Historical Perspectives on Pre-Colonial Irrigation in Southern Africa

Abstract

One of the basic areas of interaction between water as natural resource and human societies as agents of cultural transformation is the technology of irrigation. In Africa at least 66 per cent of the available water is used for purposes of irrigation. For more than 4 000 years irrigation has secured food supplies for humans on a continent that is noted for its relative shortage of sufficient natural water supplies.

There is a remarkable hidden power of water in the history of southern Africa. This is particularly the case when we consider the development of early irrigation technologies of Iron Age farmers. The small irrigation furrow of the subsistence farmer was just as important to an insular community of Bantu-speaking people in pre-colonial times, as is the sophisticated irrigation technology in present-day South Africa. Currently there is a paucity of information about pre-colonial indigenous irrigation technology. This can be ascribed to a number of factors of which the invasion of modern Western traditions in the nineteenth century is perhaps the most important. A number of other factors for the apparent blind-spot is also presented in this study.

In southern Africa there are traces of indigenous pre-colonial irrigation works at sites such as Nyanga in Zimbabwe; the Limpopo River Valley; Mpumalanga; and South Africa's eastern Highveld. Reference is also made in this article to specific strategies of irrigation used by Iron Age communities, prior to the advent of a colonial presence. Finally, attention is also drawn to pre-colonial land tenure and state formation against the backdrop of Wittfogel's theories on hydraulic society.     

‘The first duties of persons living in a civilized community’: the Maya, the Church, and the colonial state in southern Belize

In recent years, historical geography has been at the forefront of new scholarship on the spatiality of colonial power and its complex relations with indigenous communities. This literature shows that imperial policies – emerging through state and scientific institutions, cultural practices, and capitalist ventures – required particular ways of conceptualizing, mapping, and organizing spaces and territories which transformed the geographies of indigenous communities, livelihoods, and identities. Through a close reading of archival texts from the late 19th and early 20th century, this paper examines the spatial and political relations between three groups: the Catholic Church, the British colonial state, and the Maya communities of southern British Honduras. Differences between the Catholic Church and the British colonial state – in their aims and approach to winning hegemony over the Q'eqchi' and Mopan Maya – were accommodated and assuaged by a tacit agreement: that the Maya must be settled in permanent communities. Colonial power, in both its spiritual and statist modalities, was imminently geographical, and this geography comprised the common ground between Church and state in their approach to the Maya.     

“Much in Blood and Money”: Necropolitical Ecology on the Margins of the Uganda Protectorate

Increasingly, political ecologists invoke the concept of “green grabbing” to refer to the ways in which processes of accumulation by dispossession articulate with various imperatives for environmental protection. This paper traces these contemporary processes to their roots in the colonial era, focusing on how dispossession in the name of environmental protection intersects with complex historical geographies of state formation and internal territorialisation. Drawing upon the case of Mount Elgon in Britain's Uganda Protectorate, in particular, we reconstruct the ways in which the interrelated “birth” of both conservation and transcontinental agrarian markets were intimately connected to the emergence and normalisation of the colonial state itself. In doing so, we propose the term necropolitical ecology as a framework to encompass the ways in which contemporary “green grabs” partially emerge from racialised modes of colonial appropriation, the violence of which often still lingers in agencies and institutions of environmental governance in the contemporary postcolony.     

Transitions in the Ottoman Waqf’s traditional building upkeep and maintenance system in Cyprus during the British colonial era (1878–1960) and the emergence of selective architectural conservation practices

How did the Waqf, a widespread Islamic historic institution in the non-Western world which promoted traditional building upkeep and maintenance systems, cope with the emerging architectural conservation understandings of the modern era? How did colonial transfers of knowledge, expertise and political considerations influence these systems? The present study explores these questions by examining the case of the Ottoman Waqf (Evkaf) institution in Cyprus. By collecting and analysing archival evidence on conservation projects, initiated during the British colonial period between 1878 and 1960, a model framework of initiation, authorisation and implementation processes of the upkeep of the Waqf maintained properties has been identified. This framework has been used to show the transitional role of the colonial influence at different stages, which finally led to the dissolution of the Waqf system’s sustainable elements, and initiated the emergence of selective architectural conservation practices. By shifting the focus of conservation discourses to look specifically into the background dynamics of the institutional practice, a new argument has been developed. This revealed how heritage conservation practices are negotiated with the existing institutions and how they are transferred and/or transformed at different levels of institutional governance.     

