Introduction: exploring the infrastructure, energy and climate disaster nexus
This article addresses the intersection of energy production, infrastructural development, and climate vulnerability in Africa.1 While these three aspects are not necessarily always interlinked, I argue that countries such as Angola and Mozambique, while incorporating diverse histories in resource extraction, energy production and climate vulnerability, illustrate relevant cases of ‘fatal architectures’ – how infrastructural design can become, beyond its original conception as a path to development, a source of violence and death. This is notably the case for hydroelectric and water infrastructures, which are conceived here as material expressions of possible citizenships, in terms of how citizens access water and energy, and of how the industrial production of both assets affects them. For instance, while Angola has been a relevant player in the international oil industry since the late colonial period, Mozambique has traditionally invested in hydroelectric generation as source of revenue. In both cases, the industrial output has been largely intended for export rather than internal consumption – which signals the trajectories of governance at stake in both countries, structured around extractive-capitalist endeavours (Hodges 2004; Lesutis 2021).
Both countries therefore illustrate the potential of infrastructure for contentious politics, exposing struggles around African citizenship in terms of climate justice and energy justice (Nalule 2019). From a political perspective, such infrastructure becomes a ‘material geography of power’ (Schouten and Bachmann 2022), exposing continuous and ongoing processes of ordering, border-making, inclusion and exclusion. One may argue that there is nothing new in the history of citizen activism in the context of megaprojects, for example in terms of extractive or industrial developments. To name a few examples, this has been the case for Nigerian oil (Adunbi 2020), South African mining (Nalule 2020) and Kenyan transport corridors (Aalders et al. 2021). It is also a current phenomenon in the diamond mines in the Lundas in Angola (Rodrigues 2017) and the gemstone projects in northern Mozambique (Rantala 2022).
Complementing these perspectives, I propose that while the legacy of colonial infrastructures reminds us that the trajectory of imperial exploitative governance, developmentalism and material infrastructure is a long one (Cowen 2020), in the postcolonial moment and the current context of climate crises and debates surrounding energy transition in Africa (Simelane and Abdel-Rahman 2012; Cobbinah and Addaney 2019; AbouSeada and Hatem 2022), many such material formations incorporate a new chapter in the history of governmental failure. This failure is in securing a dignified citizenship – what Nhemachena and Mawere (2019) have called ‘necroclimatism’ in Africa – within and around processes of infrastructural ‘imposition’ or ‘abandonment’, or what we call ‘fatal infrastructures’. Below, I take a twin approach to fatal architectures, focusing on the impacts of both the presence and absence of infrastructure in the lives of Mozambicans and Angolans.
Mega-infrastructures and adjacent disasters in Mozambique
In March 2019, residents in the villages of Chingozi, Benga and Bairro Azul in Tete (central Mozambique) woke up in the middle of the night to see their homes destroyed due to a flash overflow in the Rovubwe River, at the intersection of the cities of Tete and Moatize on its way to join the Zambezi River. This was the result of heavy rains upstream and the discharge of 3000 cubic metres of water per second from the Cahora Bassa hydroelectric dam, flooding houses and roads, and isolating thousands of residents. The situation was described as one of ‘complete chaos’ (Lusa and DW 2019).
This event was intimately connected to concomitant climatic events in the region, namely Idai, an intense tropical cyclone stemming from the southwest Indian Ocean cyclone season and originating from a tropical depression that formed off the east coast of Mozambique on 4 March 2019. Beyond the events in Tete, Idai caused a string of severe flooding events throughout Madagascar, Malawi, Zimbabwe and other regions in Mozambique, affecting more than three million people in total (Lusa and DW 2019).
Idai is part of a wider socio-climatic process. In January 2022, flooding of the Rovubwe River killed seven people, displaced 300 families, and destroyed a recently inaugurated bridge whose construction had already been affected by the 2019 damage (Fernando 2022). In an interview with the Portuguese press, Mozambican scholar João Feijó emphasised the sense of ‘catastrophe repetition’ that is invading the local communities in this area (Rodrigues 2022). And, as an activist of the environmental organisation Justiça Ambiental told me in November 2021, the overarching destruction caused by Idai quickly made the events of Chingozi, Benga and Bairro Azul a footnote, because no one was held accountable for the damage caused by the Cahora Bassa dam discharge.
