ABSTRACT
David W. Brokensha was the first anthropologist in West Africa to look at involuntary resettlement as a consequence of large dam construction. This chapter presents a report on the relocation of some 10,000 persons in western Mali whose former villages and productive lands have been flooded out in the impoundment of waters by the Manantali Dam. It offers some preliminary assessments of the process, and suggests some ways in which it might have been improved. The Manantali Dam was completed in 1988 as part of an overall program planned and coordinated by the Senegal River-Basin Authority to regulate the flow of the Senegal River. The success of a resettlement project can be judged by the ability of the resettled population productively to assume control over its own future. As Thayer Scudder suggests, this long process requires many years and many antecedent actions. It is too early to make that kind of assessment of the Manantali Resettlement Project.