Modernising colonialism: The British Labour movement and Africa

The article evaluates the widely held view that the Attlee governments lacked a distinctive approach to colonial affairs by examining the Labour movement's post-war, institution building activities in Kenya. In Labour's colonial policy deliberations, Kenya was the focus of particular attention and is used as a case study to shed light on the Labour leadership's wider imperial concerns and objectives. From the 1920s, the Labour party advocated that the colonies be encouraged to develop trade unions, co-operatives and local government. Some tentative moves in this direction were made in 1930 by Ramsay MacDonald's administration but it was not until Labour came to power in 1945 that, in response to international pressure and the nationalist challenge, significant steps were taken to promote institutions which would organise the African masses. The argument advanced is that Labour leaders drew on their movement's historical traditions to encourage forms of African economic and political activism which were likely to stabilise colonial rule.     

Cultural Innovation and Translation in the Eastern Cape: Jan Tzatzoe,Xhosa Intellectual and the Making of an African Gospel, 1817–1833

Abstract

This article describes the construction of a truly African Bible on the London Missionary Society's Eastern Cape Buffalo River mission station in the early years of the colonial encounter. Largely unacknowledged in the historical record, the isiXhosa translations were made in an intellectual partnership involving Jan Tzatzoe, a cultural and intellectual intermediary and innovator, and two European missionaries, John Brownlee and Friedrich Gottlob Kayser. A particular focus is Tzatzoe's breakthrough in moving the depiction of Jesus Christ towards Christ as Xhosa healer or ‘physician’. The article builds upon the renewed scholarly attention directed towards intermediaries by examining African involvement in the creation of crucial discourses and the conditions under which colonial texts were produced. It is suggested that Tzatzoe and other African linguistic intermediaries might be thought of as the vanguard of an African intellectual tradition born in the colonial encounter.     

Decolonial Challenges and Post-Genocide Archaeological Politics in Rwanda

Abstract

This paper narrates in an autobiographical manner PhD research regarding pre-colonial Rwandan archaeology and its contemporary socio-political relevance. The paper re?ects on the decolonial challenge that inspired the research and the ways in which, and reasons why, the research fell short of achieving its decolonial aims. In response to this complex personal, national, and disciplinary case study, the paper questions activist archaeologies and suggests that, whilst political engagement remains essential, the outcomes of well-intentioned approaches may actually perpetuate the undesirable political paradigms they seek to challenge. In conclusion, the paper proposes a hybrid set of decolonial responses that might be usefully employed in African Archaeology and the colonial discipline of archaeology more broadly.     

The Archaeology of German and British Colonial Entanglements in Kpando-Ghana

In talking about the cultural diversity of Africa’s past, the archaeological assessment of West African sites with mangled tangible and intangible fragments of German and British and/or French colonial encounters should not be ignored but rather discussed. This research explores how specific daily material cultural practices of German and British colonizers and Kpando indigenes in the Volta Region of Ghana were enmeshed in a medley of geopolitical, ideological and exchange connections. Through the use of archaeological, archival and ethnographic sources, this paper examines how daily practices of the people of Kpando were impacted by pre-colonial and dual colonial political economic pressures from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. This paper archaeologically explores how colonial officials maintained and renegotiated the norms of domesticity/gentility/Europeaness in their encounter with Akpini domestic technology, foodways and cultural practices.     

7. TOWARD A GENEALOGY OF THE RESEARCHER AS SUBJECT IN POST/DECOLONIAL PACIFIC HISTORIES

Recent discussion has drawn out some important differences between postcolonial and decolonial theories. The former are associated primarily with the work of South Asian scholars working in cultural, literary, or historical studies; decolonial scholarship, by contrast, is located in Latin America and has emerged from sociological critiques of dependency theory. Shifting the locus of debate to the Pacific centers another subject in globalizing critiques of colonialism: the historian in indigenous communities. In this article, I examine how the role of the researcher is conceptualized in Linda Tuhiwai Smith's landmark work Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999). Revealing tensions between objectivity and intersubjectivity, on the one hand, and between essentialist identity and hybridity, on the other, I ask why Smith's book hinges on dichotomizing nonindigenous and indigenous researchers, who are by turn enabled or constrained in a colonial present. I situate this late twentieth-century subject in a genealogy of indigenous engagement with history and anthropology in New Zealand and contemporary problems of historical justice.     

After the ‘king of beasts’: Samuel Baker and the embodied historical geographies of elephant hunting in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon

This paper draws on and develops a range of concepts and methodologies from ‘more-than-human’ and animal geographies to map some embodied historical geographies of elephant hunting in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon. It focuses in particular on the exploits of Samuel Baker and some of his contemporaries. The paper attends to the attachments, crossings and ethics that passed between hunted and hunting bodies to flesh out the colonial visions of these ‘seeing men’ of empire. It critically engages with existing work on hunting and colonial natural history by examining interwoven human and nonhuman experiences, exploring elephant hunting as a collection of embodied and co-evolutionary processes with complex material histories. Drawing out the importance of embodiment, affect and intercorporeal exchange the paper then reflects on the performance, epistemology and ethics of hunting practice and traces the role played by a code of sportsmanship in orientating and legitimating the ethical sensibility of hunting. In conclusion the paper details what is gained from this style of embodied historical analysis which unsettles any simple spatio-temporal territorialisation of (post-) colonial historical geographies.     

