Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic study conceptualizes 'watery agency' to show the intersections of religious, cultural, and environmental processes in Lagos megacity, arguing that sacred water practices invokes sacred-urban continuum necessary for understanding water-induced transformations in urban Africa.

Paper long abstract:

This study invokes 'watery agency' to analyse how urban and environmental transformations intersect with religious and cultural traditions in Lagos megacity. Through ethnographic fieldwork and use of participant observation, life history accounts, in-depth, and key informant interviews to collect data from traditional monarch, priests, and community chiefs and leaders, the study examines practices associated with Odo Ota, a communal and deeply revered stream in the Ikorodu area of Lagos. It explores the historicity, uses, custodianship, and continued importance of Odo Ota and the dynamics of social relations and practices associated with the stream. Analyses revealed that fetishized uses of the stream are institutionalized in communal identity construction and by indigenous political and 'syncretic' religious traditions. While acknowledging diminution in the physical space of Odo Ota, participants largely attribute the change to urban encroachment such as construction of building structures around, and of a motor-way bridge by the local government through, the stream. These urban processes regardless, the resilience of the stream's sacrality and uses are re-enacted in traditional custodianship and the increased decentralization of control and multi-religious appropriation of the water body at different physical spots. The paper tentatively concludes that analysis of the agency of water, through sacred practices attached to inland water bodies, is insightful in understanding not just religion-culture-environment connexion but also in (re)conceptualizing African city as a sacred-urban continuum in the context of global social and environmental transformations.

Paper short abstract:

The process of securitisation of water resources is evident across the Nile River at different scales: perceptions and prioritization of risks are central to water-related disputes, since they are associated to -and reproduced by- imaginaries through the creation of peculiar (water) narratives.

Paper long abstract:

The multi-faced representation of the Nile in Ethiopia has historically evolved around contrasting perceptions, the "mighty" river being at the same time depicted as a "good-for-nothing" treasure. Across the centuries, from a plethora of Ethiopian myths, poems, folktales, novels, drama, proverbs, have emerged a number of symbolic meanings associated with the Nile waters, which -albeit often diverging- share a recurrent melancholy feeling: the sacred river, whose abundant gifts have never been thoroughly exploited, is often beneficent but vengeful, somewhat inspiring to the Ethiopians a sense of resentment before its presumed uselessness, alongside its glorification as "Father of all the rivers".

This dual narrative over the Nile not only has pervaded culture and commonsense, but has also informed political imaginaries and policy-making processes in Ethiopia. Often intentionally re-constructed by power elites, the "victimhood narrative" associated with the under-utilisation of the Nile waters has been progressively assimilated and converted into a national narrative of water development and "renaissance aspirations" for a prosperous Ethiopia.

By unveiling the multi-layered iconography of the Nile in contemporary Ethiopian poetry, this study will reveal how the ideological dimensions in the relation between knowledge, culture and technology have shaped Ethiopia's vision on the Nile waters management.

Paper short abstract:

This paper charts a genealogy of conflicting literary representations of water disasters and ecological recuperation in South Africa from the colonial era to the present.

Paper long abstract:

This paper charts a genealogy of conflicting literary representations of water disasters and ecological recuperation in South Africa. Colonial era representations figured the ocean as a site of agentive opposition to white settlers; the sixteenth-century Portuguese Lusiads personified the waters and rocks around the Cape of Good Hope as demons bent on preventing Europeans from landing, while the nineteenth-century Xhosa Prophecy promised that the ancestors would be reborn and the whites driven into the sea if the Xhosa people slaughtered their own cattle. These images of the ocean as a hostile force to whites persisted through the apartheid era. Contrastingly, the twentieth century South African farm novel evoked white labor and landscapes empty of indigenous people to frame white settlers as the true stewards of the land, and by extension, to legitimize colonialism and apartheid. The anti-apartheid novelist Nadine Gordimer's celebrated "eco" novel The Conservationist and short s

tory "Loot" use flood, rainstorm, and tidal wave to wash away white landowners and to disrupt the territorial grids of apartheid's spatial power. In this paper, I query the aesthetic, political, and environmental implications of figuring natural disaster as the agent of social change, particularly now, in an era wherein the threat of rising oceans and sinking freshwaters is increasingly suffered by the very subjects that Gordimer's imagined floods sought to liberate.

