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Who Will Benefit From Cabora Bassa ?

The dam-builders with the 60,000 troops represent Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique. The dam-busters are African freedom fighters organised into a liberation movement (Frelimo) fighting for national independence and freedom from foreign oppression. The Portuguese have a history or savage barbarity and repression in their African colonies of Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau. The Cabora Bassa dam is a ploy on their part to keep their hold on Mozambique in the face of mounting guerrilla insurgency by Frelimo forces.

The Portuguese claim that the dam will irrigate four million acres of barren land, generate 45,000 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year, and render the Zambesi navigable from the borders of Zambia and Rhodesia to the Indian Ocean. Also the industrial consequences of Cabora Bassa will provide a tremendous boost to the Mozambique economy. This is their justification.

But the dam-busters (Frelimo) don't see Cabora Bassa quite this way: they would rather see it through the sights of a rifle.

Just who is this dam going to benefit? Certainly not the Mozambique people. It will be used by the Portuguese as a vast instrument of colonial oppression. As a spokesmen has said "Yes the dam will make for fertile fields, but a million white settlers are being brought in to farm them while the 25,000 black peasants who have scratched subsistence from this land for centuries are being shunted off into reservations. Yes, the dam will discharge huge voltage of electric power, but most of it will hum through a thousand miles overhead cable to South Africa's apartheid industries. Yes, the dam will make the Zambesi navigable, but the chief beneficiary will be the land-locked and sanctions stricken regime of Ian Smith in Rhodesia. And yes, the by products will be industry and economic expansion, but this will only mean as in the past that the dominant white elite grows fatter while the black peasantry stays thin."

But these are not the only arguments which made the dam site at Cabora Bassa the most important piece of land in all of southern Africa. As both sides know, the huge dam across the Zambesi is the focal point of a strategy which could change the whole face of southern Africa.

Portugal is the only one of the old colonial powers now remaining. The Portuguese dictator Antonio de Salazar ignored all United Nations special resolutions on decolonisation. He maintained Portugal had no colonies. "We exist in Africa," he said.

Geography may not have been Salazar's Strong subject but he well knew which side of the Mediterranean his bread was buttered.

Portugal is poor: its colonies are rich. Mozambique is positively bulging with minerals. Angola is said to be floating on oil. The exploitation of these natural resources for their own prof i t is the basic underlying aim of the Portuguese in their presence in Africa.

Portugal is itself a poor country. It has a per capita income of only $220 per year. It has 40% illiteracy and lost l 70,000 refugees to other European countries last year. Yet it spends 40-50% of its annual budget on its wars in Africa to keep hold of colonies twenty times the size of Portugal itself.

Portugal has found itself now in a desperate situation. Previously they had no trouble suppressing any African dissent. In the fifties the black reform movements were forced underground only to reemerge in the hills with guns in their hands. Between 1954 and 1967 liberation movements mushroomed in the colonies. Since then Guinea Bissau has been virtually liberated and the war in Angola is being waged in a manner certain to give eventual victory to the Angolan people. Frelimo's own strength in Mozambique has increased from 250 ill-equipped protesters in 1964 to 9,000 armed guerrillas in 1970. The Portuguese economy is being crippled in the process of hanging on to the colonies for their wealth. Thus they have been forced to invite in foreign investment to exploit the resources. Portugal will share the profits with the other foreign companies and governments, and is hoping to help pay for its war operations this way.

There was, of course, a second reason for opening the doors of the colonies to foreign capital. Companies and governments have a well known habit of protecting their investments, often by force. So by recruiting foreign capital Portugal not only hopes to pay for their war operations in the colonies, they are preparing the way for other countries' involvement on a military scale. Notably South Africa and the USA. Portugal gets most of its arms from NATO as well as getting large scale loans and military deals directly from the USA. The South African government has so far committed over $215 million and already there are four battalions of South African troops in Portuguese Mozambique. The French Government is involved in financing Cabora Bassa and Britain, through its 600 year old alliance with Portugal, is the reason Portugal gets supplied with NATO arms, bombs, napalm and defoliants.

The Portuguese case for Cabora Bassa is clear. Four million acres of citrus fruits, cotton plantations, coffee beans, sugar canes and forest lands will, with the help of the dam, pour their rich harvest into Portugal's war-drained coffers. Thick seams of iron-ore, titanium, manganese, copper and chrome are waiting to be brought to the surface and turned into industries by the power of the dam. Surveys have indicated that titanium deposits alone might amount to 200 million tons.

