Narratives of Scarcity: Colonial State Responses to Water Scarcity in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1965

Abstract

In 1965, the Southern Rhodesia colonial state was forced to accede to the demands of an array of economic interests whose enterprises had been severely affected by the continuing droughts in south-western Matabeleland culminating in the devastating drought of 1964–1965. After protracted appeals, the colonial state agreed to establish a water authority, named the Matabeleland Development Council. Why, only then, did the state accede to these economic interests’ demands? It turns out that there had been a whole history of the colonial state’s reluctance to develop a long-term water conservation management regime dating back to the early days of colonial settlement in the 1890s and 1900s. This chapter unravels this story and how narratives about imagined and looming water crises became the basis for the appeals to the state to plan water development on a larger-scale. Since the days of early white settlement in Southern Rhodesia in the 1890s, growing fears of a real/imagined water scarcity crisis and the potential harm it could unleash on the white settler society produced a powerful conviction that every effort should be made to ‘retard the journey of the raindrop to the sea’. These fears engendered intense public calls on the colonial state to take a leading role in the development of large water schemes in order to harness as much water as possible for domestic and industrial purposes. Engineers, civil servants, conservationists, farmers and politicians began to clamor for the creation of a single national water authority (a hydraulic bureaucracy) which would mobilize, regulate and control all the colony’s water resources. Their views entailed most of the elements identified by Molle, Mollinga et al. i.e. the need to implement scientific irrigation, the “‘let the desert bloom’ utopia”, and the ‘biblical/messianic overtone of the call for creating new Edens in deserts or arid places’. This chapter argues that despite various emphases on the plausibility of developing a water authority not only by these classes but also from a series of commissions of enquiry (1930–1953), the colonial state was eventually forced to change course when a devastating drought in 1964–1965 afflicted the already semi-arid region of south-western Matabeleland. It also argues that this drought unraveled the underlying tensions within the central state, and between itself and the various interest groups who agitated for the creation of a structure to control the region’s waters. This study exemplifies how droughts gave a renewed impetus to robust colonial water development initiatives in the post-War era in Southern Rhodesia. Taking a cue from D’Souza’s (2006) scintillating discussion on the making of a ‘colonial hydrology’ in British India, argues that just as the rationale around ‘scientific forestry’, or the politics of land in Zimbabwe Alexander (2006), colonial environmental, economic and political concerns not only defined and impacted the south-west Matabeleland’s ‘fluvial endowments’ in specific and unprecedented ways but that the politics over water development was equally central in the making of the Rhodesian colonial state.