Water Brings No Harm. Matthew V. Bender
or English as appropriate. This helped establish a comfort level with my interviewees and showed my familiarity with the area. Lastly, I developed my question sets with an eye to how they would be perceived by interviewees, relying on the expertise of my research assistants. In my questioning, I worked from the present toward the past, as this helped my interviewees become comfortable with me and think more deeply about water issues.
Another challenge with oral histories lies in interpretation, a question that has informed much of the debate about their value. Some scholars, such as Vansina, hold that oral narratives contain essential truth that can be extracted, allowing them to be reliable historical documents if sufficient care is taken with interpretation. Others, such as Luise White, Stephan Miescher, and David William Cohen, emphasize that oral sources are dynamic and malleable and that they convey discourse and sentiment, allowing us to understand historical viewpoints that may not necessarily be based in truth.41 Emily Osborn’s recent work on statecraft in the Milo River Valley illustrates the potential of employing both interpretive lenses.42 My approach is similar to Osborn’s in that my interpretation depends largely on the moment to which my interviewees are referring. Questions about current and recent topics tend to be answered accurately, except those pertaining to active water disputes or underground activity. I am able to verify this information by comparing interviews and noting outliers and also by layering the oral sources with textual ones. Questions that probe further back in time, asking about history beyond the lifespan of the interviewee, tend to be less objectively verifiable but no less revealing. For these, I am most concerned with how people choose to remember and speak about the past. The way these stories are told demonstrates a remembering that speaks as much about the present as the past, often coming across in vivid language and phrases such as “water brings no harm.” As such, these narratives provide an indispensable tool for seeing how people have constructed waterscapes over time and how these notions have clashed with those held by outsiders. Most of all, they provide voices that are missing from the textual records, ones that illuminate the breadth and depth of water knowledge that these communities have long produced.
Lastly, given the environmental approach of this book, I utilize a number of sources that enable me to read the waterscape. These include studies of mountain hydrology, surveys of land and water resources, and photographs. I also used a handheld GPS to mark places of significance, calculate changes in altitude between points, and measure distances between locations. These sources enable me to see, at various points in history, the land and water features as they would have been seen by people at that time. They therefore provide additional data points that I compare with the impressions of officials, missionaries, and mountain peoples that appear in other sources. By examining them comparatively, I am able to see the dynamic nature of these features over time.
THE FLOW OF THE BOOK
Water Brings No Harm examines water management by focusing on moments in time when struggles over water became especially pressing. It looks at how actors responded by producing new knowledge and attempting to influence both policy and practice. The first two chapters examine how different groups—mountainside populations, and traders and explorers—developed impressions of the mountain’s waters in the nineteenth century. The subsequent chapters flow chronologically, each examining a moment when local knowledge was challenged or shaped by interactions with outside actors. Altogether, the chapters provide a compelling glance into an array of struggles over water that have shaped the modern history of Kilimanjaro.
Chapter 1 establishes 1850 as the chronological starting point for the book. It examines the origins of the agrarian communities on Kilimanjaro and shows how people developed an impression of the waterscape that embodied the dynamism and diversity of the water sources as well as the sources’ importance to people’s livelihood. The management of these sources became a defining attribute of these communities, shaping social, political, and cultural institutions and relationships. Water provided for an array of physical needs such as cooking, brewing, and irrigation. Just as important, it was a fundamental part of how people understood their surroundings, their identities, their positions in society, and their spirituality. Those with specialized knowledge of 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