Big Concrete Structure at Kariba- Dam!

I’m not normally one to turn down the opportunity to see or do something different. Most of the people I know will happily attest this statement, having seen me accept the challenge of eating the mostly inedible detritus from my kitchen sink (for a fiver, mind), do a poo in the African bush and bungee jump from Victoria Falls Bridge, among other things. I relish new experiences, even if they turn out to be a little disappointing, such as my appointment with the witchdoctor.

Given this, it was quite out of character for me when I turned down the chance to see Kariba Dam on the River Zambezi. It was the summer of 2006, during my first foray into Zambia (and for all I knew at the time, quite possibly my last). I’d never seen a dam before, let alone one of the magnitude that the black and white photos hung up in our lodge had promised this would be. We were only staying at Lake Kariba for a few days, so this genuinely appeared to be a once in a lifetime opportunity. I ummed and arred, but said no.

I can’t remember exactly why I did this, although the prospect of a ninety minute round trip to look at a glorified slab of concrete hardly had me rushing for the bus. In fact, as I looked out upon the early morning sunshine glistening across the vast pool before me, gentle waves crisply lapping up against the shore, I took it upon myself to stay right where I was.

However, the curiosity stung a little. When those who did go returned, reports varied from “really cool” to “bloody massive”, and left me feeling that my time spent reading a below-par Stephen King effort by the lake had been somewhat wasted. So, when in July 2008- two years on- I was given the reprieve of a second chance to see Kariba Dam, I jumped at the chance to find out what I’d missed.

The immediately startling thing about Kariba Dam is its size. It stands at 128 metres tall and a whopping 579 metres long- that’s like, well over half a kilometre, or about the length of six football pitches stood end to end- and the twenty-one metre thick arch contains nearly one billion cubic metres of concrete. As we rounded the last corner leading up to this massive monument, I was completely taken aback by its utter enormity.

The second thing that springs to your attention as you step on to the dam is the contrast in views from either direction. Upstream to the West sits the ever-placid Lake Kariba, a vast carpet dyed with two hundred million tonnes of blue, with no distant shoreline in sight. If you stand on the north bank of the lake you can just about make out a few hazy impressions of the Zimbabwean side but from here the water endlessly chases an elusive vanishing point. It’s like staring out to sea.

That is, of course, until you cross the twenty-one metres to the ‘downstream’ side of the dam. What awaits you here is a vastness of a completely different nature. You are confronted by a deep river valley, which carries escapist water downstream for maybe five hundred metres before meandering out of sight to the right. Here, the river resumes its natural course towards Mozambique and the Indian Ocean, as though it’s hiatus in the lake never happened and making the contrast with what you were beholding just moments before all the more stark. The river becomes a river again; steep banks re-emerge as close-knit entities ready to resume their task of guiding a relatively narrow channel on its way.

All this of course makes you wonder: what a truly colossal feat of engineering. What you are standing on appears little more than an enormous plug, yet you can’t fail to be impressed by the scale of it. I guess the nearest you could get to making your own Kariba Dam would be to fill your bathtub and leave the taps on until your entire house floods completely, whilst occasionally snorkelling back in to your bathroom to unplug the tub for a few minutes to let some water out. Except of course that would be a very stupid thing to do.

That said, the building of the dam itself was not met without controversy. Despite the thousands of tourists, booming fishing trade (when the lake was formed, shoals of kapenta fish were airlifted from Lake Malawi) and of course the hydroelectric power that it promiosed to generate for both Zambia and Zimbabwe, it faced considerable opposition from the word go.

Not least from the Tonga people who had lived, worshipped, traded and cultivated on the banks of the Zambezi for many generations before the lake engulfed their land. In the mid-1950s as construction began, one politician called Robinson Nabulyato prophetically queried what would become of the 40,000 Africans who would have to leave their homes as the waters rose.

The answer, much to their consternation, was their forced resettlement. By 1959 34,000 had been moved to areas between ten and ninety kilometres away and each family was compensated just £3 for their trouble; this pales into insignificance when one realises what many of them were forced to relinquish. Some were so angered by the situation that they used force to resist. In Chisamu Village, for example, police opened fire on residents who came at them with spears; eight were killed and a further eighty-four injured.

On top of this, acre upon acre of land had to be cleared of the tsetse fly- carrier of the much-feared sleeping sickness- in order for people to be resettled there. Extensive fogging of land with insecticide, at a cost of £150 per hectare, as well as the culling of thousands of game that may have hosted the tsetse fly brought the financial cost of resettlement to around £2,000,000.

