water—a diverse group ranging from rainmakers to mifongo managers—held positions of power and esteem. Yet knowledge of water was not limited to elites. Nearly everyone held responsibility for managing water, from young men who performed irrigation maintenance to women and children charged with procuring water for domestic uses. People also recognized that water could be dangerously scarce. These resources, therefore, required many forms of management, from the spiritual to the technical, which could often be in competition. The chapter illuminates the highly dynamic nature of water management and the extent to which that knowledge was decentralized. Though linguistically diverse and politically disparate, people on the mountain shared a common vision of the waterscape, which defined water as their divine right.
Chapter 2 turns to how those from beyond Kilimanjaro viewed its waterscape. From the 1850s, mountain communities came into increasing contact with Swahili traders and European explorers arriving from the coast. These traders and explorers developed very different perceptions of mountain waterscapes from those held by locals. Europeans perceived Kilimanjaro as an Eden in the heart of Africa. This chapter shows how these notions arose from the experience of encountering the lush mountain after arduous journeys across the steppe and also from the contrast of this encounter with prevailing archetypes of the continent as a whole. While the mountain’s tremendous size made it distinctive, it was the waterscape—the white cap and the abundance of rivers and streams—that most captured European imaginations. Kilimanjaro, a place of magical snows, endless water abundance, and favorable climate, emerged as the most known and symbolic geographic feature in sub-Saharan Africa. The mountain’s waterscape features placed it centrally into European missionary, scientific, and colonial objectives for the continent. Yet the impression these actors developed, based on visual observations and little data, was a far cry from that of locals. Through centuries of observation and experimentation, they knew all too well that water could be scarce and that these resources required careful management.
Presumptions of Kilimanjaro as a place of water abundance are what informed European thinking into the early decades of colonial rule, as we see in chapter 3. The onset of colonial rule led to the arrival of German colonial administrators, Catholic and Lutheran missionaries, and settlers from Germany, Greece, and elsewhere. In the way these new arrivals imagined the waterscape, they were more like the explorers who preceded them than like their African counterparts, and so they were surprised by the dynamic nature of the resource and the need for careful management. They largely embraced local management knowledge, and they depended on wamangi for access to water and specialists to construct canals to their farms and missions. This relationship, which defies accepted notions of relations between Europeans and Africans in the colonial period, stemmed from factors including the small number of settlers, their lack of hydrological expertise, the economy of earthen canals, and the limited time they had before the disruption of the First World War. Reliance on local expertise gave communities a tool with which to manage their relationships with colonial actors. Despite evidence to the contrary, including a devastating drought in 1907–8, Europeans persisted in their assumption that the waterscape was abundant.
Water-abundant visions of Kilimanjaro persisted until the early years of British rule. Chapter 4 looks at how this belief dried up in the 1920s and 1930s. Along with settlers and missionaries, colonial officials of the newly renamed Tanganyika Territory began to conclude that the waters of the mountain were not in fact abundant but instead scarce and in need of careful management. This rethinking stemmed from an increasing demand for water on the mountain as well as new demand from beyond it, such as hydroelectric power and sisal cultivation in the Pangani Valley. Supply-side reconsiderations arose as well, including fear of increasing aridity, erosion, and wasteful use. These concerns targeted mountain communities, whose once “ingenious” water practices came to be considered prodigal and harmful. The administration and the wamangi responded with a series of initiatives to gain control of the region’s waters. These included commissioning colonial scientists to produce studies of mountain hydrology and the problems facing the water supply, and they also included creating laws, policies, and structures to regulate water use and restrict the mifongo. Local communities vehemently resisted these new initiatives. Their perception of the waterscape had always involved volatility and the need for careful management, so these new concerns had little resonance. They also rejected the notion that users beyond the mountain had rightful claim to its waters.
This chapter marks a distinct shift in thinking about the waterscape of Kilimanjaro and also marks the start of struggles that persist to the present day. Seeing the mountain as water scarce, colonial actors felt compelled to transform management practices they considered harmful. To this end, they embraced new knowledge of water produced by scientists and politicians and rejected that held by local experts. Local knowledge came to be viewed as unscientific, superstitious, and dangerous. In the process, colonial actors conflated hydrological and technical knowledge, essentially saying that local expertise was no longer useful because the technology of the canals was outdated. Technocratic management significantly narrowed the field of people who could be experts and thus encouraged the government to develop more centralized planning of the resource. This shift threatened the local control of water and the roles of many specialists.
Even as mountain communities resisted the notion of scarcity and the idea that their long-held management practices were suddenly harmful, they began to adapt new water knowledge. Chapter 5 examines how new forms of water knowledge were incorporated in the areas of health, spirituality, and cultivation. It focuses on the discourse of harm, the tool with which outsiders lobbied for change in local practices. Between 1930 and 1960, numerous actors—missionaries, schoolteachers, colonial officers, coffee co-op employees, midwives, and others—worked in mountain communities to disseminate new knowledge and practices. They cited waterborne disease, non-Christian spirituality, and irrigation of eleusine (linked to erosion and excess beer consumption) as harms that could be rectified by managing water in modern ways. Over time, changes in everyday water use began to materialize, but these must be understood in the context of the dynamic nature of knowledge production. Mountain communities selectivity adapted new ideas in response to conditions on the ground, such as outbreaks of waterborne disease and localized scarcity. In turn, this empowered people to act as specialists in new ways. It consequently contributed to the decline of older forms of water knowledge and the status of those who possessed them.
Despite the adaptation of new water knowledge, the trend toward scientific, centralized management began to impact mountain communities. Chapter 6 examines this in the context of the Chagga and Tanzanian nationalisms that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. These movements used water development to encourage people to embrace new political identities. In 1952, mountain communities elected the first paramount chief for Kilimanjaro, Thomas Marealle. He promoted a shared sense of ethnicity across the chiefdoms, inventing traditions, ceremonies, and a shared notion of history. Water development lay at the center of his initiatives. He promised to help those facing acute land and water scarcity by investing in new technologies such as pipelines. In doing so, he promoted a state-centered model for water development that embraced high modernism and defied the mountain’s long-held tradition of local management. In the early 1960s, Tanganyika emerged from colonial rule as an independent nation, and by 1967 the new Tanzanian state had entered the era of socialist nation-building known as Ujamaa. In this period, the government in Dar es Salaam defined water as a national resource, to be provided to people for free. It invested in large-scale projects such as pipelines and the Nyumba ya Mungu Dam. These projects challenged two tenets of local water knowledge: that the waters of the mountain belonged to its people exclusively and that water should be managed locally. The projects that accompanied Ujamaa, ostensibly about providing more and better water, served as nation-building tools that consolidated government authority over the resource. People in the foothills accepted water pipes and taps when those helped ease scarcity, and people in the upper areas incorporated them into their existing mix of water resources.