At a time in which scientists are connecting cases such as Idai to global climate change trends (Naves 2019), recurrent and intensifying cyclonic activity is increasingly challenging the safety of existing infrastructures, not just in terms of their material sustainability, but also of the social and environmental impact in and beyond their location. This is the case with dam discharges and breakdowns, which are progressively causing deaths not only across Africa, but also on a global scale. The Brumadinho dam disaster in 2019 in Minas Gerais, Brazil, with a death toll in the hundreds, is one particularly catastrophic example.
Furthermore, the fact that this event happened at the Cahora Bassa dam (Hidroeléctrica de Cahora Bassa, henceforth HCB) made this story even more tragic. The HCB is a symbolic token of Mozambican history, as it reflects the country’s political history from late colonial to present times, and illustrates the infrastructural unfolding of violent forms of governance across colonial and postcolonial times. Construction of the dam began in the 1960s, through the establishment of a European consortium, and it was inaugurated in 1974 (just months before Mozambican independence), making it the last megaproject to be built in the late colonial period. It later became a major source of revenue for Mozambique due to its electricity exports to South Africa. As Isaacman and Isaacman (2013) described, despite its significant production of energy distributed across the country (to Maputo and the neighbouring cities of Tete and Moatize), the story of HCB is a tragic one, marked by violent displacement imposed by an imperative developmentalist ideology. According to Terminski (2013), around 25,000 people were displaced during its construction, and an estimated one million people living downriver from the Zambezi have been affected by the ecological consequences to the fertile agricultural floodplains and decline in fish and other wetland wildlife populations (Arnall 2014). In 1978, a major flood stemming from discharge destroyed hundreds of acres of riverbed farming and provoked an exodus of several communal villages downstream of the dam (Isaacman and Isaacman 2013, 137).
Thus, the story of discharges from HCB is not restricted to the 2019 events. Concerns with the effects of these discharges hark back to at least 2008 (TVI 2008) and 2012 (Verdade 2012). In January 2021, the regional waters administration representative strongly advised residents of the Lower Zambezi area to leave their homes because of an immediate threat of flooding due to discharge (Lusa and Público 2021). Furthermore, as Arnall (2014, 145) points out, beyond the episodes of disaster, the effects of the dam on local farming happen on an regular basis, with damage to crops resulting from sudden ‘pulses’ of water during the dry season for irrigation of industrial agriculture.
The case of HCB and the surrounding floodings is but one example of how, across the African continent, mega infrastructural developments are large ‘fields of power’ (Isaacman and Isaacman 2013) that, in the framework of climate change challenges, can quickly become fatal political architectures imposing ‘death by design’, creating a topography of human and environmental vulnerability as a consequence of their material unfolding. This idea of a ‘fatal architecture’ is inspired by the forensic architecture research agency created by British-Israeli architect Eyal Weizman (2017), who argued explicitly for the necessity to observe architecture and design as agents or factors of violence and death.2 In other words, this is a plea to focus on architectural/design failure and its consequences in terms of environmental and human rights. From this perspective, material formations such as buildings, roads or industrial mega-infrastructure become what Weizman calls ‘sensors of societal and political change’ (2017, 52), that both reflect and interact with the (social, political, natural) environment in literal and metaphorical terms. Thus, the story of infrastructure in places like Mozambique is as much the story of economy and development, as it is of violence and death for local citizens.
This is particularly the case with energy-related projects, as they are deeply tied to the urgency of both developmentalist and climate change adaptation narratives and have taken centre stage in terms of the current debates on energy transitions and climate crisis. In this respect, while hydropower appears to be an ‘acceptable’ energy source in the green energy transition paradigm due to its comparatively low carbon footprint, it raises serious questions, in terms of the pollution generated by its industrial production, but also and especially in terms of energy justice, or what Boyer (2019) describes as ‘energopolitics’. This highlights the increasingly central role of energy and fuel in present-day politics, both in terms of governance and social justice. As Boyer argues, energy transition processes intersect scales of power, particularly in political economy, land use and the exercise of citizenship. In the case of Mozambique, as proposed by Power and Kirshner (2019), energy provisions and infrastructures express the contours of statehood in the country, exposing the ruling party’s (FRELIMO) hegemonic mindset and policy when it comes to energy production, access and distribution.
