Water Brings No Harm. Matthew V. Bender
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“progressive agricultural methods” that allowed them to “progress beyond our own vision.” To ensure future prosperity, they ask the government that their “soil be conserved and, moreso, our water supplies which are the blood in the veins of agriculture. Without water our farms will be as bodies without blood.” They conclude by pleading with the government to “consider and apply the best methods of soil and water conservancy.”
At first glance, these words seem straightforward. The memo identifies land and water as critical issues on the mountain, and it calls on the government to be more involved in ensuring access to both. A deeper reading of the source, however, indicates the wamangi’s carefully constructed rhetorical strategy. While they extol the government for bringing progressive methods, their analogy of water and land as akin to blood and the body emphasizes the importance of irrigation, which the government had criticized for being harmful and wasteful. Further, neither the wamangi nor the colonial administration held effective control over water. Rather, local specialists closely guarded their power over the mountain’s rivers, streams, and mifongo (irrigation canals or furrows2) and vehemently denied attempts by others to engage in water issues. The words of the wamangi were an attempt to usurp power from the specialists by acquiescing to state control. What emerges from the memo is that water is more than a physical necessity for the peoples of the mountain. It is a resource with multiple layers of importance and meaning, and it is a focal point of struggle among competing groups.
Water is a fundamental building block of life, essential to the chemical and biological processes that make all living things possible. At the same time, it is among the most elusive of resources. This can be seen vividly in the steppe plateau of East Africa. Much of the semiarid region is unsuitable for crop agriculture or high-density populations and has historically been home to nomadic peoples such as the Maasai. In the midst of these plains, and in stark contrast to them, rise a number of mountain ranges and freestanding peaks, the most famous of which is Kilimanjaro. These highland areas feature dense forests and generate large amounts of precipitation. This rainfall gives rise to rivers and streams that reach far beyond the physical space of the peak. The combination of ample rainfall and cooler temperatures allows these montane areas to support sedentary living and larger populations.
While it is clear that water is vital for life and livelihood, the importance of water transcends its utility. Peoples in East Africa and elsewhere have long recognized the power of water to give life, and this is reflected in beliefs about human origin, religion, and spirituality. Therefore, water has become a crucial part of cultural practices and rituals including celebrations of birth, initiations into adulthood, and funerary rites. As a scarce resource vital to biological, spiritual, and community life, water has influenced the development of social institutions and power structures. Those who possess specialized knowledge of water management, such as how to produce rain or construct mifongo, wield power within their communities. In addition to its physical utility, water has long had powerful political and social dimensions, generating and sustaining relationships among people and defining and reinforcing hierarchies.
This book is about water. More pointedly, it is about how communities manage water and about the struggles that ensue when differing ideas regarding water management come into conflict. It focuses on the historical experiences of the mountain peoples of Kilimanjaro. Since the 1850s, these communities have been influenced increasingly by outside groups that include Swahili traders; European explorers, missionaries, and settlers; German and British colonial officials; the independent Tanzanian state; development agencies; and climate scientists. This study explores how these actors have perceived the waters of Kilimanjaro and examines the struggles that transpired as they attempted to impose new forms of water management. In doing so it provides a powerful look at water as a social, cultural, and political construct and shows the multiplicity of ways in which struggles over the resource play out.
This book advances three main arguments. First, water management on Kilimanjaro has long been defined by distinct, interconnected bodies of knowledge: hydrological, technical, cultural, spiritual, and political. The peoples of the mountain depend on water to irrigate farms, form mud blocks, refresh livestock, cook food, brew ritual beer, clean homes, and bathe children. These waters came from a multiplicity of sources: rainfall, streams, springs, waterfalls, rivers, and mifongo. Each of these could vary in volume and clarity seasonally or year to year. Water also figured into numerous spiritual rites and cultural practices. The many uses of water, as well as the multiplicity of sources, meant that numerous people on the mountain possessed knowledge about how to manage it. Therefore, water management consisted of a diverse, dynamic set of practices that were inherently local and politically decentralized. Those who possessed expertise held positions of authority in their communities, and much of their knowledge was bound by social status, gender, and age. This meant that water knowledge shaped local politics as people with different expertise negotiated—and often competed—with one another over whose knowledge was most salient. Rival chiefdoms and clans even fought over control of watercourses, especially during droughts. Though specialists possessed a great deal of water knowledge, everyday users held expertise as well. Most men knew how to clean mifongo, and most women knew how to locate sources and use water for the home. Across Kilimanjaro, communities developed a shared sense of the value of water and its connection to the physical space of the mountain.
Second, water management became a focal point of conflict during the colonial period. The struggles that ensued can best be understood as a clash between conflicting knowledges of water. This did not occur initially, nor was it necessarily inevitable. For seventy years, Europeans considered Kilimanjaro (fig. I.1) to be a place of water abundance, and this led them to embrace local hydrological and technical expertise. This changed in the 1930s amid rising populations, skyrocketing demand, and fears of increasing aridity and soil erosion. In response, colonial actors began to criticize local knowledge as harmful, unscientific, primitive, wasteful, and prodigal. Rather than use overt coercion, they undermined local knowledge by introducing “modern” ideas and practices grounded in “scientific” management. Initially, colonial actors disseminated new water management through political and legal tools and educational efforts. Starting in the 1950s, they employed new technologies such as pipelines and dams. Since the rise of the independent Tanzanian state, the government and development agencies have used all three (political tools, educational efforts, and new technologies) to push for changes in water management, ostensibly to provide people with more and better water. These interventions have promoted two major shifts in thinking about the resource: toward a centralized, technocratic model of management and toward a commodified notion of water as something for which people should pay.
Lastly, this book argues that the peoples of Kilimanjaro have responded in ways that reflect the diversity and dynamism of water-management knowledge. Communities proved adept at negotiating new ideas and practices, allowing them to take advantage of new opportunities and react to new challenges. Yet the introduction of new technologies, along with changing economic and social realities, gradually eroded many aspects of local knowledge, reduced the roles of local experts, and made people dependent on government-controlled water resources. This fractured the interconnected nature of water knowledge, which in turn sped the decline of local control and the shared sense of responsibility. Today, people still believe that water is their divine right, but most are detached from its everyday management. This fracturing of water-management knowledge has led to a situation where many have poorer access to water than their parents or even their ancestors. Government actors have struggled to provide water both because they lack resources and because they pursue inconsistent and contradictory development strategies. They are also hindered by their lack of appreciation for the cultural dimensions of water, their contempt for traditional technologies and customary community-based water management, and their belief that commoditization is essential to building sustainable water systems. Though neoliberal reform speaks of integrating local communities in water management, it offers users little effective power. This neglect of local opinions and knowledge is especially evident in recent discussions over global climate change and its relationship to the recession of the mountain’s glaciers.
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