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Water Brings No Harm. Matthew V. Bender
Читать онлайн.Название Water Brings No Harm
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780821446782
Автор произведения Matthew V. Bender
Серия New African Histories
Издательство Ingram
A second factor is the people who for generations have called it home. The peoples now known as the Chagga first settled the lower slopes more than five hundred years ago.34 They formed small clan-based communities on the ridges of the agroforest zone, on the south and east sides. These communities shared cultural and economic similarities and spoke related languages, but they did not possess a single identity. The strongest continuity was a form of agriculture defined by the cultivation of bananas, yams, and vegetables on homesteads called vihamba. In the nineteenth century, the clans on each ridge began to consolidate politically, and chieftaincy emerged. Yet the mountain remained a diverse place. What outsiders saw as a uniform Chagga society was actually a place of many societies, with strong linguistic diversity and no sense of political unity. The twentieth century witnessed developments including the rise of coffee cultivation, further political consolidation, and the formation of a shared identity. To this day, the Chagga retain cultural pride that is linked to the mountain as a physical space.
What makes these communities unique is the nature of their engagement with water. While all communities in Africa—and the world—depend on water, the peoples of Kilimanjaro developed a unique web of knowledge about the resource that touched nearly every aspect of life. This owed partly to the uniqueness of the mountain, featuring a narrow band of highly fertile soil and ample water wedged between the rainforest and the steppe. As such, waterscapes came to define the identity of mountain peoples and their notions of inclusion and exclusion. Furthermore, the multiplicity of sources enabled many to adopt a multiple-source water economy, in which they gathered water from different locations, at different times of the year, for different purposes. The physical placement of rivers and streams shaped communities, while the importance of water to livelihood shaped social, political, and cultural institutions. Lastly, mountain people have a long history of active water management. The need to control the multiplicity of resources lent power to specialists, but the availability of alternative sources also empowered a wide range of users. As a result, community water management on the mountain was more decentralized than that of most other places.
Lastly, Kilimanjaro has long fascinated outsiders, largely because of its waterscape. The earliest known allusions to a snowcapped mountain by non-Africans date back to antiquity. In the second century CE, Greco-Egyptian geographer Claudius Ptolemy wrote of a Great Snow Mountain near the spring lake that fed the Nile River. Other classical writers, such as Herodotus, speculated about snow mountains that fed the Nile. In the fifteenth century, Spanish traveler Martin Fernández de Enciso wrote in Summa de geografía that west of Mombasa stands the “Ethiopian Mount Olympus, which is exceedingly high.” These accounts were not verified by firsthand observations until the nineteenth century, when missionary Johannes Rebmann became the first European to see the mountain. With its tremendous size, its isolation from other peaks, its seeming abundance of water amid the steppe, and, most notably, its glaciers, Kilimanjaro became the most renowned geographic feature of sub-Saharan Africa. With the emergence of colonial rule, Africa’s Olympus came to be a lucrative piece of territory and a symbol of Europe’s desire to dominate Africa. It even became a powerful literary symbol, as we see in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The mountain remains an important symbol to outsiders such as the Tanzanian state, mountain climbers, and scientists concerned with climate change.
The symbolic importance of Kilimanjaro and its waterscape to outsiders makes it a particularly good place for this study. Largely because of its allure, the mountain has attracted an unusually diverse cast of outside actors. As these outsiders have asserted power over the mountain and its people—whether for political domination, economic gain, religious conversion, nation building, alpine conquest, or other goals—the mountain communities have found themselves confronted with new opportunities 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