5. Unpacking Colonial Legacies: Part 1
[This blog post will be split into two separate posts as I want to be able to have enough space to touch on this topic! The post after this will be a direct continuation of this post.]
It’s impossible to begin to write about or understand issues around water in a postcolonial world without addressing the colonial legacies that persist and continue to shape water inequalities and conflicts (Mathur and Mulwafu, 2018). In light of Black History Month that happened in October, I have been reflecting on the importance of privileging African academics and their research in order to make this blog more nuanced and thoughtful. I cannot help but notice that many of the sources I have been citing have been from Western NGOs or development institutions- furthering a Eurocentric approach akin to the ‘white man’s burden’. I want to go further in this post and put a spotlight on not just academic literature by African scientists, but to consider the effects of colonialism on water issues in the Sahel– this understanding has been noticeably absent in much of the literature I have come across about the Sahel despite the region having an extensive French colonial history.
Thus, I would like to examine today what colonial legacies exist, how they affect water in the Sahel, and discuss what is needed to untangle these colonial perspectives. Water provides an immensely useful lens for “understanding the intricacies and the dynamics of the colonial and postcolonial eras” (Loftus, 2009: 953-954). I will utilize a political ecology framework that understands water issues as an “injustice of water poverty” as opposed to naturalizing the scarcity of resources.
Western Sahel was ruled by a French colonial administration from 1895 to 1958 which formed a federation of eight territories known as French West Africa. The present-day countries namely Mali and Niger carry the legacies of colonialism in their struggles to develop and achieve greater socio-economic status, particularly regarding water. Colonialism in the Sahel “generated countries whose geographies almost destined them to perpetual hardship” (Jalali, 2013)
A series of colonial political and institutional governance over pastoral land and activities has contributed to the lack of defined water access regimes leading to both inter-state and intra-state conflicts between pastoral communities. French colonial administration of over sixty years has created homogeneous systems of government and local administration and a legal system that does not secure the formal rights of herder communities to pastures and water resources (Thébaud and Batterbury, 2001). Herders and other communities today who have evolved from traditional pastoral communities are not entitled to land rights as modern law deems their land use ‘unproductive’. Consequently, herder communities were forced to dig their own wells and watering points (Taylor, 1996). Water resources like shallow hand-dug wells are locally negotiated in a complex system of rights between herder communities where regulation and maintenance are absent. The modern introduction of collective boreholes and cement-lined wells has further threatened access regimes as regulation of these complicated open-access resources is far harder to achieve. Peul, Tuareg, Tubu, and Arab communities are in serious conflict over access to these modern water points.
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