Water Brings No Harm. Matthew V. Bender
produce studies of mountain hydrology and the problems facing the water supply, and they also included creating laws, policies, and structures to regulate water use and restrict the mifongo. Local communities vehemently resisted these new initiatives. Their perception of the waterscape had always involved volatility and the need for careful management, so these new concerns had little resonance. They also rejected the notion that users beyond the mountain had rightful claim to its waters.
This chapter marks a distinct shift in thinking about the waterscape of Kilimanjaro and also marks the start of struggles that persist to the present day. Seeing the mountain as water scarce, colonial actors felt compelled to transform management practices they considered harmful. To this end, they embraced new knowledge of water produced by scientists and politicians and rejected that held by local experts. Local knowledge came to be viewed as unscientific, superstitious, and dangerous. In the process, colonial actors conflated hydrological and technical knowledge, essentially saying that local expertise was no longer useful because the technology of the canals was outdated. Technocratic management significantly narrowed the field of people who could be experts and thus encouraged the government to develop more centralized planning of the resource. This shift threatened the local control of water and the roles of many specialists.
Even as mountain communities resisted the notion of scarcity and the idea that their long-held management practices were suddenly harmful, they began to adapt new water knowledge. Chapter 5 examines how new forms of water knowledge were incorporated in the areas of health, spirituality, and cultivation. It focuses on the discourse of harm, the tool with which outsiders lobbied for change in local practices. Between 1930 and 1960, numerous actors—missionaries, schoolteachers, colonial officers, coffee co-op employees, midwives, and others—worked in mountain communities to disseminate new knowledge and practices. They cited waterborne disease, non-Christian spirituality, and irrigation of eleusine (linked to erosion and excess beer consumption) as harms that could be rectified by managing water in modern ways. Over time, changes in everyday water use began to materialize, but these must be understood in the context of the dynamic nature of knowledge production. Mountain communities selectivity adapted new ideas in response to conditions on the ground, such as outbreaks of waterborne disease and localized scarcity. In turn, this empowered people to act as specialists in new ways. It consequently contributed to the decline of older forms of water knowledge and the status of those who possessed them.
Despite the adaptation of new water knowledge, the trend toward scientific, centralized management began to impact mountain communities. Chapter 6 examines this in the context of the Chagga and Tanzanian nationalisms that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. These movements used water development to encourage people to embrace new political identities. In 1952, mountain communities elected the first paramount chief for Kilimanjaro, Thomas Marealle. He promoted a shared sense of ethnicity across the chiefdoms, inventing traditions, ceremonies, and a shared notion of history. Water development lay at the center of his initiatives. He promised to help those facing acute land and water scarcity by investing in new technologies such as pipelines. In doing so, he promoted a state-centered model for water development that embraced high modernism and defied the mountain’s long-held tradition of local management. In the early 1960s, Tanganyika emerged from colonial rule as an independent nation, and by 1967 the new Tanzanian state had entered the era of socialist nation-building known as Ujamaa. In this period, the government in Dar es Salaam defined water as a national resource, to be provided to people for free. It invested in large-scale projects such as pipelines and the Nyumba ya Mungu Dam. These projects challenged two tenets of local water knowledge: that the waters of the mountain belonged to its people exclusively and that water should be managed locally. The projects that accompanied Ujamaa, ostensibly about providing more and better water, served as nation-building tools that consolidated government authority over the resource. People in the foothills accepted water pipes and taps when those helped ease scarcity, and people in the upper areas incorporated them into their existing mix of water resources. They therefore tried to embrace the new technologies while rejecting the underlying political objectives.
Mountain communities nonetheless became increasingly dependent on the new systems. In the highlands, an aging population found itself without the labor to maintain the mifongo or traverse long distances for water. In the foothills and lowlands, people had no alternative but to rely on government-built systems. By the 1970s, communities depended on water systems over which they had little control and in which they took little ownership. Local knowledge that was related to water quality and provision became less important in the upper areas and resented by those in the lower areas who viewed it as contrary to their interests. Specialists disappeared as elders passed away and children did not assume their roles. These changes reshaped how people made sense of the waterscape. Rather than one in which most people assumed an active role in management, it became one where people used resources passively.
By the late 1970s, Tanzania had fallen into steep economic decline. Facing economic collapse, the country abandoned Ujamaa and accepted a program of structural adjustment designed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Chapter 7 looks at how neoliberal economic reforms transformed water management. The Tanzanian government, with the aid of international development agencies, embraced Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). This called for two major changes: the devolution of control from the central government to basin-level authorities and local user associations, and the introduction of cost recovery to fund projects and maintenance. Communities on Kilimanjaro have responded in highly nuanced and varied ways. Most vehemently reject the notion that they should pay for water, seeing this as an affront to their cultural norms and their pocketbooks. They also generally realize that despite the devolution rhetoric, they are denied any real power over water. Whereas people in the highlands have been most resistant to new water user associations—seeing them as shadows of the real thing—people in lower areas are more accepting, partly out of necessity and also because they have less interest in maintaining traditional forms of management.
The rise of neoliberal water management indicates the extent to which people’s impressions of the waterscape have changed, as well as how they have remained the same. The physical water features of the mountain, natural and man-made, are very different from how they were in 1850. Many more people draw on these resources and use them in many more ways. While some forms of local management persevere, especially in the domestic and spiritual spheres, technical and hydrological management has diminished because of a dependency on government-managed pipelines and the decline of the mifongo. There is a substantial difference in thinking between people living in the highlands, who still practice a multiple-source water economy, and those in the foothills and lowlands, who depend solely on pipes. The former tend to look more favorably on older forms of water management, while the latter reject them as counterproductive and antiquated.
The final chapter returns to the most symbolic feature of the waterscape, the snows atop Kibo. For nearly one hundred years, the mountain’s glaciers have been shrinking, and scientists predict that they will disappear completely within the next twenty years. Some claim that it is the direct result of human-induced climate change, while others see it as the product of regional factors such as increasing aridity and mountainside deforestation. The debate has spilled over into the political realm, where the snows of Kilimanjaro are used to promote or rebuke policy changes related to greenhouse gas emissions. The political and scholarly discourses of glacial recession ignore the perspective of mountain people and the knowledge they have produced about the glaciers and their place in the waterscape. This chapter shows how local communities are producing knowledge to explain the changes to the glaciers, the likelihood of the glaciers’ demise, and how they can manage the implications. This enables them to acknowledge the scale of the problem while retaining a sense of agency. Their desire to interpret glacial recession in terms of both local and global factors reflects the broader historical trend shown throughout this book. Interestingly, scientists have pivoted in this direction over the past few years. Recent studies have shown that deforestation is largely causing the decline in water supplies on the mountain, and the studies cite local resource-management practices as essential to reversing the trend.
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