The Kariba dam was the flagship project of the complex political entity of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (the Central African Federation), which was set up by the British government in 1953 with the support of the majority of white settlers in the two Rhodesias in disregard of African opposition. The dam was a monumental intervention that transformed the valley beyond recognition, providing the energy necessary for post-war industrialization, creating the largest man-made lake in the world and displacing those who had lived along what had been a marginalized part of the valley. It was also the focus of a high-profile, internationally funded animal rescue operation. As such, Kariba was important both in terms of the politics of landscape and the making of the border. Moreover, its legacies have been far-reaching in shaping post-colonial politics in the valley.

Like the Victoria Falls bridge, Kariba was always more than simply an infrastructural development. The dam was a symbolic initiative that captured the imagination of global publics, fuelled an expansionist confidence in Southern Rhodesia and was used to justify late-colonial rule. Federal politicians used it to rally support for the Federation and its political ideology of interracial ‘partnership’, to foster a sense of pride in its achievements, and cultivate a sense of historical continuity with a lineage of white ancestors in central Africa. In the words of Southern Rhodesian journalist Frank Clements, Kariba stood ‘as a monument to the white man's genius’ – it represented tangible evidence of the benefits of white settlement, and the culmination of a long history of European endeavour to conquer the river. In settler stereotypes, the Zambezi valley in the mid-twentieth century was still a frontier, a primitive border wilderness where time had stood still and the Tonga people, if they were known at all, were cast as ‘still leading much the same life as they had when the Livingstones pushed up the river in 1860’. The valley's reputation for backwardness made its transformation through the cutting edge of global technology the more striking and threw the Tonga into the public eye as an icon of the primitive.

This chapter is about these political uses of the dam and transformed landscape.