riddle:
Riddle: Father left me a bowl from which I have been eating ever since.
Answer: The irrigation canal.82
Riddles and sayings such as this reminded the youth of the importance of the canals as well as the hard work their fathers and ancestors put into developing them. When boys neared the age of fifteen, they were given the task of irrigating the kihamba.83 Fathers taught their sons how to spread out the water from the canal by using many small canals and banana sheaths. This ensured that they brought water to the plants as a gentle trickle rather than a quick flow that would wash away soil and manure.
Teaching of mfongo design and management began as boys neared initiation. On the mountain, initiation involved a series of teachings, rituals, and ceremonies that marked the transition into adulthood.84 Initiation rites for both girls and boys involved division into age-sets, followed by group education in the proper ways of being an adult. This culminated in circumcision, a physical act that symbolized the rebirth into adulthood that had taken place. Water played a crucial role throughout this process. First, boys had to be taught the workings of the system and the responsibilities of being a member of a canal society. Gutmann writes of a canal cleaning ceremony that took place during an initiation in Marangu.85 The boys were gathered together and sent to a canal to learn the art of cleaning it from a teaching elder. They removed their clothes and had their heads shaved. The elder then called on them to enter a dry canal on their hands and knees and begin removing the grasses that had grown inside it. As they did this he sang a song:
Aleh, my novices, my helper.
Awaken the train of male novices. Lelele hm . . .
Aleh, my novices, I have put my arm in here.
May the juice plant and the mossy fern spring up.
Hoh heh haja ja ja ja ja!
Aleh, my novices, may it prosper, you men, my comrades!
Hah ja ja ja hm . . .
Aleh, my novices, may it rise in billows, up and down, ei you men!
Hah ja ja ja hm . . .
Hei you men, comrades, I am beginning the procession, I am beginning the march.
Hoh heh hm . . . hm . . .
Now I relinquish it to the helper of the child.
He must tell it to his younger brother who comes after him.
Hoh heh hm . . . hm . . .
Aleh, my young brother.
What is it billowing up and down here?
Like the juice plant and the mossy fern!
Hoh heh hm . . . hm . . .
Which springs up there like the sprouting grass.
Hoh heh hm . . . hm . . .
The word lelele was onomatopoetic, referring to the sound made by the rushing of water into an empty canal. The elders repeated the song as the boys cleaned the length of the canal. Gutmann concluded that the sound signified the rebirth experienced by the boys through initiation.
After the boys had cleaned the canal, the teacher opened the weir and released water back into the canal. He then instructed the boys to live life as the grasses. As the boys had sent the grasses out from the canal, so must they send out shoots that would flourish in their homesteads.86 The cleaning of the canal, therefore, was symbolic as well as practical. The boys learned an important skill, while the ceremony itself symbolized their transformation. Just as the grasses were removed from the canal and given new life outside it, so the initiates were pulled from the nurtured state of childhood and released into adulthood.
Circumcision, the culminating step in the initiation process, drew heavily on the perceived powers of water. The cleansing properties of water helped wash initiates of the impurities of childhood and prepare them for adult life. In his book, Dundas describes a circumcision ceremony for girls and provides a vivid description of the role of water.87 After much preparation, the girl and her female relatives gathered. The women all came with a gift of eleusine. Before the actual operation, the relatives took the girl to a canal to be washed by one of the senior women. The elder sprinkled only the toes of her right foot, saying, “We wash you of all the uncleanness of heretofore, now we cleanse you of the uncleanness of childhood that you may follow a new path to your death.” They then led the girl to a hut to be anointed and then to the hut of an elder, who performed the operation. Afterward, the elder tested the girl for her virginity, and if she passed, much celebration and mbege drinking ensued. After three days, the elder returned to wash the girl, and they began a period of instruction in the domestic duties of womanhood. Water thus served as an agent that purified the girl of the uncleanness accumulated during childhood and that fostered her rebirth as a woman.
The education and initiation of children illustrate water’s importance in an array of social and cultural transactions. Especially important is the way in which water arose as a form of knowledge. For the youngest children, they were taught basic knowledge of water sources at an early age as a way of protecting these communal resources from children’s immaturity and inexperience. Initiation represented the time when adolescents were granted deeper knowledge of water and became privy to its cleansing and life-giving powers. The ceremonies themselves were also significant in that they reproduced the power and authority of the knowledge holders, in this case elders and ritual specialists.
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Analyzing the water-management practices that developed on Kilimanjaro, one clearly sees how people’s impressions of the waterscape shaped a web of linkages between water and society. Mountain communities developed a highly nuanced understanding of the dynamism and diversity of the water supply as well as a broad understanding of the knowledge needed to manage it. People needed water to nurture crops and cook bananas, but they also valued it for its power to cleanse people and generate new life. Water could be known in many ways, and people at various levels of the social strata had differential access to this knowledge. Children were denied knowledge of water until they reached initiation and were considered adults. Women were denied knowledge of procuring, controlling, and managing water resources, while they often knew more about water quality, the day-to-day tribulations of finding water, and methods of carrying, storing, and using water. Meni mifongo held knowledge of canal management that made their services and expertise tremendously important to the whole of the mountain.
By the nineteenth century, the peoples of Kilimanjaro had developed a highly successful system of intensive agriculture, one that enabled them to prosper and grow significantly in size. Around 100,000 people lived on the slopes of the mountain by 1850, spread across more than forty mountain ridges. The period brought many changes to the mountain. It experienced a dramatic rise in trade with peoples from beyond the mountain, particularly Swahili long-distance traders. The growing importance of this trade fueled the rise of chieftaincy and the increasingly assertive power of the wamangi. It also led to a rise in warfare on the mountain, pitting rival chieftaincies against one another and forcing weaker chiefdoms on the mountain to either forge alliances or accept subordination.
Despite this trend toward political centralization, the management of water remained decentralized. Wamangi asserted little authority over water until the colonial period.
