By
Lily Higgitt
MSc Anthropology, Environment and Development, 2022-23
This reflective piece highlights the ethical and political barriers I encountered whilst researching and co-hosting a UCL Anthropology podcast, Hearing Above the Roar. While we initially aimed to amplify the voices and experiences of local researchers and residents, we were unable to have these vital conversations due to the level of violence and controversy surrounding the project. Instead, we consulted outside experts, compounding preexisting power discrepancies and colonial legacies and adding to the deafening roar that drowns out local people’s voices.
Across the 20th century, it is estimated that 40-80 million people were directly displaced by large dams or ‘megadams’ (World Commission on Dams, 2000). Today, only 37% of the Earth’s longest rivers are free-flowing across their entire length (Grill et al. 2019).
Despite academic consensus on the adverse social and ecological impacts of megadams, the “dam fever” (Akhter, 2020) of the 20th century is seeing a renaissance in sub-Saharan Africa where dam-building has boomed over the past decade. The Nyerere Hydroelectric Power Project is one example. Construction of the 2115-megawatt dam began in 2019 on the Rufiji River in southern Tanzania, promising to deliver cheaper electricity, power new electrical train lines and generate wealth.
Amid a dam-building boom, the Nyerere is a compelling case study of how politics intersect with energy infrastructure, water rights, climate change and colonialism. However, these larger conversations can overshadow the threat the Nyerere imposes on the Rufiji’s inhabitants. Downstream, the Nyerere jeopardizes the livelihoods of 200,000 people along the Rufiji’s banks (WWF, 2017) who were not consulted about the project (IUCN, 2019).
Silencing the River, Silencing Dissent
Dams reinscribe rivers, altering their flow, sediment and vegetation, reducing soil fertility, disrupting fish breeding cycles and straining the irrigation, agricultural and fishing systems of communities downstream, ultimately rendering their modes of subsistence untenable (Adams, 1992; World Commission on Dams, 2000; McCully, 2001; Richter et al. 2010; WWF, 2017). As the podcast (UCL, 2023) explores, usurping the waters of the Rufiji River from communities downstream for national use mirrors extractive core-periphery dynamics operationalized during colonialism where Rufijians unequivocally bear the costs while not sharing in its benefits.
Coercive policing and authoritarian incursions on freedom of speech in Tanzania under the Magufuli and present Hassan administrations have meant that it is risky to conduct research or speak about the Nyerere. Criticism is suppressed by the Tanzanian government often through violent policing (Dye, 2021; Human Rights Watch, 2024), meaning we were unable to bring local voices into the podcast for concerns of safety.
Given these ethical barriers, the scant peer-reviewed research on the impact of the Nyerere in Rufiji is primarily focused on the technical, economic and environmental aspects (Siderius, et al. 2021; Brutelle, Orieschnig and Al-Sayyad, 2023) rather than the testimonies of local people. Local voices are effectively ‘drowned out’ by the louder voices of proponents in the Tanzanian government and foreign critics.
While it is vital to bring awareness the dispossession and cultural erosion megadams inflict upon riparian communities, there is a risk that through telling these stories without these communities we simplify them as passive “victims of development” (Seabrook, 1993) whose demise is inevitable. The Nyerere will not likely address systematic energy security problems, economic stagnation and rural poverty. As the dam nears completion and considering recent catastrophic floods, discussions should now focus on supporting localised, equitable water management systems and implementing flood risk mitigating strategies.
Towards Solidarity
Given ongoing state repression and police violence in Rufiji, spotlighting critical voices or documenting local dissent would have had dire consequences. While I support our decision to prioritise safety, I am left with the discomfort that, by creating the podcast, I have inadvertently reproduced neocolonial relationships where the voices of Western outside experts without direct links to Rufiji are the loudest and widest reaching, mirroring much of the existing scholarship surrounding dams where local people are seldom the narrators or protagonists of their own stories (Nixon, 2011; Isaacman and Isaacman, 2013).
My experience illuminates several quandaries at the heart of anthropological research, namely how can we spotlight the experiences of the politically marginal without speaking over or for them? Ethics often rightfully curtail the scope of anthropological enquiry but can also function as a form of censorship where the voices of the most marginal and vulnerable are deemed too risky for publication.
