‘We used to get tourists here — now there’s no one’

After independence, Zimbabwe’s white minority lost its hold on land. Today, around Lake Kariba, dilapidated resorts still draw some nostalgic visitors, but who uses the lake is increasingly contested.

In the 1950s the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi) in southeastern Africa built the Kariba hydroelectric dam on the Zambezi river. Designed by French engineer André Coyne and opened in 1960 by Queen Elizabeth II, it brought together European engineers, international capital and African workers to construct the world’s biggest artificial lake at over 5,000 sq km – five times the size of New York City. The dam transformed an inhabited valley into a strategic reservoir. With a total generating capacity of over 2,000 megawatts today, it feeds two underground hydropower stations which each supply two thirds of the electricity needs of the countries on its shores – Zambia to the north and Zimbabwe to the south.

Creating Lake Kariba (‘little trap’ in Tonga) meant flooding the Zambezi valley and displacing 57,000 Tonga people who had lived there for centuries. They were relocated inland, some more than 100km from their homes and the river on which they depended for their subsistence. It also led to Operation Noah (1958-63), the dramatic rescue of more than 6,000 animals marooned on small islands created by the rising waters. Rhodesia’s chief game ranger Rupert Fothergill and his team captured antelopes, elephants, rhinos and zebras and released them into protected areas such as Matusadona National Park, created in 1963 along the lake shores. The following year Fothergill became director of the newly created department of national parks and wildlife management.

By displacing the local inhabitants while giving sanctuary to wild animals, they shaped a landscape that fitted the colonial idea of Africa as a wilderness devoid of people but teaming with iconic animals. The anthropologist David McDermott Hughes observed how, by the 1970s, ‘imaginative writers had shifted the lake from the field of technology to that of nature. They depicted a “water wilderness” of primeval, prehuman Africa. In a second, more (…)

Full article: 1 897 words.

(2) David McDermott Hughes, Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2010.

(3) Elizabeth Colson, The Social Consequences of Resettlement: The Impact of the Kariba Resettlement Upon the Gwembe Tonga, Manchester University Press, 1971.

(5) Doris Lessing, ‘The Jewel of Africa’, New York Review of Books, 10 April 2003.