Wood Chipping of Indigenous Forest on Private Land in New Zealand 1969–1993

In recent decades the international wood chip industry has been the major cause of indigenous forest destruction in New Zealand. This paper analyses how changing state forest policies have affected wood chipping of indigenous forest. Emphasis is placed on wood chipping on private land through a case study of the reactions and changing attitudes of farmers. It is argued that farmers and Maori landowners often have no other alternative but to allow wood chipping on their land. Although government policies have been tightened in recent years, and although attitudes among private landholders are shifting towards forest conservation, the pressure on New Zealand's lowland indigenous forest remnants continues unabated.     

The ‘bullets to water’ belief complex: a pan-southern African cognate epistemology for protective medicines and the control of projectiles

Remarkable similarities across colonial encounters where Africans believed projectiles could be influenced by ritual practices (medicines, behaviours, observances) demand enquiry into their conception and trajectory. Although suggestion of pan-subcontinental phenomena may elicit suspicion of a generalisation, here evidence is examined from the late-independent and colonial periods that shows that a general belief, held cognate between groups, may indeed have existed. The focus is on precolonial¹ southern African beliefs in the manipulation of projectiles and how these may have affected ritual responses to firearms during colonisation. At least a millennium of interactions between hunters, herders and farmers appear to have resulted in commonly held beliefs, albeit with differential emphases. From first contact, and into sustained colonisation, it became necessary for Africans to highlight and/or adapt indigenous beliefs as mechanisms by which to cope with firearms and settler aggressive expansion.     

From Ubombo to Mkhuzi: disease, colonial science, and the control of Nagana (livestock trypanosomosis) in Zululand, South Africa, C. 1894-1953

This article looks at the scientific studies and debates that surrounded the control of nagana (trypanosomosis in livestock) in Zululand, South Africa, from the late nineteenth century until the 1950s. By 1953 the disease appeared to be contained following the use of DDT to exterminate the tsetse fly that spread the infection from immune wildlife to susceptible livestock. It argues that South Africa made an important contribution to western knowledge about trypanosomosis in terms of its etiology and possibilities for its control-a fact that has often been overlooked in the historical literature that has tended to focus on events in colonial central and east Africa. It explores Zulu conceptualizations of nagana, which influenced early researchers, the evolution of veterinary, entomological, and ecological sciences as "tools" for understanding and suppressing disease, as well as the difficulties involved in reconciling game conservation with colonial settlement. The article also shows how an animal disease contributed to the development of colonial science and encouraged the expansion of scientific networks with African colonies and beyond.     

ENTANGLED INVASIVE LIVES: INDIGENOUS INVASIVE PLANT MANAGEMENT IN NORTHERN AUSTRALIA

This article explores the entanglement of two kinds of invasive lives in northern Australia: invasive plants, and the enduring life of the unfinished colonial project, which continues to have implications for indigenous peoples. In the extensive indigenous lands of Australia's tropical north, communities have increasing responsibility for invasive plant management among other pressing land management tasks. In a context of climate change and novel ecosystems, these entanglements exacerbate environmental management challenges in the tropical savanna and affect indigenous livelihoods. Drawing on arguments that it is necessary to literally speak novel ecologies, we here enunciate and describe a novel ecological assemblage we call Indigenous Invasive Plant Management (IIPM). Historical accounts and contemporary ethnography (semi‐structured interviews and participant observation undertaken in 2010–2013) show a lingering colonial heritage in the ways that IIPM is entwined with tenure and governance issues, and in its everyday practice. These findings illustrate how IIPM can risk being a form of continuing dispossession as well as having good potential outcomes.     

Groundnuts as ‘economic crop’ or ‘wife of the home’ in Northern Nyasaland

This paper examines points during the 1930s in which the colonial state in Nyasaland attempted and failed to bring groundnuts more into the colonial export economy. Nyasaland colonial officials, the Department of Agriculture, European export companies and the British Colonial Office attempted to establish the groundnut as an ‘economic crop’ for African smallholder farmers in the Northern Province of Nyasaland in the 1930s. Their failure was in part due to competing and conflicting interests: payment of hut taxes, reduction of millet production, improvement of food security, payment of railway costs, and reduction of migration. Farmers actively resisted colonial efforts to sell groundnuts to European buyers. The paper addresses the question: how can we understand the nature of colonial state power in relation to Nyasaland peasant agricultural practices in the 1930s? I argue that conflicting interests within the colonial state, as well as external constraints led to efforts to both stabilize and exploit the Nyasaland farmer in the Northern Province. These competing agendas helped lead to a failed effort at groundnut promotion. Colonial officials' actions were linked to ideas about gender, ethnicity and migration. Lack of colonial scientific knowledge about groundnuts, including their gendered role in the local food system contributed to the failure. The focus on groundnuts is a lens through which to understand the nature of colonial power in Nyasaland and the role of agricultural science in the colonial state. The paper contributes to broader discussions about multiple historical geographies of colonialism, the nature of African colonial states, and the relationship of African farmers to colonial states.     

