The Dam Outlived the Smelter

The road south from Paramaribo runs down the east bank of the Suriname River past the shut gates of the Paranam refinery, and about ninety kilometres out it climbs onto an embankment and crosses the river on top of a dam. There is no viewing platform, no interpretation board and nothing to tell you what you are on. Traffic crosses at walking pace because of the speed bumps. On one side of the road is a lake with the tops of dead trees standing out of it, and on the other the river resumes, fifty-four metres lower down.

The lake covers something like 1,560 square kilometres, close to one per cent of Suriname. It was made to run an aluminium smelter, and the smelter closed in 1999. The company that built it held on to the dam for another twenty years and then left the country altogether. Since the last minutes of 2019 the largest single piece of infrastructure in Suriname has belonged to Suriname, which is a sentence that took sixty-one years to become true.

One sentence

The Brokopondo Agreement was signed in 1958 between the Surinamese government — self-governing inside the Kingdom of the Netherlands since 1954 — and Suralco, the Alcoa subsidiary that had been mining bauxite in the country since 1916. The terms ran in one direction. Suralco would finance the dam, build it, own it, operate it and take the electricity; the state's entitlement was a fixed slice of the output at cost, plus whatever a smelter paid in tax. The concession ran seventy-five years, which would have carried it to 2033. In a long and specific document about turbines, tariffs and exemptions, the six thousand people living in the forty-three villages the water was going to cover got a single sentence, and what it did was instruct the colonial administration to remove them.

Construction began in 1961 and the dam was closed in 1964: fifty-four metres of earth and rock across the river, six Kaplan turbines of thirty megawatts each, 180 megawatts in total. The water then rose for years. The villages upstream were Saamaka — Maroon communities descended from people who escaped the plantations and whose autonomy the Dutch had been forced to recognise by treaty in the 1760s — and they were moved into new settlements strung along the road on the western side, Brownsweg among them, in what the paperwork calls transmigration. The graves stayed where they were. So did the cultivation grounds, the fruit trees and the fishing places, and the argument about what was owed for them has never closed.

Operation Gwamba

The animals got a rescue operation. In 1964 an American named John Walsh arrived on behalf of an animal welfare society and spent eighteen months on the rising water with a Surinamese crew, taking wildlife off islands that were shrinking week by week as the forest drowned. They moved just under ten thousand animals — 9,737 by the count usually given, more than two thousand of them sloths, the rest monkeys, anteaters, armadillos, tortoises and snakes — and Walsh wrote a book about it with the best title anyone has managed on the subject: Time Is Short and the Water Rises. Operation Gwamba appears in every popular account of the dam. The transmigration villages appear in the academic literature and almost nowhere else.

A contract can be read by what it spends its words on. The Brokopondo Agreement spends them on turbines, tariffs and tax exemptions, and it spends one sentence on six thousand people.

The smelter goes first

Aluminium is made in two stages and Suriname did both. Bauxite came out of pits inland, was refined into alumina at Paranam on the river, and was smelted there into metal using the dam's power. The smelter was the part that needed the dam, and it was the part that went first — it shut in 1999, beaten on electricity costs by newer plants elsewhere in the world. The refinery and the mines carried on for another sixteen years on ore that was getting further from the plant every season, until Suralco turned off the furnaces on 30 November 2015, taking more than seven hundred direct jobs with it and a great many contractors besides. Alcoa announced the permanent closure of the refinery in 2017. What the company still owned was a hydroelectric station with fourteen years left on its concession and nothing of its own left to power.

What followed is known in Suriname as the Alcoa affair, and it was genuinely fought over: what the company owed for environmental clean-up, what the dam was worth, and whether parliament had been shown the terms it was being asked to approve. An agreement on early termination was reached in 2018. The National Assembly voted to end the 1958 agreement on 30 August 2019, fourteen years before it was due to expire, and at midnight on 31 December the dam changed hands. Suriname did not buy it in the ordinary sense of the word. It settled what it owed — around US$111 million, largely for electricity already taken — and the asset came across with the settlement. Staatsolie, the state oil company, took over operations and sells the output to the national utility. Afobaka now supplies roughly half the electricity in the country.

What the lake is for now

Nobody would build this dam today and nobody in Suriname is proposing to take it out. The reservoir has become a fishery, a transport route, a salvage-logging ground where submerged hardwood is cut underwater and floated out, and the anchor of a grid that would otherwise be burning imported diesel. The state is now working through what to do with a plant designed in the late 1950s; refurbishment studies put its capacity nearer 189 megawatts than the original 180, which is an entirely normal question for a country to be asking about its own power station, and it is the first time Suriname has been in a position to ask it.

The ledger underneath is the part that has not been settled. Reporting from the resettlement villages beside the water keeps arriving at the same sentence: the dam supplies about half of Suriname's electricity, and households whose villages are under the lake have still not been connected to it. A hydroelectric scheme is a very long-lived object, and the accounting that produced it does not expire when the company leaves. The turbines outlasted the smelter, the concession, the colonial arrangement that signed it and the corporation itself. The one sentence in the middle of the contract has outlasted all of them too.