39 f Dam Buskers
Wales and Nubia recently came together in a project called Dammed Nations. Andy Morgan uncovers the story of shared heritage and Nuba Nour.
I
n his novel Austerlitz, WG Sebald writes hauntingly about the village of Llanwddyn, the childhood home of his hero’s Welsh foster father lying deep under the murky waters
of the Vyrnwy reservoir:
“I imagined all the others – his par- ents, his brothers and sisters, his relations, their neighbours, all the other villagers – still down in the depths, sitting in their houses and walking along the road, but unable to speak and with their eyes opened far too wide… At night, before I fell asleep in my cold room, I often felt as if I too had been submerged in that dark water, and like the poor souls of Vyrnwy must keep my eyes wide open to catch a faint glimmer of light far above.”
Eighty years after the disappearance of Llanwddyn, Capel Celyn, a small com- munity in north Wales with a school, post
office and chapel suffered the same fate when it was drowned in 70 billion litres of water on completion of the Treweryn dam project. The civic fathers of Liverpool deemed their city’s need for water more important than the need of Capel Celyn’s 44 Welsh-speaking inhabitants for their way of life, their culture, the ancestors that lay buried in their churchyard, their memories.
Not a single Welsh MP voted for the parliamentary bill that sealed their fate, but the whole debacle turned Plaid Cymru and the Welsh language movement into mainstream political currents that were to bring unimagined benefits decades later. In 2005, Liverpool formally apologised for their callous certainty that the wailings of a few Welsh farmers could never outweigh the benefits of modernity and growth. In 2010, the remaining inhabitants of Capel
Celyn and their relatives marched through the nearby town of Bala demanding that the dam be removed and their village restored to them.
“I remember the water coming out in a huge gush,” former villager Elwyn Edwards told the Independent. “There was nothing left – not a tree, a hedge, no sheep, cattle, or birds singing. It was deathly quiet, like a funeral… We lost our heritage, we lost everything.”
One of the lessons of Capel Celyn is that the bitterness and anger provoked by the drowning of somebody’s world are doggedly persistent. In Egypt those emo- tions were amplified a thousandfold when the High Dam was built in 1964, on the First Cataract of the Nile at Aswan. It wasn’t just 44 expendables from some marginal corner of the nation who spoke a minority language that were displaced
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