But this development will not be for and by the Mozambican people at all. The power of the dam will certainly be used to create an agricultural and industrial complex on the Zambesi. But Portugal's intention is to plan for a complex which will be financed, built, owned, managed and defended by international companies and white settlers.

Previously the Portuguese troops garrisoned a line to the north of the Zambesi; but in 1965 Frelimo troops broke through the line and now they control over a fifth of Mozambique and a third of the population. A new line of defense had to be created to stop Frelimo southward drive — both from Portugal's point of view and Vorster's regime in South Africa which is casting fearful looks at the southward push of the freedom fighters. A white dominated, economically powerful, and easily defended industrial Zone along the Zambesi could block Frelimo's drive southward and guarantee the status quo of Mozambique. The power point of the plan is the Cabora Bassa Dam.

Portuguese citizens are encouraged and financially aided to move to the colonies. Two hundred acres of fertile land is given to every Portuguese soldier who volunteers to remain in Mozambique when his military service has expired.

White immigration, though, is but one part of Portuguese policy. Portugal stands condemned for selling off the resources of Mozambique to foreign countries in order to lay the functions for a strong white dominated Mozambique and protected by forein interests. One hopes, for the sake of all, that the US imperialists have learnt their lesson from Victnam and if they interfere here as well, they will be defeated again by a protracted people's struggle. There is certainly no doubt that the US is actively aiding and abetting with the Portuguese. Large scale grants, loans and trading concession have been made to Portugal.

One of the most glaring example of the justice for Frelimo's case lines in the labour policies of the Portuguese. In finding labour to work on the dam the Portuguese have adopted policies consistent with their savagely brutal actions used to defend the dam. The 3,000 black Mozambicans working on the Cabora Bass construction and the consequent industrialising page 15 [unclear: of] the area are recruited for work according to Portuguese colonial law.

Any African who breaks these laws, or [unclear: who] falls behind the tax he pays on his [unclear: mid] hut, must work penalty labour with [unclear: ou] pay wherever the government [unclear: reHs] [unclear: hi] to work. Compulsory labour applies [unclear: automatically] whenever voluntary man-[unclear: power] is insufficient to meet the needs of [unclear: plic] works such as Cabora Bassa, and [unclear: the] means that any African between the age of 14 and 60 is liable to be forced to [unclear: wok] if, where, and when the government [unclear: siders] it necessary. Any African who [unclear: unot] prove he has been employed for at [unclear: let] six months of the previous year is [unclear: ped] at the disposal of state or private [unclear: iploycrs] Note, also, that subsistence farming is not regarded as employment, but as vagabonding, and as such liable to forced labour.

The wage for Africans for this kind of work can be as low as tenpence per week.

Informed sources have come to consider that forced labour in the Portuguese colonies is the most extreme form of exploitation that exists anywhere.

It should be noted that the dam has been made possible by the mutual interests and practical cooperation of the white supremacist regimes in southern Africa. (South Africa, Rhodesia and the Portuguese.) Eventually the power of the dam will link these states politically, economically and electrically. An unholy alliance of the white supremacist and power bloc, naturally assisted by the USA, Britain, France and others.

For the South African apartheid regime, Cabora Bassa is also a long term political investment. Vorster's fear is that if Frelimo over-ran Mozambique, there could (and probably would) be a link up between Frelimo and the ZAPU—ZANU freedom fighters in Rhodesia. This would bring the two liberation movements masses on the borders of South Africa itself. Cabora Bassa is the first (and vital) line of defense to that possibility, and so the industrialised white buffer zone to the north of Mozambique is of just as much interest to South Africa as it is to Portugal.

The conflicts at the Cabora Bass gorge are symptomatic of the sort of major conflicts in the world today.

Colonialism against independence, black against white, international capitalism against socialism, apartheid against the liberation movements. Your stand on Cabora Bassa depends on your stand on each of these questions.

Now what of Frclimo? To quote Samora Machel, "A mango does not become a great tree in its first day but like a growing mango tree, we are deeply rooted in the soil that is our people, and the masses are now tasting the first fruits." Sept 25, 1970.

In the liberated regions the first steps towards national reconstruction are begining. Land which had belonged to foreign owned concession companies has been redistributed and agriculture is being reorganised on a cooperative system. Though short of supplies and equipment, bush primary schools have been set up and 20,000 arc beginning their education.

The justice of Frelimo's cause is obvious. Their success depends to a large extent on the help- support and solidarity they receive from justice minded peoples of the world. The developing fighting around Cabora Bassa in particular, and southern Africa in general will become the new focal point in the struggle against colonialism and imperialism — the products of western capitalism.