or malevolent spirits. To ensure that water would bring no harm, people in the community actively managed the resource. In the case of a broken mfongo, canal specialists known as meni mifongo worked with the society of users to restore the water. This involved not merely fixing the physical canal but also making offerings to the relevant spirits. In cases of drought or excessive rain, those with expertise in rainmaking medicine and spirit divination made offerings to the spirits and the creator god Ruwa to make it rain or make it stop. Though spirits or human action could bring these harms to the water supply, people generally believed that water, in and of itself, was the source of life and brought no harm. Keeping it that way involved careful management that tied together technology, spirituality, and community.
On Kilimanjaro, water was a fluid resource whose significance shifted in response to environmental, political, and social conditions. It often inspired debate between various specialists and between specialists and other community leaders, such as the wamangi and clan heads. After 1890, these debates became more pronounced. Colonial rule introduced new actors to Kilimanjaro who settled on the mountain and made demands on its resources. At first, these individuals believed that water existed abundantly, and they embraced local knowledge of the resource, in particular the mifongo. This persisted until the late 1920s. By that point, the rising population and increasing demand for water from users on the mountain and in the lowlands led Europeans to reimagine the waterscape as scarce. At the same time, they became concerned with dangers such as contamination and soil erosion. The tandem led colonial agents to embrace a discourse that challenged local water management as harmful to the landscape, the water supply, and the people themselves. Colonial scientists, district officers, and wamangi criticized the mifongo as wasteful of water and destructive to the land. Midwives and schoolteachers promoted the idea of water being contaminated with bacteria and therefore harmful to those who consumed it. They joined with the missionaries and Christian converts, who had long criticized diviners and rainmakers for promoting spiritually harmful beliefs and practices. These actors in turn promoted new knowledge of water that was grounded in allegedly modern, science-based thinking. Only by adopting new knowledge, and rejecting the old, could communities save their resource and build a better future. Colonial attempts to influence mountain peoples included the creation of new laws and regulations, the manipulation of chiefly authority, and the educational efforts of European and African colonial officers, clergy, teachers, and midwives. In the 1950s, the government became involved in providing water by constructing pipelines intended to replace the mifongo. These efforts challenged not only a host of social and political relationships on the mountain but also the position of water specialists.
Struggles over water did not ease with independence. In 1967, Tanzania embarked on a program of socialist economic development, Ujamaa, that defined water as a national resource that should be provided by the state as a public good, for free. Ujamaa policies, along with new development projects such as water pipelines, effectively challenged the idea of local water management by considering it to be harmful to the nation. In the mid-1980s, the government switched course again as it abandoned African socialism in favor of structural adjustment. In this era, the national government embraced a new strategy called Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), devolved oversight of water to regional basin authorities, and adopted the policy that water should be treated as a commodity and that people should pay for it. In recent years, the most intense conflict over water has involved the shrinking of the mountain’s venerable ice cap, which is predicted to vanish entirely by the year 2030. Scientists are heatedly debating about the causation of this phenomenon and its potential linkage to global climate change. This has made Kilimanjaro a visible icon of broader debates over global environmental issues, while ignoring the opinions of the mountain’s own peoples.
Water Brings No Harm asks important questions about the relationship between water-management knowledge and political power. Since the 1920s, colonial officers, missionaries, the postcolonial state, development agencies, and scientists have criticized local water management, yet they have rarely used force or heavy-handed policy to make mountain communities alter their practices. Rather, they have used science and technology as political tools, extolling the virtues of modern management and its superiority to traditional or customary management. In most cases, local actors have negotiated these interventions or rejected them outright, demonstrating that the relationship between knowledge, authority, and power is far from linear. Many Africanist scholars have challenged the binaries (traditional versus modern, customary versus scientific) that defined colonial thinking about knowledge, and they have shown the extent to which everyday Africans negotiated these interventions. Paul Richards, in his work on West African agriculture, shows how peasant farmers are adept at producing new knowledge through experimentation and innovation, hallmarks of the scientific method.26 Locals possess expertise that outsiders do not, and this is due to their long-standing interaction with the land. Likewise, Timothy Mitchell’s work on Egypt reveals how modern states rely on discrete categories of knowing—fields such as engineering, chemistry, and economics—that are led by so-called experts.27 This separation effectively excludes locals from participating in processes for which they are deemed lacking in knowledge. More recently, Helen Tilley’s work on science in colonial Africa has shown not only how science-based knowledge has held the power to both coerce and liberate but also that the application of such knowledge can be used by local communities for subversive purposes.28
Water Brings No Harm builds on these studies by complicating our understanding of what constitutes expert knowledge of water as well as who can possess that knowledge. For much of its history, management knowledge on Kilimanjaro has consisted of hydrological and technical expertise that was very much scientific, derived from centuries of observation and experimentation. Early colonizers admitted as much by embracing local expertise for nearly seventy years. It was only when their vision of the waterscape shifted that they rejected local knowledge. This study also shows how adept local communities proved to be at negotiating knowledge from the outside, which stemmed in part from their belief that outsiders had little legitimate authority over water. This belief enabled them to negotiate outside actions by embracing elements of knowledge they found useful while rejecting the assertions of power that accompanied that knowledge. Local communities also benefited from the power of geography. By being the most upstream users in the watershed, they had an inherent power to resist outside interventions.
This book also encourages us to think more deeply about the meaning of development in Africa and the Global South. In the 1950s, colonial officials began working with the wamangi to develop new water systems, such as canals and pipelines, for the communities of Kilimanjaro. Though extolled as a way to provide more and better water, these projects also reflected the desire of colonial actors to assert political power over communities and reshape local knowledge of water. This use of development continued largely unaltered into the postcolonial period, with projects promoted by the socialist and neoliberal regimes and a host of development agencies. The relationship between development and state power has been analyzed in depth by scholars such as James Ferguson, James Scott, and Monica van Beusekom. Ferguson, in his study of Lesotho, notes that development “is a machine for reinforcing and expanding the exercise of bureaucratic state power.” This can happen almost invisibly because of the attractive nature and seemingly “neutral, technical mission” of the project itself. Development discourses promote “technical solutions to technical problems” in a way that allows the state to ignore or deliberately exclude local communities.29 There are echoes of this on Kilimanjaro, where development is both implicitly and explicitly linked to attempts to impose state authority. Scott’s work on high modernism indicates how the hegemonic nature of large-scale state-sponsored projects contributes to their failure. Such projects fail by dismissing “local knowledge and know-how” in favor of “formal schemes of order.”30 Van Beusekom argues that development became more effective once colonial actors recognized the value of local knowledge. Her work on the Office du Niger’s irrigation project in Mali shows that output and productivity improved once French officials started paying attention to local knowledge, resulting in development that was a hybrid of the colonial, or Western, and the local.31 Colonial and postcolonial attempts to develop water on Kilimanjaro echo these cases and indicate the drawbacks of top-down, state-driven development.