In the context of climate change adaptation, the situation becomes even more complex. Across the globe, countries are adhering to transnational commitments and strategies such as the 2021 UN COP26, or the 2022 Stockholm+50 strategy, and developing national and local policy in this respect. In 2012, for instance, Mozambique implemented a National Strategy of Adaptation and Mitigation of Climate Change Effects (Estratégia Nacional de Adaptação e Mitigação dos Efeitos das Mudanças Climáticas) for 2013–2025, alongside a National Climate Change Monitoring and Evaluation System (Sistema Nacional de Monitoria e Avaliação às Mudanças Climáticas) and other vulnerability reduction programmes. At the same time, while it ignored citizen concerns regarding the accumulated impacts of HCB, the Mozambican government has recently defended the benefits of a new infrastructural project in the Zambezi River, the Mphanda Nkuwa hydroelectric dam – a decades-old project that has been recently recovered as a desígnio nacional (national imperative) to increase the country’s energy autonomy and competitiveness in the global market. Projected to be commissioned in the early 2030s, according to the Ministry of Mineral Resources and Energy’s investment teaser, it promises to ‘support the achievement of the Government’s vision of universal access of electricity by 2030, stimulate industrialization and boost growth through reliable transmission infrastructure’ (MIREME 2020, 3). From a macroeconomic perspective, it is presented as a major source of socioeconomic growth through foreign currency earnings. According to the prospectus, it also guarantees ‘sustainable hydropower’, incorporating international good practices ensuring the environmental feasibility of the infrastructure (MIREME 2020, 52). However, as local NGOs such as Justiça Ambiental exposed, beyond the immediate environmental and social impacts downstream, the project is situated in a basin that has been identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as one of the most vulnerable to climate change impacts, in terms of extreme weather events such as prolonged droughts and flooding (Sanyanga 2022). Furthermore, if placed within a network of dams across the Zambezi River, from Kariba and Kafue to HCB, it is easy to anticipate further discharges and flooding across central Mozambique in the coming years.
Justiça Ambiental also highlights that over 60% of Mozambicans still do not have access to electricity from the national grid, despite the history of ‘national imperative’ macro-hydroelectric projects (Sanyanga 2022). This places the energy infrastructure debate in Mozambique within the framework of a quest for citizenship and democracy, not only in terms of energy governance (Hossain et al. 2019) but also environmental security (Cotton, Kirshner, and Salite 2021), particularly in how new infrastructural projects incorporate an ‘amnesiac’ public memory (Machava and Gonçalves 2021) on the impacts of infrastructures. This was pointed out by Isaacman and Morton (2012), who noted how the Mphanda Nkuwa project was being established on top of a catastrophic history of colonial infrastructure.
Interestingly, the Zambezi debate happened at the same time as the Mozambican government was unfolding a large-scale extractive infrastructural programme across the northern and central provinces, especially in the province of Cabo Delgado, where one of the most significant global discoveries of natural resources over the past decades took place: over 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (LNG). While natural gas is a fossil fuel, its determination in the COP27 summit as an acceptable resource in the green energy transition increased the prospects of its exploration in Mozambique.
This discovery jumpstarted major infrastructural investment in industrial and urban development in the cities of Palma, Mocímboa da Praia and to a lesser extent Pemba. This not only attracted a global community of specialists, but also local migrants seeking to participate in the emerging economy. It also enabled a large-scale, complex process of negotiations and agreements towards the resettlement of local communities to leave the new concession zones (DUATs) attributed by the Mozambican government to the gas corporations (Anadarko and later Total). However, two disconnected phenomena eventually hindered (although did not halt) the infrastructural development machine: the impact of Cyclone Kenneth on the province in 2019, which destroyed households, roads and communications infrastructures, and left hundreds of thousands of refugees (IOM 2019); and the emergence of an insurgency movement that provoked a wave of violence and displacement, and finally forced the interruption of extractive operations in April 2021.
From this perspective, Mozambique industrial infrastructural development seems to unfold in profound disconnection with political and environmental processes taking place in the same space (Blanes, Rodrigues, and Gonçalves, 2023). I came across one such example in the city of Pemba in Cabo Delgado. While Pemba is not a main hub in the LNG infrastructural development projects, it has been at the receiving end of the major industrial, demographic and environmental developments in and around the LNG projects, in particular through the construction of a logistics terminal near its maritime port (Osório and Silva 2018). It also became an operations base for the humanitarian response to Cyclone Kenneth as well as for the military response to the Islamic insurgency. Since then, the city’s population has more than doubled, which has put a disastrous strain on its public services. As one city official put it to me in November 2022, ‘the city is strangled’, facing the collapse of its sanitation, energy, transport and environment infrastructures. In this context, in recent years the Pemba municipality has promoted the implementation of climate adaptation policies, such as an Urban Restructuration Plan (Plano de Reestruturação Urbana), Energetic Transition Plan (Cidade de Pemba: Rumo a uma Transição Verde e Futuro de Desenvolvimento Urbano. Plano de Transição Energética), and tree repopulation and garbage management campaigns. Likewise, it has welcomed the recently announced investment in solar power plants involving Italian firm Renco, one of the major corporate players in Cabo Delgado (Club of Mozambique 2022), However, the city continues to endure acts of environmental ecosystem destruction through industrial and infrastructural development, fuelled by the prioritisation of industrial development over environmental conservation on behalf of the Mozambican government.
