and challenges. The local population negotiated new ideas about water in everything from religion and politics to health and technology. In the past three decades, numerous scholars have written about aspects of mountain society, including Sally Falk Moore, Emma Hunter, Susan Geiger Rogers, Anza Lema, Robert Munson, and Ludger Wimmelbücker.35 Some of this work, notably by Alison Grove, Donald Mosgrove, and Mattias Tagseth, has focused on the mifongo.36 The last ten years have seen an explosion in scientific discussion of Kilimanjaro, dominated by articles on glacial recession.
By focusing on the intersection of management knowledge and power, this book provides a model for understanding water conflicts not only in Africa, but across much of the Global South. It shows both how local communities produced knowledge about the resource, and what happened when this knowledge confronted new ideas introduced by outsiders. These outsiders attempted to use their “modern” knowledge of water management as a means of attaining power, whether religious, political, or physical, over the resource. In turn, local people negotiated new ideas about water, often rejecting the accompanying power plays by outside actors. In some cases, new knowledge was even used as a tool to refute outside control. This richer understanding of the history of Kilimanjaro and East Africa also provides insights that are relevant to other regions where local communities encountered powerful actors from outside their boundaries. Our understandings of these problems are incomplete if we look at water strictly as a physical commodity to be controlled, divided, and consumed. I aim for this work to encourage those involved in water issues to think more deeply and broadly about the resource, as well as the importance of engaging local communities.
SOURCES AND METHOD
Analyzing the history of community water management on Kilimanjaro presents some distinct challenges. On the one hand, water is a resource that affects everyone and influences a range of thoughts, institutions, and relationships. On the other, everyday management can be routine and mundane, and the knowledge involved in certain practices can be concealed from public view. This means that some issues, like those that garnered the attention of government officials and agencies, are well represented in historical records, while others are scarcely mentioned. The temporal breadth of this book introduces another challenge. Over the 160 years covered, dozens of stakeholders have been important players in managing the waters of the mountain. Though textual sources have become more numerous over time, they do not represent the multiplicity of actors. I therefore draw on a wide range of sources including government and missionary archival records from Tanzania, Germany, Britain, and France; published reports from government agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); scientific articles; newspapers; historical linguistics; photographs; survey data and GPS measurements; and travelogues and memoirs. I also conducted oral history interviews on the mountain over three periods between 2002 and 2012. By layering these sources, I have pieced together a comprehensive account of water management that encompasses a wide range of voices.
Interpreting these sources requires careful attention to both context and each author’s biases. For the early decades of the book, I rely on travelogues, diaries, and letters written by European explorers and adventurers between the 1850s and the 1930s. These writings reflect how outsiders’ personal biases, objectives, and literary goals skewed their narratives of the mountain. Despite such challenges, these sources provide rich descriptions of the mountain and its waterscapes, and they are highly effective at showing how each author’s presumptions and experiences intersect and also what features and experiences most preoccupy them. As published volumes, the works also give a sense of the knowledge that made its way back to Europe.
In the early twentieth century, several colonial officials and missionaries published ethnohistorical studies of mountain society. The most prominent authors were Lutheran missionary Bruno Gutmann, Catholic missionary Alexandre Le Roy, and the district officer for Kilimanjaro in the early 1920s, Charles Dundas.37 These individuals lived and worked in close proximity to local communities, and their writings provide a wealth of detail concerning daily life, political and cultural practices, and understandings of history and descent. Gutmann was by far the most prolific. He wrote more than five hundred works during his time as a missionary, dozens of which pertain specifically to Chagga history and cultural practice.38 Water management was a particular point of fascination for these authors, so these practices are well documented. Their works provide a view into mountain life and a tool for reconstructing life in earlier times, yet they require care in interpretation. Marcia Wright, who refers to these kinds of writers as “intimate outsiders,” warns that their work “often verges on fiction in that it enters imaginatively into the life circumstances of Africans . . . and transgresses boundaries between observer and the observed.”39 These works interpret local life through the eyes and expectations of the writer, which can lead to distortions. For example, most writers homogenize the experiences of the people, assuming them to be part of the same “tribe,” the Chagga. This assumption of ethnic unity was far from reality, as people identified with clans and chiefdoms and shunned any sense of panmontane identity. These writings also privilege the southeast chiefdoms, in particular Marangu, which had been most receptive to European colonialism and missionary work. The eastern slopes, known as Rombo, are described as resource-poor and impoverished—a reflection of recent environmental conditions and stereotypes held by people in the southeast—despite evidence that they had been prosperous in earlier centuries. If these sources are read alongside others, and with a careful eye to their biases, they can offer a window into late precolonial and early colonial life.
For the colonial and early postcolonial periods, I draw on government archival documents and published reports from government ministries. Most are housed at the Tanzania National Archives in Dar es Salaam, with some additional holdings in Germany and Britain. The archives’ holdings include collections from the German period and the British period: district books, the Secretariat Series, the records of the Moshi District and Northern Province offices (and their successors), and the files of the Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Health, and Ministry of Lands, Settlement, and Water Development, among others. These contain annual reports, correspondence, and memoranda, which feature useful information about issues of colonial concern. They tell us less about local communities, as they selectively incorporate the perspectives of the governed. Prominent actors such as the wamangi frequently appear, but they are hardly representative of the views of their subjects, and women’s voices are almost entirely absent. Despite these deficiencies, these documents provide a wealth of detail about policies, laws, and actions that had real effects on community water management, and they reveal the concerns and motivations of the government administrations. We can also get a sense of local perspective by reading these sources against the grain. Numerous documents, for example, reflect on how local communities responded to new policies and procedures. The descriptions of the responses provide useful information, even if the author’s interpretation may be biased. We can then layer these with other sources such as oral narratives to tease out the meanings and motivations behind the responses.
In addition to government documents, there is a wealth of records from the missionary orders, including correspondence between the mission stations and with the head offices, collections of letters from clergy, and serial publications. The richest of these are the journals kept by the mission stations. These provide a daily account of the affairs of the mission, covering issues from baptisms and conversions to interactions with wamangi, elders, and government officials. They also offer detailed observations of the waterscape, including the earliest rainfall data and written accounts of drought in the region. These sources offer different perspectives from those of the government sources, perspectives that are more familiar with local life. Yet despite the fact that many European clergy lived on the mountain for years, even decades, they are still intimate outsiders who interpreted events through a desire to transform. These works need to be read with a careful eye to the objectives of the clergy, but they do offer a tremendous amount of detail and our earliest quantitative data on the waterscape.
Given the limited availability of archival materials for the postindependence period, published works are important for the more recent decades covered by this book. Reports and studies by the Tanzanian government, international agencies, and NGOs provide
