 000 people were forced to move from their ancestral homes, abandoning family graves and spiritual sites to the depths of Kariba's water. They became a dispersed people who have never been able to reunite as a cohesive society, never again been able to live peacefully on the banks of the river which gave them life. Animals, too, perished in their thousands despite the gallant efforts of wildlife personnel who mounted a hastily planned rescue mission known as Operation Noah. Whispers from the Depths gives a voice to the all but forgotten BaTonga. It celebrates their unique culture but deplores the price they paid for progress ... a price from which they themselves derived no benefit whatsoever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tracey McDonald Publishers
• Release date: Apr 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9780994658654

Book preview

9780994658654.jpg

WHISPERS

from the

DEPTHS

The Kariba Story

Liz Wickins and Mike Wickins

TMPBlack.psd

First published by Tracey McDonald Publishers, 2015

Office: 5 Quelea Street, Fourways, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2191

www.traceymcdonaldpublishers.com

Copyright © Liz Wickins and Michael Wickins, 2015

All rights reserved

The moral right of the authors has been asserted

ISBN 978-0-9946586-4-7

e-ISBN (ePUB) 978-0-9946586-5-4

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-0-9946586-6-1

Text design and typesetting by Reneé Naude

Cover design by Apple Pie Graphics

Printed and bound by Interpak Books (Pty) Ltd

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

To the Tonga people, past and present,

who have struggled for the voice with which to share their story.

And to Jonathan Wickins who we miss so very much.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Prologue

ONE Aligning the Stars

TWO The Copperbelt

THREE Where to Start

FOUR The Impossible

FIVE The Garden of Eden

SIX The Water’s Revenge

SEVEN Time to Say Goodbye

EIGHT Picking up the Pieces

NINE Kariba

TEN The River God

ELEVEN The Big Shift

TWELVE The Final Tally

THIRTEEN Conclusion

Select Bibliography

FOREWORD

I first saw Kariba when I lived in what was then Southern Rhodesia in the late 1950s and, like thousands of other visitors, I was impressed by the magnitude of the project. I saw the first stages of what was to become the largest man-made dam in Africa. In the early 1960s, when I was teaching at the University of Ghana, I organised what was the first study of resettlement on the Akosombo Dam on the River Volta. My interest in the problems of dam resettlement would last all my life, encouraged by following the career of my friend and colleague Thayer Scudder, who is the world’s leading expert on dam resettlement.

There is enormous literature on Kariba and the authors have made judicious use of it, as shown in the Bibliography. All the other volumes emphasise one particular aspect of Kariba: engineering, political, economic, ecological, sociological, wildlife, copper, or resettlement. Liz and Michael Wickins’s volume is unique in providing a balanced, comprehensive summary of all the many aspects of the Kariba Dam. It is remarkable how, in a fairly short volume, they manage to provide so much detail without overwhelming the reader. In a partially chronological order, they start with the raison d’être for the dam: a need for more electricity for the copper mines in what was then Northern Rhodesia. The dam is situated in an inaccessible area on the Zambezi River, which necessitated such strategies as surveyors following elephant tracks when building the roads. The authors deal with the political problems arising from the formation of the Central African Federation in 1953 and go on to look at the enormous problems facing the Italian contracting firm Impresit. At its height, 8 500 workers were employed on the construction project, about 90 per cent of them African and almost a hundred of whom would lose their lives during construction.

A good part of the book is concerned with the Valley Tonga people who had to be moved, about 34 000 on the north bank and about 23 000 on the south bank of the Zambezi River. These numbers may seem small compared with the one and a half million who were resettled during the building of China’s Three Gorges Dam, but we need to think of the approximately 57 000 individual lives which were so drastically disrupted. A distressingly common feature of virtually all existing man-made dams is that most emphasis was placed on the engineering and very little thought was given to the local people, who all experienced what Morton Fried termed ‘grieving for a lost home syndrome’. As Elizabeth Colson, who has done extensive research in this area, stated: ‘. . . the planners, the politicians and economists all count the engineering costs, but not the social costs’. The Valley Tonga, whose pre-dam way of life is summarised, without being idealised, were moved to areas where they faced many constraints, particularly a lack of available land and water, unpopular appointed chiefs, marauding elephants, tsetse fly, outbreaks of dysentery, fear and suspicion of white farmers moving in, inadequate compensation, endless misunderstandings and lack of consultation.

