Water Brings No Harm. Matthew V. Bender
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abundant or scarce, they are seeing water through their own beliefs, needs, and expectations. All of these change over time as societies use water in new ways and in greater quantities, which in turn influences how people choose to use, manage, and engineer those resources. Waterscapes thus provide a conceptual framework for understanding how water sources intersect with the expectations and needs of those who depend on them.
The term waterscape is relatively recent, and its value and meaning have been subject to debate among scholars. It derives from work looking at landscapes as socially constructed, or “anthropogenic, the result of the interaction between natural processes and human action.”20 However, it brings water, rather than land, to the fore. Some scholars of water have started to embrace this term,21 while others consider waterscapes to be mere watery landscapes. I see the concept as illuminating the uniqueness of water and its impact on human societies. As noted by Hoag, “whereas landscape can evoke stationary images of expanses of dry land, waterscape implies fluidity, motion, and dynamism.”22 This is particularly important for places like Kilimanjaro, where water is the defining natural feature. Waterscape also emphasizes the socially constructed nature of water. Geographer Erik Swyngedouw, who has written extensively on water in Spain, sees waterscapes as “hybrid socio-natures” produced by the intersection of people and environment.23 They are a “liminal landscape . . . [that] is embedded in and interiorizes a series of multiple power relations along ethnic, gender, and class lines.” These power relations “operate at a variety of interrelated geographical scale levels, from the scale of the body upward to the political ecology of the city to the global scale of uneven development.”24 Swyngedouw sees waterscapes as shaping relationships and hierarchies of power from the local to the global.
By centering my analysis on waterscapes, I am able to analyze the multiplicity of water sources on Kilimanjaro based on how different actors saw them over time. This emphasizes the dynamic nature of the resource and the knowledge produced about it, which in turn shows the uniqueness of water compared to other resources. For the peoples of the mountain, water was the defining feature of the space they inhabited. Water features shaped the topography and gave life to flora and fauna, and they defined culture, politics, and belonging. People therefore imagined these water sources in a way that reflected their culture and history. Those who encountered Kilimanjaro from the outside in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as colonizers, missionaries, settlers, government officials, and scientists, constructed different visions of the waterscape that reflected their own impression of the water sources as well as their social and cultural contexts. Waterscapes emphasize how people’s impressions of water are constructed by their circumstances. The groups of people who have encountered Kilimanjaro since 1850 may have been looking at the same space, but they were not seeing the same thing.
WATER BRINGS NO HARM
Water Brings No Harm draws on waterscapes to examine struggles over water both among the mountain populations of Kilimanjaro and between them and outside groups. These struggles center on competing knowledges of water shaped by different imaginings of the waterscape. Furthermore, the views of these various groups changed over time in response to environmental conditions, consumption patterns, and the availability of new knowledge and technologies. A commonality of these struggles is that they came to be articulated in a language of harm. This book analyzes these struggles and the impact they have had on the peoples of the mountain.
In the late nineteenth century, Chagga-speaking peoples resided in over twenty chiefdoms on the southern and eastern slopes of Kilimanjaro. They drew from the mountain’s streams, rivers, and rainfall to establish a thriving agrarian economy, one that exemplifies Sara Berry’s observation of African agricultural systems as “fluid, dynamic, and ambiguous.”25 These resources were utilized for irrigating crops such as bananas, yams, and eleusine; for livestock; and for domestic needs such as cooking, bathing, and brewing. To more effectively use water for these purposes, local people developed mifongo to channel water into settlements. In addition to its utility, water was crucial to notions of origin and spirituality. It appeared in numerous adages, proverbs, and fables. It shaped ideas of community belonging and defined social boundaries along clan, gender, and generational lines. Knowledge of the tangible and intangible properties of water empowered a variety of community specialists who managed water systems or performed rituals and offerings.
This book’s title, Water Brings No Harm, demonstrates the centrality of waterscapes to local thinking. A translation of mringa uwore mbaka voo, this adage was common on southeast Kilimanjaro in the years before colonialism. It indicates belief in the inherent purity and goodness of water. It also implies a specific notion of harm as well as practices for managing any harms that relate to the resource. Before the twentieth century, the most common water-related harms were attributed to human action or malevolent spirits. To ensure that water would bring no harm, people in the community actively managed the resource. In the case of a broken mfongo, canal specialists known as meni mifongo worked with the society of users to restore the water. This involved not merely fixing the physical canal but also making offerings to the relevant spirits. In cases of drought or excessive rain, those with expertise in rainmaking medicine and spirit divination made offerings to the spirits and the creator god Ruwa to make it rain or make it stop. Though spirits or human action could bring these harms to the water supply, people generally believed that water, in and of itself, was the source of life and brought no harm. Keeping it that way involved careful management that tied together technology, spirituality, and community.
On Kilimanjaro, water was a fluid resource whose significance shifted in response to environmental, political, and social conditions. It often inspired debate between various specialists and between specialists and other community leaders, such as the wamangi and clan heads. After 1890, these debates became more pronounced. Colonial rule introduced new actors to Kilimanjaro who settled on the mountain and made demands on its resources. At first, these individuals believed that water existed abundantly, and they embraced local knowledge of the resource, in particular the mifongo. This persisted until the late 1920s. By that point, the rising population and increasing demand for water from users on the mountain and in the lowlands led Europeans to reimagine the waterscape as scarce. At the same time, they became concerned with dangers such as contamination and soil erosion. The tandem led colonial agents to embrace a discourse that challenged local water management as harmful to the landscape, the water supply, and the people themselves. Colonial scientists, district officers, and wamangi criticized the mifongo as wasteful of water and destructive to the land. Midwives and schoolteachers promoted the idea of water being contaminated with bacteria and therefore harmful to those who consumed it. They joined with the missionaries and Christian converts, who had long criticized diviners and rainmakers for promoting spiritually harmful beliefs and practices. These actors in turn promoted new knowledge of water that was grounded in allegedly modern, science-based thinking. Only by adopting new knowledge, and rejecting the old, could communities save their resource and build a better future. Colonial attempts to influence mountain peoples included the creation of new laws and regulations, the manipulation of chiefly authority, and the educational efforts of European and African colonial officers, clergy, teachers, and midwives. In the 1950s, the government became involved in providing water by constructing pipelines intended to replace the mifongo. These efforts challenged not only a host of social and political relationships on the mountain but also the position of water specialists.
Struggles over water did not ease with independence. In 1967, Tanzania embarked on a program of socialist economic development, Ujamaa, that defined water as a national resource that should be provided by the state as a public good, for free. Ujamaa policies, along with new development projects such as water pipelines, effectively challenged the idea of local water management by considering it to be harmful to the nation. In the mid-1980s, the government switched course again as it abandoned African socialism in favor of structural adjustment. In this era, the national government embraced a new strategy called Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), devolved oversight of water to regional basin authorities, and adopted the policy that water should be treated as a commodity and that people should pay for it. In recent years, the most intense conflict over water has involved the shrinking of the mountain’s venerable ice cap, which is predicted to vanish entirely by the year 2030. Scientists are heatedly debating about the causation