Colonialism and Water in Southern Africa: Land grabbing and Displacement

KEYWORDS: Colonialism, Politics, Development, Southern Africa, Land grabbing, Displacement, Agriculture, Urbanisation

Welcome back! 

These next two posts will centre around the colonial history of Southern Africa in order to understand how colonialism has affected modern-day water politics and development in the region. In this first blog, we will focus on how land grabbing and community displacement in relation to areas of water availability have affected the politics of water management and relationships between different social groups across Southern Africa. 

Due to frequent resettling of native groups, water-rich land grabbing and drastic changes to patterns of resource access, Southern African states were left with significant internal and transboundary tensions post-independence. Exacerbated by water scarcity, the socioeconomic inequalities that were created during colonial rule have led to conflicts and instability across the region. Transboundary water laws themselves are a direct result of colonialism as new national borders were drawn up and water management agreements across river basins and aquifers were consolidated by colonial powers for their own benefit. 

Figure 1: Mpenjati coffee farm in South Africa, by Coffee Magazine

Land-grabbing

Water and water-rich land are crucial for social and economic development via agriculture and industry growth. However, since foreign involvement in African resource management, access to water has become reliant on the political economy and therefore the power relations that are produced and reproduced by it. During colonial expansion across Africa from the mid-16th century, native communities were frequently, and usually violently, displaced from their territory, especially if the land was water-rich. This land was to be owned and used by white settlers for large-scale agriculture and to support its resource-mining industries, all to be exported back to Europe. 

The first people living in Southern Africa were the indigenous Khoisan tribes, made up of the Khoi Khoi and San people who were nomadic pastoralists and semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, respectively, with territory from modern-day Zambia to the Cape of South Africa. The Khoisan people had territory on fertile, water-rich land due to their sustainable, small-scale use of water. However, they had less politically established societies than indigenous groups in Western Africa at the time and insufficient armies to defend against the expanding white Boer settlers. These communities were robbed of their generational agricultural and grazing patterns and either forced into slavery on land stolen from them, displaced to unwanted, water-scarce areas or killed. A fraction of their population remains in South Africa today, though their traditions have largely been erased due to modern farming laws and their languages are still not considered official. Discrimination towards the Khoisan people has led to significant political tensions and protests. In 2017, King Khoisan and some of his people travelled to Pretoria in order to camp outside of the Union Buildings which house South Africa’s presidency in demand of recognition of their culture and were still there in January 2022.

Figure 2: Khoisan languages across Southern Africa, by Basler Afrika

Displacement

The displacement of indigenous communities across Africa and subsequent control over resources by colonial powers meant that local sustainable water-sourcing practices and agreements were disrupted, as were ‘traditional forms of social organisation’. Local communities were dispossessed of their access to water and resource management was reorganised into the Western model. In Southern Rhodesia – now Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi –small-scale indigenous water transfer systems that distributed water for irrigation from wetlands were declared unlawful due to ‘environmental conservation reasons’ when in fact this was to prevent any viable competition between local and European-owned farms. Most water management infrastructure such as dams and large-scale irrigation systems were built to serve industries for resource mining or white-owned farms which caused significant ecological damage to the soil due to the huge monoculture tobacco, tea and cotton plantations. Even though there were efforts to regenerate the health of the land, this had a significant negative impact on Southern Africa’s development as a region, as the economies have barely expanded from their colonial profiles and remain dependent on exporting produce with the general exception of South Africa and Zimbabwe. In South Africa, agriculture uses the majority of the country’s abstracted freshwater, most of which is distributed to white-owned farms. As of 2008, an estimated 87% of agricultural land is controlled by commercial farmers rather than more sustainable small-scale irrigation farms, emphasising the lack of control native South Africans have over water. When the Malawian economy was struggling in the 1930s due to the Great Depression and Lake Chilwa drying up, farmers forced to cultivate cotton on wetlands began to boil or dry out the seeds before planting them and hunting birds instead as their source of food and income. Though only on a small scale this shows how native groups were able to subvert colonial rule and find ways of adapting to water scarcity. 

Figure 3: Receding boundaries and wetlands (in green) of Lake Chilwa, October 1990 (left) to November 2013, by the U.S. Geological Survey

While towns and cities were built in Africa during colonial rule, their purpose was to facilitate resource exportation rather than being well-organised, liveable places for Africans. Therefore, their location was not based on efficient access to water sources meaning that after rapid urbanisation since independence in the 20th century, many cities in Southern Africa have been left with serious problems with water provision. Many of the more easily accessible water sources had been compromised due to pollution from farming and other industries as well as groundwater depletion. The Orange river, while carrying significantly less water than the Congo or the Zambezi rivers is one of the most densely settled basins in Southern Africa. This exacerbates inequality due to water transfer systems being built to serve these cities but at a socio-economic and environmental cost to those living in the rural areas from which water is extracted, amplifying the rural-urban divide. Water scarcity in cities also has significant effects on the health of the population due to an increased risk of waterborne diseases causing social unrest which in turn reduces the capacity for development. 

Thank you for reading and see you in part two, where we will focus on the effect of inherited transboundary laws.