Water Brings No Harm. Matthew V. Bender
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Alexandre Le Roy, and the district officer for Kilimanjaro in the early 1920s, Charles Dundas.37 These individuals lived and worked in close proximity to local communities, and their writings provide a wealth of detail concerning daily life, political and cultural practices, and understandings of history and descent. Gutmann was by far the most prolific. He wrote more than five hundred works during his time as a missionary, dozens of which pertain specifically to Chagga history and cultural practice.38 Water management was a particular point of fascination for these authors, so these practices are well documented. Their works provide a view into mountain life and a tool for reconstructing life in earlier times, yet they require care in interpretation. Marcia Wright, who refers to these kinds of writers as “intimate outsiders,” warns that their work “often verges on fiction in that it enters imaginatively into the life circumstances of Africans . . . and transgresses boundaries between observer and the observed.”39 These works interpret local life through the eyes and expectations of the writer, which can lead to distortions. For example, most writers homogenize the experiences of the people, assuming them to be part of the same “tribe,” the Chagga. This assumption of ethnic unity was far from reality, as people identified with clans and chiefdoms and shunned any sense of panmontane identity. These writings also privilege the southeast chiefdoms, in particular Marangu, which had been most receptive to European colonialism and missionary work. The eastern slopes, known as Rombo, are described as resource-poor and impoverished—a reflection of recent environmental conditions and stereotypes held by people in the southeast—despite evidence that they had been prosperous in earlier centuries. If these sources are read alongside others, and with a careful eye to their biases, they can offer a window into late precolonial and early colonial life.
For the colonial and early postcolonial periods, I draw on government archival documents and published reports from government ministries. Most are housed at the Tanzania National Archives in Dar es Salaam, with some additional holdings in Germany and Britain. The archives’ holdings include collections from the German period and the British period: district books, the Secretariat Series, the records of the Moshi District and Northern Province offices (and their successors), and the files of the Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Health, and Ministry of Lands, Settlement, and Water Development, among others. These contain annual reports, correspondence, and memoranda, which feature useful information about issues of colonial concern. They tell us less about local communities, as they selectively incorporate the perspectives of the governed. Prominent actors such as the wamangi frequently appear, but they are hardly representative of the views of their subjects, and women’s voices are almost entirely absent. Despite these deficiencies, these documents provide a wealth of detail about policies, laws, and actions that had real effects on community water management, and they reveal the concerns and motivations of the government administrations. We can also get a sense of local perspective by reading these sources against the grain. Numerous documents, for example, reflect on how local communities responded to new policies and procedures. The descriptions of the responses provide useful information, even if the author’s interpretation may be biased. We can then layer these with other sources such as oral narratives to tease out the meanings and motivations behind the responses.
In addition to government documents, there is a wealth of records from the missionary orders, including correspondence between the mission stations and with the head offices, collections of letters from clergy, and serial publications. The richest of these are the journals kept by the mission stations. These provide a daily account of the affairs of the mission, covering issues from baptisms and conversions to interactions with wamangi, elders, and government officials. They also offer detailed observations of the waterscape, including the earliest rainfall data and written accounts of drought in the region. These sources offer different perspectives from those of the government sources, perspectives that are more familiar with local life. Yet despite the fact that many European clergy lived on the mountain for years, even decades, they are still intimate outsiders who interpreted events through a desire to transform. These works need to be read with a careful eye to the objectives of the clergy, but they do offer a tremendous amount of detail and our earliest quantitative data on the waterscape.
Given the limited availability of archival materials for the postindependence period, published works are important for the more recent decades covered by this book. Reports and studies by the Tanzanian government, international agencies, and NGOs provide a wealth of material about water management on Kilimanjaro, in the Pangani Basin, and elsewhere in Tanzania. They document concerns about the water supply, the competing interests in management, and the shift in water policy since the 1960s. The scientific community has likewise published numerous studies, particularly about the glaciers. Some of these date to the nineteenth century, but most come from the past thirty years. These sources provide information for understanding hydrology, the impacts of climate change, and the shifting nature of water management since the colonial era. However, they provide little voice to local communities and either discount or ignore local knowledge.
A common problem with the textual records is that they do not provide a voice to the peoples of the mountain in the past or the present. To tease out these perspectives, I conducted oral history interviews across Kilimanjaro over a period of ten years. When I began this project, I focused my work in two communities: Kilema and Mkuu Rombo. The former is located on the southeast corner of the mountain and the latter on the east side (see map I.1). Both were marginal places, politically speaking, in the decades before colonial rule, but they rose to prominence in the twentieth century due to the presence of Catholic missions. I spent six months in these two areas conducting interviews with a wide range of individuals. I selected many because of their social position or expertise in water management. I also spoke with men and women from a broad range of occupations, ages, and social standings, people who had an understanding of the nuances of everyday water management and use. In later research trips, I expanded my geographic scope by interviewing in Kibosho, Machame, Kirua Vunjo, Uru, and Moshi Town.
MAP I.1. Prominent chiefdoms and rivers (Brian Edward Balsley, GISP)
In reflecting the voices of people in local communities, oral narratives have the power to fill the lacuna created by the textual sources. Yet their collection and use has been a point of debate among Africanist scholars since Jan Vansina’s pioneering work in the 1950s.40 One challenge of my work stemmed from my position as an interviewer. I asked people about water management in their daily lives, in the past and the present, with questions that often asked about knowledge considered to be protected or intimate. I did so as an outsider in multiple respects: my race, nationality, ethnic heritage, sex, age, education level, and native language. Any of these could have influenced the willingness of my interviewees to share information or have affected the kinds of information they provided or the way they presented it. This is especially true given the long history of outsiders’ meddling in water issues and bringing undesired outcomes. Another challenge related to the nature of the information I sought. Just as knowledge can be intimate and protected, it can also be routine. While people often have vivid memories of specific moments, their memories are less reliable when it comes to more mundane aspects of water use, such as changing consumption patterns or irrigation practices. This presents a particular issue for exploring past practices that continue today, since memories are filtered through the lens of contemporary society. Lastly, interviewees were understandably reluctant to discuss issues that are controversial or relate to underground activities such as water stealing or sabotage.
I took several steps to address these issues. I relied on research assistants who were either from those communities or had connections through family or work. Three were men (two in their sixties, one in his thirties), and the other was a woman in her thirties. These individuals had broad knowledge of the area and a firm understanding of local social and political relationships. They not only introduced me to people and assisted with language, but they also acted as intermediaries, explaining my purpose and the nature of my research. This helped facilitate interviews that would otherwise have not been successful, such as those with women that included questions about domestic issues. I conducted all the interviews by opening with greetings