Finding Mid-19th Century Native Settlements: Cartographic and Archaeological Evidence from Central California

Historical maps have the potential to aid archaeological investigations into the persistence of Native American settlements during the mid-19th century, a time when many Native communities disappear from archaeological view. Focusing on Tomales Bay in central California, we evaluate the usefulness of historical maps as a way to discover and interpret archaeological deposits dating to the period, with the aim of better understanding indigenous patterns of residence at the transition from missionary to settler colonialism. In particular, we focus on diseños and plats created to document Mexican-era land grants as well as early maps produced by the General Land Office and United States Coast Survey. Although we note inconsistencies regarding the inclusion of indigenous settlements on historical maps, our case study offers an example of how archaeologists can employ historical maps and targeted archaeological ground-truthing to discover sites that are poorly represented in the historical and archaeological records.     

Order (and Disorder) in Early Colonial Moquegua,Peru

In the viceroyalty of Peru, Spanish authorities imposed several mechanisms to try to establish Christian social order among the colonists and dwindling indigenous populations, two of which were encomienda and reducción. The implementation of these and other policies and practices is examined using a case study in Moquegua, a colonial periphery in far southern Peru: the encomienda of Cochuna and the reduction site of Torata Alta. Incomplete knowledge of local conditions left the area vulnerable to social and religious disorder: overlapping boundaries, contested jurisdictions, and competing interests. Further historical archaeological consideration of such disorder can illuminate local impacts of colonialism.     

6. WHAT'S IN A CONCEPT? THE KINETIC EMPIRE OF THE COMANCHES

This essay revisits the main themes and arguments put forward in The Comanche Empire: indigenous agency; spatial reorientation in the writing of colonial histories; the composition of the Comanche empire and its impact on the history of North America. It also responds to a number of specific issues raised by the roundtable participants: differences and similarities between indigenous and Euro‐colonial power regimes; balancing of culture‐specific frameworks with broad‐gauge political economic analysis; linkages between indigenous agency and indigenous sovereignty in colonial encounters; the question of periodization in writing Native American and colonial histories. Finally, the essay points to new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, and comparing nonterritorial nomadic empires by introducing the concept of “kinetic empire,” which refers to a flexible imperial organization that revolves around a set of mobile activities and relies on selective nodal control of key resources.     

Other messages,other missions; or,Sahlins among the Melanesians

Responding to a number of developing critiques, Sahlins (1991) has recently adapted his ‘structural history’ model to accommodate endogenous change in pre-colonial conditions. His reformulation, however, critically restricts the model's applicability to mythopraxis of a specific sort, viz. the historical actions of divine heroes in societies structured along Dumontian lines of ‘hierarchy’ as supposedly exemplified in Fiji and Polynesia generally. This article examines certain implications of this new structural history – particularly Sahlins's revision of the ‘structure of the conjuncture’ notion – by analyzing a case of relatively late historical contact and change involving exogenous Europeans as well as Melanesians (i.e. the later phases of the so-called Yali movements of post-World War II Papua New Guinea). Here, neither ‘heroic history’ nor ‘hierarchy’ as Sahlins has incorporated them into his new model are evident. What is apparent instead is a dialectical interplay of articulated messages and enacted missions on the part of a complex and shifting multiplicity of both expatriate as well as indigenous constituencies.     

Ethnoscaping Canada's boreal forest: liberal whiteness and its disaffiliation from colonial space

This essay examines the construction of Canada's boreal forest from the point of view of critical whiteness studies. Through an evaluation of two texts—a film and a book—produced in conjunction with a 2003–2004 environmental campaign, it argues that the boreal forest is constructed as a white ethnoscape and that, as a result, boreal forest conservation comes to be associated with ‘white’ identity, although by no means exclusively so, and certainly not without significant contradictions. The essay deploys Robyn Wiegman's notion of liberal whiteness to argue that liberal white subjectivity is cultivated in these texts by its self‐conscious distancing, or disaffiliation, from colonial spatial practices. It is argued that this distancing is achieved through the active inclusion of First Nations peoples in the texts such that the boreal forest is constructed as a socio‐natural working landscape. Liberal white disaffiliation is explored through three specific tropes: inclusion, inverted racial historicism and economic partnership.