One particularly damning moment was an oil spill that occurred in July 2018, spreading 10,000 litres of fuel near the terminal of the Mozambican petrol company Petromoc (DW 2021). The spill seriously damaged mangrove and marine ecosystems along the coast of the bay. These ecosystems had already been a point of contention during the establishment of the logistics terminal, which was significantly affecting the livelihoods of the local communities who made use of those spaces. However, this had no effect on the motivation of state, corporations and contractors in Pemba, invested in the process of infrastructural development of the city.
Infrastructural absences and decay in Angola
While central and northern Mozambique provide active examples of how existing or planned infrastructures such as hydroelectric dams and terminals can become dangerous spaces in the framework of climate crisis, we also argue that infrastructural absences – insubstantial or abandoned construction – can also conjure similar effects. Added to climate events, these infrastructural absences generate large-scale disasters through more protracted or deferred (Rogat 2022) forms of ‘death by design’.
This is the case for Angola. In 2019, president João Lourenço attended the UN General Assembly Meeting, where he voiced his concerns regarding the effects of global warming and climate change. He claimed that:
Concrete examples of the phenomenon of climate change and global warming are multiplying around the world, which leads us to join those who denounce the irresponsibility of those who persist in ignoring these signs and who think they have the right to finance polluting industries. (Lusa and DW 2019b; my translation)
However, the speech failed to mention dramatic processes taking place in the country. Also in 2019, several national and international organisations denounced a social and environmental disaster taking place across southwestern Angola: a long-term drought cycle provoking a large-scale humanitarian disaster across the provinces of Namibe, Huíla and Cunene. As described elsewhere (Blanes et al. 2022a, 2022b), alongside other areas of Africa, this region has experienced a pattern of irregular rainfall since 2010, which has been recurrently ‘explained’ in the Angolan media in reference to El Niño. The drought resulted in millions affected by food insecurity, loss of livestock and crops, rural exodus and migration, and increasing conflicts over land and water resources. In Angola, the UN and other institutions estimate that 1.3 million people are directly affected by the drought across the three provinces (Blanes et al. 2022a, 2022b). In response, national and international organisations mobilised to provide immediate assistance and aid, and to promote more long-term solutions to address the population’s vulnerability. Most of these initiatives were operationalised through a funding programme called FRESAN,3 which had been created as a food insecurity reduction campaign and was later repurposed to address the drought through in situ micro-interventions such as building or repairing water holes, retention or collection systems, and promoting farming projects (Blanes et al. 2022b).
However, beyond the large-scale interpretation of a ‘generalised drought’ that is a product of overarching climatic events, diverse micro-droughts can be seen in the region, most of which originated not in climatological processes, but instead in anthropogenic processes. In this respect, it is telling that in the province of Cunene – which became the symbol of the drought, in the sense that it is often referred to in the Angolan media as ‘the Cunene drought’ (a seca no Cunene) – drought events in the dry season are recurrently alternated with flooding events in the rainy season, stemming from the overflow of the Cunene River.
One such anthropogenic drought stems from the breakdown of the extended network of colonial energy and water infrastructures that remained in the region, resulting from decades of state abandonment; for instance, dams such as the Barragem das Neves or Matala dam in the province of Huíla, or the Calueque dam in the province of Cunene, have experienced ruptures and breakdowns, both in their retention infrastructures and associated distribution and irrigation systems (Blanes et al. 2022a). The construction of this infrastructural network in the 1950s to 1970s also involved similar socio-environmental violence as with Cahora Bassa in Mozambique. However, in the subsequent decades, resettled pastoralist and farming communities slowly made use of the water distribution networks for their own household livelihoods. Unfortunately, these networks have not received any major maintenance or repair work over in recent decades.