Further problems arose once resettlement had taken place. For a start there was an inadequate food supply: away from the river the soils could not be as readily irrigated and crops were slow to yield, which was exacerbated by the large elephant population. Anyone who has seen the Disney version of the Jungle Book may well recall a whimsical elephant herd that young Mowgli tries to join. He gets booted out because, well, he’s not an elephant, but that doesn’t stop them from being amusing and loveable all the same. What you may not remember is the parting shot of them trampling down trees that stand in their way, leaving in their wake a path of destruction and decimating hundreds of years of growth in one fell swoop. Elephants are genuinely prone to doing this, and it was the inherent issue faced by the Tonga people upon their arrival in new pastures where elephants were numerous. They simply made mincemeat of their crops, and some people were even trampled to death. Many people fled, whilst a great number of elephants were shot.

A prevalence of disease didn’t help matters as a coming together of people from different areas exposed many to viruses and bacteria with which they were previously unfamiliar and had no resistance to. In September 1959 fifty-three people died without any apparent explanation.

Crikey, you’re thinking. This Kariba Dam thing sure caused a lot of trouble. And you’re right. But wait! There’s more…

The actual construction of the dam itself was fraught with contentious issues. For starters, its being built on the River Zambezi rather than the seemingly more practical River Kafue was met with cries of opposition. Kafue ran closer to Lusaka, and crucially, the mines in the Copperbelt region in the north than the Zambezi, had greater irrigation potential and with Kafue having been the original location for the scheme, £500,000 had already been spent on the project before Prime Minister Lord Malvern decided upon the switch. Malvern’s thinking was that a dam and consequently, a lake, on the border of the Northern and Southern Rhodesias (now Zambia and Zimbabwe) would strengthen the… well, allow me to quote the man:

“Its size and all that sort of thing makes such a popular appeal and it will be an excellent advertisement for the whole Federal area.”

In other words, he was thinking in terms of the Federation (of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland- now Malawi) rather than Northern Rhodesia alone. Placing it on the border of two of the three member states would be a statement of unity and solidarity within what was only a young federation.

Still, it remained very unpopular among Zambians. Not least the miners in the Copperbelt. Their opposition to the scheme was mete with an iron fist by the determined Malvern, who threatened to dump an export charge of £50 per tonne on copper if they didn’t support the switch to Kariba. This meant that an annual export of 400,000 tonnes of copper would induce a whopping £20 million export fee; the miners were duly silenced.

The government did all it could to justify the switch, although attempts to defend the changes were rather feeble. In one video presenting the finished article to the oil company Shell, the narrator naively asks, “What is lost [by the Tonga people] that isn’t doubly compensated?” For sure, the movement to areas with better access to modern health facilities and the like may have had a positive impact on their lives but in doing so they lost their spiritual homes and ways of life, as well as encountering all of the problems mentioned above. Another claim it made was that data on the geography of Kafue was incomplete and that the research carried out at Kariba was much stronger. This excuse was somewhat undermined when, in 1962, a large area of weak rock was found on the southern bank of the dam, making the entire structure vulnerable to collapse. It was hurriedly underpinned and buttressed to spare Malvern and co.’s blushes, which by this point must have reached beetroot levels.

Sadly, the workers themselves didn’t get off lightly either. Eighty-six of them were killed during the construction of the dam, of whom eighteen were tragically buried in wet concrete. To this day it is widely believed by the Tonga people that the river god Nyaminyami was responsible for their deaths due to his disgruntlement with the halting of his river. Regardless of how daft this sounds, what is absolutely true is that fate (or Nyaminyami) chose the time it did to inflict the most severe flooding seen along the Zambezi for 10,000 years, washing away much of the already-constructed dam along with masses of farmers’ yields, causing massive delays to building work.

Thankfully I knew none of this as I stood atop this great structure and gazed out over the grandeur that surmises the Zambezi Valley downstream. The soft shadows of the sky’s few fluffy white clouds glided gently across the southern bank, dancing through the contours of the trees and jagged rock. A small bird chirped and hoped about naively on the dam wall. Early afternoon sunshine glistened on the water’s surface as it skipped through the valley. We even spotted the tiny figure of a crocodile basking on a rock far below, motionless and very much without a care in the world. Everything was still, and I was glad to have been granted a second chance to be here.

And I was glad to enjoy the experience on Kariba Dam for what it was: a sunny, happy, majestic thing without anything to taint it. Because I felt truly humbled when I read about the plight of the thousands of Tonga people forced to resettle and the scores of workers avoidably killed during construction work And when I thought about it, I came to realise that they were all caught completely off their guard. The Tonga were never to expect that their lives by the river would be transformed in such a radical way; no vigilant man gets himself trapped in wet concrete; and similarly (sort of), it didn’t once occur to me that such splendour as I beheld on that day came at such expense.

In hindsight the experience has become a little tainted, and as I think back to the nonchalant crocodile I cant help but wonder if he too got caught out by the dam. Not far from where he basked was a sixty-metre hole beneath the surface of the river, drilled by the sheer force of water as it has spilled out from the dam over the years. Not the best place to be caught out and it certainly wouldn’t have given our reptilian friend much of a chance; I just hope he saw it coming.