Light and Power for a Multiracial Nation: The Kariba Dam Scheme in the Central African Federation

ISBN-13: 9781137268761 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 323 str.

Julia Tischler

Opis

The Kariba Dam, stretching across the Zambezi River between today's Zambia and Zimbabwe, was one of the most famous development projects in Africa in the late 1950s. As a producer of abundant and cheap power, Kariba was to boost the economy of the newly established Central African Federation. The book shows how the dam project crystallised both the hopes and the flaws of the Federation, a highly controversial experiment of 'multiracial' nation-building by which the British colonial power meant to appease both settler and African aspirations for independence. The author sketches the perspectives of a great variety of people involved in the Kariba project, including World Bank experts, colonial administrators, the local population, nationalist politicians, and the workers building the dam. By drawing out what these different groups imagined a 'developed nation' to be like and how they tried to put their visions into practice, the study provides a nuanced understanding of one of the most pervasive ideologies of the twentieth century. Refraining from both uncritical praise and blanket condemnations, the author draws out the fundamental ambivalence at the heart of modernisation, oscillating between empowerment and domination.

Recenzje

"This was a book that needed to be written....It exists as an important addition to the historiography of development in sub-Saharan Africa." - Margaret Mielke, Modern African Studies

"Light and Power tells in great and effective detail the story of a dam and a colonial moment. Tischler argues that the dam itself has been underreported in historical literature. Her book addresses that lacuna." - James C. McCann, American History Review

"The great strength of this study is the author's success in writing an 'entangled history' of Kariba, which emphasizes the ways that the ideas, practices, strategies, and understandings of the competing protagonists are constructed as part of a set cross-cultural interactions located within an asymmetrical field of power. Her notion of 'entangled history,' derived from a broad reading of post-colonial and subaltern studies, allows Tischler to moved beyond the familiar binaries of 'colonized and colonizer,' 'black and white,' 'resistors and collaborators,' and 'colonial and post-colonial.' She presents a more nuanced and complicated analysis of the ambiguous, and at times, contradictory, roles which many of the principal protagonists played in the unfolding drama of national building and modernization at both the local, national and global levels." - Allen Isaacman, African Studies Quarterly

"Tischler demonstrates very clearly how, as the impulses that first stimulated Federation began to wane, the Kariba Dam project supremely embodied the contradictory nature of development in late colonial Africa." - Kate Law, African Affairs

Spis treści

Introduction PART I: PLANNING KARIBA 1. Global High Modernism and the Kariba Dam Scheme 2. 'Scientific' Decision-Making? 3. Developing a Powerful White Nation  4. Negotiating Development: the Kariba Loan Talks PART II: PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTING THE RESETTLEMENT 5. African Development and the Resettlement Question 6. A Dam Against the 'Primitive': White Discourse about the Gwembe Tonga 7. Renegotiating African Development: the Resettlement in Northern Rhodesia 8. The 'Efficiency' of Settler Rule: the Resettlement in Southern Rhodesia PART III: INTERVENING IN THE KARIBA DAM PROJECT 9. In the Middle of Development: Hezekiah Habanyama and the Gwembe Tonga Native Authority 10. Struggling with Development: the Perspectives of the Gwembe Tonga 11. A Black Dam for the People: Nationalist and Left-wing Critiques PART IV: BUILDING THE KARIBA DAM 12. A Microcosm of the Modern Nation: Controlling the Kariba Construction Site 13. Coping, Protesting, Improving their Lives: Kariba's Workers PART V: THE END OF JOINT DEVELOPMENT: PLANNING LAKE KARIBA Conclusion Bibliography Index

O autorze

Julia Tischler is a Researcher in African History at the International Research Center 'Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History' at Humboldt-University, Berlin, Germany. Her PhD dissertation, on which her monograph is based, received the Hedwig-Hintze-Prize for the best doctoral thesis in History, awarded every two years by the German Historical Association (Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands).