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.
Water Brings No Harm expands the existing literature in three respects. First, it pushes us to think about development over a longer timeframe. Debates about how to develop water resources, by whom and using what technologies, did not arise with colonial rule. They had preoccupied local experts for centuries, just as they preoccupied colonial scientists and engineers working for the Tanzanian state. Second, it shows that development has involved a larger toolbox than is commonly assumed. Most studies of development center on a case study, and many of these are specific projects, like dams or irrigation schemes. By focusing on developing a resource rather than a technology, this book shows that the toolbox used by development actors has included legal, scientific, and cultural interventions as well as political and technical ones. Lastly, this book shows that development struggles in the absence of social resonance and engagement with local knowledge. Community water management thrived for centuries because the diverse forms of management knowledge linked together to create a shared sense of responsibility and ownership. Though the mifongo may have become antiquated in light of alternative technologies and the changing needs of users, the social networks they engendered could have been embraced to make new technologies more effective and sustainable. Yet colonial and postcolonial development deliberately excluded local communities for decades. In recent years, the Tanzanian government and development agencies have engaged with local communities, but they have done so only in limited ways and under the assumption that local knowledge has little to offer. This book indicates that the key to successful development is not just engaging the local, but incorporating the local in meaningful ways that builds social connectivity and engages local knowledge and expertise.
THE UNIQUENESS OF KILIMANJARO
Mount Kilimanjaro is an illuminating place for this study, in part because of its physical uniqueness. It is the tallest mountain in Africa, the world’s fourth tallest in geographic prominence, the tallest of volcanic origin, and the tallest that does not lie in a range. It stretches 95 kilometers from east to west, 65 kilometers from north to south, and is separated by at least 30 kilometers from neighboring peaks.32 Two volcanic cones define the massif: Mawenzi (5,149 meters) and the glacier-capped Kibo (5,895 meters). Neighboring peaks—Mount Meru to the west, the Taita Hills to the east, and the Pare Mountains to the southeast—all lie beyond its foothills. The semiarid grasslands of the steppe surround the mountain on all sides and average about 800 meters in elevation. A sky island in a sea of aridity, the mountain features its own unique climate zones with large variations in temperature and precipitation.33 At the highest points of Kibo lie two ice fields that stretch downward from the peak. Beneath these is a region of alpine desert (4,000–5,000 meters) marked by minimal vegetation and animal life. Next is a zone of heathlands and moorlands (2,800–4,000 meters), a transition zone with minimal precipitation and various heathers and small shrubs. Beyond this point are areas of high precipitation. An alpine rainforest lies between 1,800 and 2,800 meters, featuring abundant water and a wealth of vegetation. Further downhill lies the area of focus for this study, the temperate forest, or agroforest zone. Called home by mountain peoples, it lies between 800 and 1,800 meters and features moderate temperatures, rich soils, and annual rainfall between 750 and 2,500 millimeters. Beyond this lies the lowland steppe, which averages less than 500 millimeters of rain per year and has only scrubby vegetation.
Water features define this mountain landscape. The most renowned is the ice cap at the top of Kibo. The upper reaches also receive seasonal snowfall, giving the whole of Kibo a distinctive white layer during periods of the year. The surface waters that flow from the rainforest through the agroforest zone are generated by the precipitation of two rainy seasons. Rainfall