Although it is critical to reframe research as a deeply relational enterprise and shift priorities towards sharing knowledge rather than speaking for another (Wilson, 2008), it is also important to recognize that these tensions extend beyond individual researchers to the uneven political and economic landscapes where research is conceived, funded, conducted and published. Until police violence eases and restrictions on freedom of speech are lifted, the testimonies of local communities are unlikely to reach international audiences through mainstream channels.
Rivers are “the blood” of riparian communities that sustain and nourish the diverse cultural, spiritual, ecological and interpersonal webs of interrelations and lifeworlds forged within their ebbs and flows (Caycedo, 2014). While the Nyerere jeopardizes this diversity, its construction does not cement the end of communities in Rufiji, but rather opens a host of questions, responsibilities and opportunities for just social transformation and transnational solidarity.
References
Adams, W. (1992) Wasting the Rain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Akhter, M. (2020) Dam Fever and The Diaspora. [podcast] The Essay. London: BBC Radio 3. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kn8t?msclkid=77956574ba5211ec93512b1ace86c906 [Accessed 12 Apr 2022].
Brutelle, A. Orieschnig, C. and Al-Sayyad, O. (2023) ‘Uncovering Threats to Wildlife and Mangrove Forests From the Rufiji Dam Project in Tanzania’. Rainforest Journalism Fund, Available at: https://rainforestjournalismfund.org/stories/uncovering-threats-wildlife-and-mangrove-forests-rufiji-dam-project-tanzania [Accessed 6 Sep 2024].
Caycedo, C. (2014) Land of Friends. Available at: http://carolinacaycedo.com/land-of-friend-2014 [Accessed 13 Mar 2023].
Dye, B. (2021) Unpacking authoritarian governance in electricity policy: Understanding progress, inconsistency, and stagnation in Tanzania. in Energy research & social science, 80, 102209, Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2021.102209 [Accessed on: 31 Mar 2022].
Grill, G., Lehner, B., Thieme, M. et al. (2019) ‘Mapping the world’s free-flowing rivers’, Nature, 569, pp. 215–221. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1111-9 [Accessed 17 Nov 2023].
Human Rights Watch (2024) ‘World Report 2024: Rights Trends in Tanzania’. Available at: https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/tanzania [Accessed Sep 6 2024].
Isaacman, A.F. and Isaacman, B. (2013) Dams, Displacement and The Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and its legacies in Mozambique, 1965-2007. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.
IUCN (2019) Independent technical review of the “Strategic Environmental Assessment for the Rufiji Hydropower Project” in Selous Game Reserve World Heritage site, Tanzania. Gland, Switzerland. Available at: https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/2019-044-En.pdf [Accessed 17 Nov 2023].
McCully, P. (2001) Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams. London: Zed Books.
Nixon, R. (2011) Unimagined communities: Megadams, monumental modernity and developmental refugees. in Slow Violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp.150-174.
Richter, B., Sandra, P., Carmen, R., Thayer, S., Bernhard, L., Allegra, C., and Morgan, C. (2010) ‘Lost in Development’s Shadow: The Downstream Human Consequences of Dams’, Water Alternatives, 3(2), pp. 14-42.
Seabrook, J. (1993) Victims of Development: Resistance and Alternatives. London: Verso.
Siderius, C., Geressu, R., Todd, M.C., Kolusu, S.R., Harou, J.J., Kashaigili, J.J. and Conway, D. (2021) ‘High Stakes Decisions Under Uncertainty: Dams, Development and Climate Change in the Rufiji River Basin’. In: Conway, D. and Vincent, K. (eds) Climate Risk in Africa. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61160-6_6 [Accessed 6 Sep 2024].
UCL (2023) Hearing Above the Roar. [podcast] Available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/podcasts/podcast-series-hearing-above-roar [Accessed 14 Dec 2023].
Wilson, S. (2008) Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing.
World Commission on Dams (2000) Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision-Making. London: Earthscan. Available at: https://www.ern.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/52/2017/12/2000_world_commission_on_dams_final_report.pdfport 1-7 (ern.org) [Accessed 17 Nov 2023].
WWF (2017) The True Cost of Power: The Facts and Risks of Building Stiegler’s Gorge Hydropower Dam in Selous Game Reserve, Tanzania. Available at: https://wwfint.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/int_stieglergorge_final_1.pdf [Accessed 27 Nov 2023].