This abandonment is not necessarily caused by state incapacity – technical, financial or otherwise – but instead by its paradigmatic focus and investment in new infrastructures as ‘big business’ (Oliveira 2007) opportunities. Several authors have mapped how, since the end of the civil war in 2002, Angola experienced a ‘constructionist boom’ that radically reconfigured both its urban landscapes and construction, transport and communication sectors (Cardoso 2015; Oliveira 2015; Croese 2017; Gastrow 2017; Buire 2018; Croese and Pitcher 2019; Blanes 2019; Moreira 2021). In this framework, transnational partnerships with Portuguese, Brazilian or Chinese construction companies to build large-scale infrastructural construction projects became commonplace (ibid.) This radical material rehaul was mostly located in and around the capital Luanda. By contrast, infrastructural investments in rural areas remained almost exclusively at the service of large-scale agro-industrial or mining ventures, which have grown exponentially over the past decade (Blanes et al. 2022a). The drought, however, raised public awareness of the situation of rural farmer and pastoralist communities, and ultimately pushed the government into a redesign of water and energy-related infrastructures in the affected regions.
This is what became known as the Sistema de Transferência de Água do Rio Cunene (Cunene River Water Transfer System), a water capture and redistribution system around the Cunene River whose construction began in 2019, as the major governmental infrastructure response to address the drought. The construction was contracted to the Chinese hydropower and engineering company Sinohydro, a recent strategic partner with the Angolan regime within the framework of Angola–China bilateral relations, which combine loan agreements and major public construction programmes, such as the Cunene project or the reconstruction of Luanda’s water supply system, among others. The Cunene waterwork project included the construction of all new infrastructures such as dams, water collection and pipeline systems in an area from the region of Ombadja to Cuamato and Namacunde – creating an expected 5000 hectares of agricultural lands, and ‘putting an end to the suffering caused by the drought’ for about 235,000 people and 250,000 livestock, as recently conveyed in the local media (Esteves 2022). Furthermore, other societal problems, such as the extension of transhumance routes and school abandonment, were to be solved (Esteves 2022). The newly renamed Cafú Canal was finally inaugurated in April 2022.
However, while this major infrastructural intervention promised to solve the issues in the ‘token province of Cunene’, it did not address the problems in the nearby provinces of Huíla and Namibe, which also suffered from long-term drought. While Namibe traditionally has a desert and semidesert climate, the highlands and plateaus of Huíla have been a historically fertile region that has attracted pastoralist (transhumant), settler and more recently agro-industrial communities to the region (Blanes et al. 2022a). Here, one particularly striking example is the Tunda dos Gambos, which was a popular communal grazing ground for pastoralist and agro-pastoralist communities due to its pastures and the aquatic resources offered by the Caculuvar River, an effluent of the Cunene. However, as denounced by Amnesty International in 2019, the implementation of projects such as private commercial livestock, industrial farming or mining endeavours such as Esopak or Horizonte 2020 (Blanes et al. 2022a) in this region has led to large-scale land and water grabbing that has prevented access to communal waters and pastures by pastoralist communities (Amnesty International 2019). A different kind of infrastructure emerged in Tunda dos Gambos, one mediated by the political and juridical framework that enabled large-scale land occupation for agro-industrial and extractive (mining) purposes.
In any case, the Cafú Canal offered an overarching solution for the province of Cunene. Responses were mixed. On the one hand, communities affected by the infrastructure construction complained that they were not compensated for the loss of their lavras (farming plots) (Hossi 2022). On the other hand, the network did not consider all the communities affected by the drought. For instance, when I visited the village of Oncocua in November 2021, I saw the other side of this infrastructure: the consequences for those who are not entitled to pipeline access. This was the experience of the community of the kimbo (extended household hamlet) of Vátua farmers and goat herders, led by the soba (village leader) Joaquim Mutila Kalila. Talking to him about their current situation, he explained how the land around Oncocua was traditionally very dry and stony, and farmers could not make it to the end of a season with the irregular rainfall they have been experiencing over the past decades. And (as I painfully experienced first-hand on the journey there), the transport routes from Oncocua to the nearby towns of Otchinjau and Cahama are in such dire condition that water transportation is a nightmare. Subsequently, his community’s access to water for their farms relied exclusively on a ‘moto-cistern’ (three-wheel motorcycle equipped with a 1000-litre water tank), which collected water from a nearby reservoir that had been recently rehabilitated through the FRESAN project. This access, however, was disputed with other herding and farming communities, which led to constant conflicts between them.
