With a team made up of East Africa's top water conservancy experts, including Brauns, the design and construction of the Cahora Bassa Dam had its most basic guarantee. For a national strategic project directly concerning the safety of millions of people, relying solely on the old "brute force can fly bricks" model of construction was clearly impossible.
While the expert group discussed matters inside the work sheds, blasts from the distant gorge below rang out from time to time. East Africa's engineering troops were responsible for the explosions. Besides clearing the foundations for the dam and ship locks, they also had to carve roads through the mountains.
Cahora Bassa Gorge, a scar across the East African landmass, had grown wild upon the ancient East African Shield. It was a magnificent natural wonder born from the Zambezi River's hundreds of millions of years of ceaselessly gnawing downward through the plateau's hard rock layers.
In a sense, the Zambezi River had single-handedly split a vast plateau on the African continent into two parts. Strictly speaking, however, it could not be considered a boundary between plateaus. It was merely a major natural river, and together with the many plateau rift valleys it passed through, the East African government had conveniently used it as a natural boundary for many East African geographical units.
Cahora Bassa Gorge was part of the Zambezi River valley, which was also an important reason why East Africa had previously been unable to fully develop the areas along the Zambezi main stream. At present, only the downstream alluvial plains and river-mouth delta had been developed into important East African industrial and agricultural regions.
However, once the Kabrasabasa Reservoir had finished storing water, the areas around the reservoir could theoretically gain vast amounts of usable land to be developed into farmland.