Description
Already during the First World War, the British War Cabinet adopted plans for more efficient resource extraction from the colonies. To this end, the “Water-Power Committee of the Conjoint of Scientific Societies” was set up in 1918 in order to research the possibilities of generating water energy. However, the implementation of such plans only gained momentum in the British and French colonial empires after the Second World War, when both launched major programmes to promote ‘development’ in their colonies. Their aim according to contemporary development discourses – was industrialisation which in turn should lead to prosperity. Therefore, not only metropolitan development programmes, but also funding by the World Bank, concentrated on the expansion of infrastructures that would provide energy for metal smelting and roads, ports and airports for the transport of goods. A closer look at infrastructure projects in Uganda, French Cameroon and Ghana, however, shows that these ideas rarely worked out. Instead of mineral resources, water energy itself became a resource that was exploited but did not serve the expansion of local industries. This will probably also apply to the initially failed dam project on the Konkouré River in Guinea, which is currently being completed with funds from the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, but even more so to planned projects for green energy such as Grand Inga. The lecture will discuss the historical continuity of water energy as a resource and the role of infrastructures as (colonial) power retainers both in terms of their materiality and the continuity of their inherent development ideas, as well as the long-term financial dependencies they produce and the conceptualisation of their users.