Paper short abstract:

This paper traces different temporalities in the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal, their relation to movement and place and how frictions and resonances between them effect, manifest themselves in and get mediated by the practice of mollusc gleaning.

Paper long abstract:

The Sine-Saloum Delta can be understood as a meshwork of interlocked temporalities, (re)configured by humans and non-humans and again mediating movement and place. To inquire this meshwork, I follow the gleaning of mollusc, a millennia-old, yet recently commercialised, predominantly female practice. It takes place in the dry season during mbissa, the week long period when the tides' low points occur during the day. More than a 'natural' rhythm, mbissa is a co-product of tides and human's striving for catch in the situation of a dwindling ecosystem and accelerating commercialisation. And so today, although fuzzy around its endings and beginnings, mbissa sets the pace and (in)forms not only the days of the gleaners but also their relationships with buyers, creditors, authorities, spirits and relatives. It only gets suspended for feasts or mourning periods, and more recently, for moratoriums around the rainy season that should prevent overexploitation. These moratoriums are tied to the solar- rather than the lunar/islamic calendar and build on the harmonisation of rules across the many islands, yet are challenged by the historically grounded centralisation of state power and the sociocultural diversity of the delta dwellers as well as the increasingly irregular rains that shift, cut short or prolong the rainy season. Gleaning is thus a knot in the meshwork of different temporalities and as my paper will work out, has the ability to create both resonance and friction within human-human as well as human-non-human relations, movements and practices.

Paper short abstract:

The paper analyses experimental practices and provisional arrangements in the process of re-establishing irrigation projects as a site of knowledge production and social organisation crucial in times of radical changing river regimes, displacement and existential uncertainty.

Paper long abstract:

Sociality and work among peasant communities at the Fourth Nile Cataract in rural Northern Sudan were organised through irrigation agriculture that resonated with the cycle of seasons and the rhythm of the Nile. After the construction of the Merowe Dam downstream of the area, the inundation of agricultural fields and the changing river regime radically disrupted existing links between the Nile, forms of cultivation, sociality, and agricultural infrastructures. Displacement and the changing landscape and river regime demanded but also afforded new ways of agricultural practices and ways of knowing. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, I explore the local attempt of establishing large irrigation canals and projects in the adjoining desert valleys. This type of agricultural projects and the knowledge about it had been marginal to the peasant's lifeworld, which was grounded in institutionalised small-scale irrigation projects directly located on the Nile. The new projects became important to both make use of the possibilities of the rising river and to re-establish life in the homeland on the fringes of the emerging reservoir. Building on Paul Richards (1985) concept of "people's science", I propose the notion of experimentation as a site of local "epistemic practice" (Knorr Cetina 2006) that is useful to understand and conceptualize sensory and practical engagements of re-inhabiting radical changing environments. I will show that embodied knowledge, skills, and experiences are "grafted" onto large-scale projects, to direct water flows and irrigate new fields in the desert. In turn, new spaces of work and sociality evolved around the projects.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates social and economic landscapes produced by modern piped connections that fail to deliver expected services. We discuss the variegated mechanisms (political, social, and material) by which water courses across the estate's physical and human geography.

Paper long abstract:

Where much writing on urban water supply in the Global South considers service deficiency explained by the lack of infrastructure, this paper investigates social and economic landscapes produced by modern piped connections that fail to deliver expected services. Analysing water provision to a Nairobi housing estate, we elaborate the manifold grid-hacking strategies and consequent outcomes as residents, water activists, and aspiring politicians attempt to divert and increase water flows into the estate.

Vendors ferrying barrels of water from the informal settlement to the modern housing blocks reveal a counterintuitive pattern of distribution: informal settlements that are better serviced than fee-paying flats. But if this enterpreneurialism clarifies the estate-wide consequence of a malfunctioning infrastructure, water bowsers, storage tanks and whirring pumps (expensive and spatially limited options) lay bare an intense socioeconomic stratification within the estate, and the fragmented strategies by which this vital resource is accessed.

Using Nikhil Anand's formulation of 'pressure management', we discuss the variegated mechanisms by which water courses across the estate's physical and human geography. We extend the metaphor to describe the associational forms that appear sporadically to amplify resident grievances against the water company. Opposed to these, we enumerate the decades long ebb and flow of counter-strategies - public meetings, supplementary boreholes - employed by elected representatives, the county executive and the water service company to dissipate popular demands, to placate angry residents and to assure them of efforts to end the estate's prolonged drought.