Water Brings No Harm: Management Knowledge and the Struggle for the Waters of Kilimanjaro.

• Author: Skidmore-Hess, Cathy

Bender, Matthew V. Water Brings No Harm: Management Knowledge and the Struggle for the Waters of Kilimanjaro. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019.

In Matthew Bender's Water Brings No Harm, WaChagga agriculturists declare "Without water our farms will be as bodies without blood." Thus, Bender asserts the centrality of water to the peoples of Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro. For Bender, technical, hydrological, cultural, and spiritual actions and knowledge are intertwined and closely connected to something he refers to as waterscape, the way people see water. In historicizing water use and management, he argues that "Groups of people who have encountered Kilimanjaro since 1850 have been looking at the same but not seeing the same thing." Bender's Kilimanjaro, then, exists not just in physical space, but in the realm of perception.

Through creating a history of Kilimanjaro's waterscape Bender illuminates the close relationship between power, perception, and action. In 1850, the peoples of Kilimanjaro saw the mountain as multiple places with one reference point Kibo, the highest peak on Kilimanjaro. Water came from a Supreme Being, Ruwa, and Kibo was a source of...