During our conversation, the soba pointed east, towards the Montenegro mountains behind which the Cunene River flowed. It was there where, according to the soba, it was said that one of the transfer systems was going to be built, bringing water to Oncocua. However, due to unknown reasons that project had fallen apart, and they were left with no solution for their water crisis. They became infrastructurally excluded.4
The soba concluded: ‘a seca é uma história que já não dá para contar’ (the drought is a story we can no longer tell). They were experiencing true hunger, and people in his kimbo were leaving for the city, one by one. The soba only had 20 goats and five oxen left. His statement reflected a sense of hopelessness and despair that many rural communities express regarding the developmentalist-infrastructural route followed by the Angolan government, which has rendered them powerless. More broadly, it also reflected how governmentality in Angola has produced a citizenship of dependency, devoid of agency in the face of climate change and extractivism. It is precisely within this nexus of infrastructure and authoritarianism that Angola’s politics of the last decades has played out.
However, it is also true that the nexus is not unchallenged. In 2016, farming communities in the neighbouring commune of Curoca stood up, with the aid of local NGOs such as Omunga and Associação Construindo Comunidades (Building Communities Association) to contest a process of land grabbing on behalf of an agro-industrial project called Horizon 2020 (Jornal de Angola 2016). As shown in a video of a communal meeting with local leaders released by Omunga in 2016 (Omunga 2016), the agro-industrial project occupied a vast proportion of land, leaving virtually no public land available for their grazing and farming, which led to confrontations between the villagers and the project representatives. While the project continued to unfold, the protest managed to publicise their criticism in the local media, and raise the issue of land grabbing more broadly as a process of infrastructural imposition.
This conflict over land use illustrates the perpetual disconnect between the Angolan government’s forward-looking infrastructural strategy – more invested in construction than maintenance and repair – and the everyday struggles of its citizens. But this disconnect widens when it comes to climate vulnerability and climate change adaptation. President Lourenco’s public commitment on climate change cited above not only made no reference to the drought in the country’s southwestern provinces, but also did not mention Angola’s longstanding leading position in the continental production and exportation of crude oil. The official narrative is, instead, one of Angola’s leading role in climate change adaptation and energy transition. In May 2022, for instance, a consortium was set up between Angola’s flagship oil company Sonangol and Italian multinational Eni for the construction of a solar energy project in the village of Caraculo, Namibe province (Lusa 2022). Recently, it also announced partnerships to develop wind and solar power plants in the provinces of Namibe and Huíla, as evidence of the greening of its energy sector (Angola Press 2023) – coincidentally, two of the provinces still suffering the consequences of extreme drought.
Concluding thoughts
As with Mozambique, Angola is equally engaged in transnational commitments and protocols to achieve sustainability, environmental protection and disaster risk reduction – among which is the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction agreement, signed in Yaoundé in 2015. Likewise, both countries have been active participants in the UN’s COP conferences, proactively presenting initiatives towards climate sovereignty and security, mostly through initiatives towards the transition to renewable energy (Adalberto 2022; TVM 2022).
However, as we have seen with other infrastructural announcements, these discursive diplomatic gestures, juridical dispositions and investment strategies unfolding in the framework of infrastructure often fail to translate into material dispositions that improve citizens’ lives. If historically this was the case with large-scale developmentalist projects in the late colonial period (as in the case of HCB), today a similar process is observed with the movements towards energy and environmental sustainability. Here, despite their diverse historical, political, social and environmental trajectories, one cannot but acknowledge the similarity of infrastructural mindsets between Angola and Mozambique, which often reveal a refraction between the anticipatory logic of statehoods and the present struggles of their citizens (Tomás 2012).
In this respect, such gestures, policies and documents are also part of a fatal architecture, one that is expressed either through ‘infrastructural imposition’ (as in the case of Mozambique’s persistence with megaproject models) or ‘infrastructural absence’ (as with Angola’s abandonment of existing infrastructure towards new construction) promoted by state interventions. It is fatal inasmuch as it incorporates the bodies of thousands of human and animal victims of flooding and drought in both countries, both in terms of deceased and displaced citizens and their increasing susceptibility to climate disasters.
Following recent suggestions by Schouten and Bachmann (2022), we realise that infrastructures are necessarily ‘unsettled’ processes that expose the limits and limitations of governance, the processes of state/corporate imposition and violence, as well as citizenship resistance. States, through the corporate and industrial promotion of infrastructure, become active participants in the production of climate disasters and emergencies, even when they are discursively engaged in climate and social sustainability.
Conversely, Angolan and Mozambican civil society, both in the form of environmental and agrarian organisations, and of community protests, are calling out governments and corporations in their hegemonic narrative of infrastructural developmentalism.