Taming the Zambezi

The African porters, hired by white traders, who first labored their way 300 miles upstream on the Zambezi River called the spot Kebrabasa -- "where the work ends." A huge gorge through which the Zambezi flows in the western panhandle of Mozambique, Kebrabasa has always been a dead end. There, according to legend, Dr. Livingstone turned around his wheezing paddle steamer MaRobert in 1858, musing that mastering the forbidding rocks would open wide the gates that have barred for centuries the interior of Portugal's second largest overseas possession.

Now Portugal has set out to unlock that interior. It plans to build at Kebrabasa a 510-ft.-high, 1,000-ft-wide dam that by 1974 will generate 12 billion kw-h of electricity per year, 2 billion more than Egypt's Aswan High Dam. Eventually, the dam will become a sort of common-market grid for white-dominated southern Africa. Most of the power will travel 800-mile-long lines to Pretoria and feed South Africa's industry, but Mozambique's other neighbors, Rhodesia and probably Malawi, will get their share.

A $287 million contract for construction of the dam has been awarded to an international consortium led by the Oppenheimer's huge Anglo American Corp. of South Africa. The group also includes Siemens and Telefunken of West Germany, Compagnie de Constructions Internationales of France, plus Swedish and South African firms.* Financing will be entirely through foreign credits and loans arranged by the consortium. Part of the money will be spent on a new seaport at Cuama, on the Indian Ocean at the mouth of the Zambezi, which will be capable of handling 40,000-ton freighters. More millions will go toward making the river navigable as far as Tete, some 90 miles from the dam. One day the Portuguese hope to see a huge iron and steel works rise on their modest 400-year-old settlement there.

Mozambique itself will absorb a growing amount of electric power: the dam will be the cornerstone of a vast development scheme designed to transform the wilderness, which is infested with tsetse flies and mosquitoes, into what the Portuguese like to think will become the Ruhr of Africa. Among the area's natural resources are known reserves of nickel, copper and asbestos, plus a twelve-mile-long seam of coal and iron deposits that could produce an annual 1,000,000 tons of ore.

* Losers in the bidding: a group led by the U.S.'s Morrison-Knudsen Co. and another formed around British companies, including English Electric Co.

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