Resettlement in Southern Rhodesia followed a different pattern where the people were simply told to go and find somewhere to live because there was plenty of land available, but they were dumped with no homes, no fresh food or water and left to face problems of drought, eroded soil and unrelenting poverty.

Other topics discussed include an effective debunking of the myth that the Tonga believed in Nyaminyami, the River God, and claimed that he was responsible for a disastrous flood in the early stages of construction; problems of dealing with the threatening Salvinia weed on the lake; problems arising from the 1964 to 1979 Rhodesian Bush War. A further complication was the fluctuating price of copper when mines were nationalised in the 1970s and then later privatised again. ‘Operation Noah’, the rescue of wildlife in the area that would be flooded, captured much more media attention than did the resettlement of the Valley Tonga, and those efforts were also beset with many problems.

Today Kariba is a popular tourist and fishing destination – recreational, commercial and subsistence fishing continues, resulting in massive overfishing. This book amply illustrates what a high price the local people paid for the successful engineering project. The authors are to be congratulated on presenting so much material in a succinct and highly readable manner.

David Brokensha

Professor Emeritus, Anthropology and Environmental Studies

University of California, Santa Barbara

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been a long time coming for many reasons, but the support and kindness we have received in the process of writing it has been overwhelming. This may be because so many trusted in the motive behind its genesis. It was never conceived for benefit or financial gain. We came across the bare bones of a story and, perhaps like finding an old book in the attic, we knew it deserved, perhaps even demanded, to be taken out, dusted off and read for all to hear. Like so many incidents that have been swallowed into the black hole of time, we realised that unless we told this particular story, history would pass without recalling it. And we believed that the Tonga people have the right to be known, and to be remembered. Their story should not simply be washed away like footprints in the sand.

And so we set out to write a factual, and yet ‘non-academic’ book. Written in layman’s language, we wanted it to be accessible to and enjoyable for, every reader. In so doing, we hoped not only to illustrate the impossible heights which men can reach when they want to, but also the price that must so often be paid in order to do so. We hope we have succeeded, but we know that we could not even have tried were it not for many others.

First and foremost, the good people at Tracey McDonald Publishers, who saw in this book the message we intended to share and decided to publish it. It is with gratitude that we will see it on bookshop shelves and perhaps, in this age of electronic communication, in various e-book stores. The further the story spreads, the better. We hope that it will earn its place alongside other stories of success and struggle in Africa. Our thanks especially to Tracey McDonald, who instantly shared our vision, and Pam Thornley, our tireless editor. Both ladies are highly professional and committed and we thank them for their belief in our project.

Special thanks also go to Pat (Liz’s sister) who used her academic position to track down any information we had trouble accessing. She also added her valuable experience of publishing many academic papers to assist us with this project. Thank you to Margie Sutherland, Tim Smith, Barry Wickins and Terry Eaton for their contribution of material. Our friends and family supported us and never stopped believing that this story, because it was so important to us, would one day be told. Their endless encouragement and faith in it kept us going.

There are people alive today who remember the dam being built and the knowledge they have shared confirmed our suspicions starting out: that many of the facts about the Kariba project were not reported and much of the story was lost as a result of political manoeuvring at the time. For example, most of them confirm that the animal rescue discussed in the book received substantially more news coverage at the time than almost any other aspect of the dam’s construction including, most especially, the plight of the Tonga people. It has thus largely been the works of academics on which we have relied in order to get our story straight. Their studies, so often removed from the public eye, have provided the facts we required to help our story evolve and grow over time until we reached what we believe to be as accurate an account as possible.

Two anthropologists have dedicated most of their life’s work to the Tonga people. Both have been incredibly generous in sharing their knowledge and expertise with us. Their generosity was boundless, not only in their willingness to share their astounding knowledge and incredible experience with us, but also the amount of valuable time they were prepared to dedicate to it.

