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 in Kichagga, then switching to Kiswahili or English as appropriate. This helped establish a comfort level with my interviewees and showed my familiarity with the area. Lastly, I developed my question sets with an eye to how they would be perceived by interviewees, relying on the expertise of my research assistants. In my questioning, I worked from the present toward the past, as this helped my interviewees become comfortable with me and think more deeply about water issues.
Another challenge with oral histories lies in interpretation, a question that has informed much of the debate about their value. Some scholars, such as Vansina, hold that oral narratives contain essential truth that can be extracted, allowing them to be reliable historical documents if sufficient care is taken with interpretation. Others, such as Luise White, Stephan Miescher, and David William Cohen, emphasize that oral sources are dynamic and malleable and that they convey discourse and sentiment, allowing us to understand historical viewpoints that may not necessarily be based in truth.41 Emily Osborn’s recent work on statecraft in the Milo River Valley illustrates the potential of employing both interpretive lenses.42 My approach is similar to Osborn’s in that my interpretation depends largely on the moment to which my interviewees are referring. Questions about current and recent topics tend to be answered accurately, except those pertaining to active water disputes or underground activity. I am able to verify this information by comparing interviews and noting outliers and also by layering the oral sources with textual ones. Questions that probe further back in time, asking about history beyond the lifespan of the interviewee, tend to be less objectively verifiable but no less revealing. For these, I am most concerned with how people choose to remember and speak about the past. The way these stories are told demonstrates a remembering that speaks as much about the present as the past, often coming across in vivid language and phrases such as “water brings no harm.” As such, these narratives provide an indispensable tool for seeing how people have constructed waterscapes over time and how these notions have clashed with those held by outsiders. Most of all, they provide voices that are missing from the textual records, ones that illuminate the breadth and depth of water knowledge that these communities have long produced.
Lastly, given the environmental approach of this book, I utilize a number of sources that enable me to read the waterscape. These include studies of mountain hydrology, surveys of land and water resources, and photographs. I also used a handheld GPS to mark places of significance, calculate changes in altitude between points, and measure distances between locations. These sources enable me to see, at various points in history, the land and water features as they would have been seen by people at that time. They therefore provide additional data points that I compare with the impressions of officials, missionaries, and mountain peoples that appear in other sources. By examining them comparatively, I am able to see the dynamic nature of these features over time.
THE FLOW OF THE BOOK
Water Brings No Harm examines water management by focusing on moments in time when struggles over water became especially pressing. It looks at how actors responded by producing new knowledge and attempting to influence both policy and practice. The first two chapters examine how different groups—mountainside populations, and traders and explorers—developed impressions of the mountain’s waters in the nineteenth century. The subsequent chapters flow chronologically, each examining a moment when local knowledge was challenged or shaped by interactions with outside actors. Altogether, the chapters provide a compelling glance into an array of struggles over water that have shaped the modern history of Kilimanjaro.
Chapter 1 establishes 1850 as the chronological starting point for the book. It examines the origins of the agrarian communities on Kilimanjaro and shows how people developed an impression of the waterscape that embodied the dynamism and diversity of the water sources as well as the sources’ importance to people’s livelihood. The management of these sources became a defining attribute of these communities, shaping social, political, and cultural institutions and relationships. Water provided for an array of physical needs such as cooking, brewing, and irrigation. Just as important, it was a fundamental part of how people understood their surroundings, their identities, their positions in society, and their spirituality. Those with
