the Rivers of East and West Africa examines the role of waterways in the continent’s economic, social, and political development.15 Hoag treats water as the “lead actor” in her narrative, which allows her to examine the centrality of watercourses to the lives of those who live near them and to see the broader impact of colonial attempts to harness rivers through damming. Allen and Barbara Isaacman’s Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development examines the Zambezi in the context of the development of the Cahora Bassa Dam.16 By focusing on the river, they demonstrate the disconnect between the rhetoric and the actual political, economic, and environmental impacts of the project. Another area that has featured water centrally is the study of irrigation. John Sutton’s work on the Engaruka irrigation system in the Rift Valley of Northern Tanzania is some of the earliest and most noteworthy.17 More recently, Monica van Beusekom’s work on the Office du Niger’s irrigation project in Mali has shown the importance of water development in relationships between colonial experts and local farmers.18 Maurits Ertsen’s recent book on irrigation in colonial Sudan focuses a bit more on water itself. He sees irrigation as a process that generated “continuous negotiations” between farmers and the colonial state.19
Although these recent works have broken new ground in analyzing the deeper significance of water, many important areas have yet to receive attention. There has been virtually no scholarship on how communities of Africans manage water. Each day, people use water in myriad ways, in their homes and on their farms. Each of these actions reveals much about their understandings of the resource and about broader social and political relationships. Furthermore, much of the existing work examines rivers, dams, or irrigation systems. The focus on single manifestations of water—naturally occurring or human engineered—allows the authors to dissect their political, social, and cultural dimensions and the conflicts that they have generated among users, between specialists and users, and between locals and outside actors. The drawback is that this makes it more difficult to get a holistic perspective as to how people think about water. It assumes that the water system in question is—or is perceived to be—discrete from other forms of water, such as rainfall, clouds, glaciers, wells, or neighboring systems. The question of where such boundaries are drawn is highly relative and culturally contingent. Yet in colonial contexts, such boundaries are often contested.
KILIMANJARO AS WATERSCAPE
This book approaches water in an innovative way. It examines how a community of people—the residents of Kilimanjaro—has managed its water resources amid a changing world and strong external pressures. Rather than focusing on a particular manifestation of water, it uses the concept of waterscapes to analyze multiple water resources in tandem and their intersections with society. What is a waterscape? In short, it is a term that describes how people see water. Many water features, such as rain and rivers, appear naturally. Others, such as irrigation canals and dams, are engineered by people. Most are visible to the eye, while others, such as underground rivers, are not. Water features show tremendous dynamism. Rain and surface water resources move, often covering very large distances. They vary seasonally and with long-term shifts in climate. What people see, therefore, depends on time, place, and perspective. Furthermore, the impression of these watercourses and their relationships with one another are socially and culturally constructed. When people describe places as lush or arid, or employ terms such as 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