Professor Elizabeth Colson’s work with the Tonga people started on the plateau in 1946 when she was employed by the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute to document their social organisation, at which time she spent a year living amongst them to do her fieldwork. That was when she learnt to speak ciTonga so that when, in 1956, the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute was looking for the ritual practices and social and political organisation of the Gwembe Tonga to be documented and recorded for posterity before and after their resettlement, Elizabeth Colson was the obvious choice of researcher. Starting almost sixty years ago, she spent time, on and off, in the harsh conditions of the Gwembe Valley to conduct this study of the Gwembe Tonga people. Elizabeth Colson’s lifetime work with the Tonga people has produced hugely valuable information that could be applied to a great number of resettlement situations and has been invaluable in recording how the Tonga people were affected in contrasting their lives before and after resettlement. Elizabeth Colson is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

So, too, we acknowledge Professor Thayer Scudder, who was also employed by the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in 1956 to study human geography and agriculture in relation to the Gwembe Tonga. According to Jacques Leslie, in his book Deep Water, Scudder spent a year in the Gwembe Valley at the same time as Elizabeth Colson, camped in a tent under a tamarind tree in a village called Old Mazulu, and then made eighteen more extended trips to record everything he now knows and has shared about the people and their environment. He and his mentor, Elizabeth Colson, alternated their visits to the Gwembe Valley after their initial stay in 1956, to form the longest running study of a dam’s social and environmental impact. Professor Scudder retired from teaching in 2000 but is a Professor Emeritus in Anthropology at the California Institute of Technology, and has written prolifically on his subject. He is considered the world’s leading expert on dam resettlements.

The sheer quantity of what has been written by these two anthropologists about the Tonga people and their resettlement reveals just how complex Tonga life was and is and we gladly acknowledge that, without the participation of these learned and generous people, this book would not have become a reality.

Thank you to Professor David Brokensha, who not only wrote the Foreword, but also added valuable insight into our work through his own published works and knowledge. His academic opinion adds to the book’s credibility and we are grateful for his contribution.

When focusing on the dam wall as an engineering project, we were grateful to Professor Geoffrey Blight from Wits University, who has sadly since passed away, who steered us towards the information we needed.

By word of mouth and some good fortune, we came across the colourful Mr Tony Hallier, who was an engineer on the Kariba project. His efforts, right down to correcting us on engineering terminology and sharing his photographs with us, brought an accuracy and personal touch to the engineering chapter we may not otherwise have had. The pictures of the dam wall, some under flood, are mostly his. So certain is he about what was achieved at Kariba and so loyal to the project does he remain that he assured us recently, in light of press releases to the contrary, that he’d stake his life on the strength of the dam wall.

The photographs of the animal rescue you see in the book were largely shared with us by Charles Lagus, who wrote a book on the subject of the animal rescue and took these pictures when he was a photographer and film producer for the BBC’s ‘Zoo Quest’. Charles would go on to earn a ‘Lifetime Achievement Panda’ for his services to wildlife film-making from the Wildscreen International Film Festival in Bristol UK in 1986. His switch from medicine to photography as a young man served him well as it was the start of a hugely successful career that saw him working with people like David Attenborough. Charles’s generous and enthusiastic involvement has brought the chapter on the animal rescue to life.

To all the people whose conversations have started with ‘How is the book going?’ for so many years, we now give you the complete story for you to make your own judgement and we thank you for believing it was a project that would see finality.

From Liz

Without any doubt, the most important person I would like to acknowledge is Michael, my nephew and co-author. I am the aunt who has watched him grow into the fine young man he is, successful in all avenues of his life as lawyer, banker, husband and father and a real credit to his family. So it wasn’t difficult when I was looking for someone to share the responsibility of the project with to be swayed by his shared interest in the story and choose him. It was a move that this book would greatly benefit from, making it professional and viable as a publishable work. We have worked well together, both feeling a certain commitment to tell a story that has bypassed even the people of southern Africa.

My mother, who was blind and battled failing health for some years before her death a few years ago, got such obvious pleasure from me reading the Kariba story to her. She loved to hear it over and over and whether she saw in it what we did, or was simply a loyal and encouraging mother, she was certain that it would, one day, be published. I am sad that she is not here to see it happen.

I was a toddler when work on Kariba Dam started and Michael would only be born nearly twenty years after building commenced. The question that will be asked of me, which I have already needed to answer a number of times is, ‘How did you come to be involved and interested in the subject of the dam?’ About nine years ago I began writing a novel that included an Italian character, and to find a way to place her family in Africa, I had to dream up a scenario that put them there. To incorporate into that novel the Italians building Kariba Dam was my sister Cathy’s idea as she had, some years before, visited Zimbabwe and Kariba. This set me on a path of investigating and researching the Kariba Dam project to make it an authentic background to my book. It didn’t take long for me to become totally engrossed in the