Shattered Nilometers LETTERS After 5,200 Years of Top-Down Rule
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JGW-12 SOUTHERN AFRICA James Workman is a Donors’ Fellow of the Institute studying the use, misuse, accretion and depletion of ICWA fresh-water supplies in southern Africa. Shattered Nilometers LETTERS After 5,200 Years of Top-Down Rule, Since 1925 the Institute of Can Water Scarcity Re-Democratize? Current World Affairs (the Crane- Rogers Foundation) has provided James G. Workman long-term fellowships to enable FEBRUARY, 2003 outstanding young professionals CAIRO, Egypt – A few hours after the White House asserted its right to launch a to live outside the United States unilateral preemptive war on Iraq I found myself the sole American sharing a and write about international packed auditorium with several hundred nervous Arabs. areas and issues. An exempt operating foundation endowed by All around me sat middle-aged officials. They hailed from Algeria, Jordan, the late Charles R. Crane, the Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, West Bank and Gaza, Yemen and, above Institute is also supported by all, Egypt. Excluding non-Arab Turkey and the markedly absent Israel, these au- contributions from like-minded tocracies allowed no opposition parties or welcomed dissent. Glancing about, I individuals and foundations. estimated the crowd as 95 percent male, Muslim and agitated. The imam’s calls to prayer filtered through the windows. Speakers grew shrill. Driven by modern man’s quest to exploit a precious liquid found in this Middle TRUSTEES East-North African region, a political crisis loomed. It threatened to unleash in- Bryn Barnard stability, violence and refugee waves within and between Arab nations. Yet this Joseph Battat same risk united them in solidar- Mary Lynne Bird ity to address their shared pre- Steven Butler dicament. One after another, each William F. Foote took the microphone to vent his Kitty Hempstone opinion about the one indisput- Pramila Jayapal able menace that really, truly Peter Bird Martin frightened us. Ann Mische Dasa Obereigner Fresh water. For by their own Paul A. Rahe admissions, Arab governments Chandler Rosenberger could no longer supply it. Katherine Sreedhar Edmund Sutton With parched capitals ab- This Egyptian Dirk J. Vandewalle sorbing less than an inch of rain A future hydro-democrat? farmer, on a canal off the Nile, will haggle and hungry millions competing with you endlessly over the price of his HONORARY TRUSTEES for that scarce resource, this was own fresh-picked carrots. Soon, he’ll David Elliot Africa’s most water-stressed and haggle with others over the price of David Hapgood volatile region. I had been invited water used to irrigate them Pat M. Holt here by officials to compare po- Edwin S. Munger litical responses to aridity in the continent’s dual deserts, Kalahari and Sahara. Richard H. Nolte True, Egypt lay north of my primary ICWA focus. And water ‘talk-shops’ nor- Albert Ravenholt mally made me snooze. Phillips Talbot But this one — boringly titled and run by staid bureaucracies1 — had the Institute of Current World Affairs The Crane-Rogers Foundation 1 “Water Demand Management Forum: Decentralisation and Participatory Irrigation Man- Four West Wheelock Street agement,” hosted by the International Development Research Center, Canadian Hanover, New Hampshire 03755 U.S.A. Internatioanl Development Agency, United Nations Development Programme, Japan Of- fice of Development, International Fund for Agricultural Development in collaboration with the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, Egypt. opposite affect. It quickened my pulse. It shed light on stalled by skilled U.S. mechanics, clearing the air with water politics emerging throughout arid Africa. Its cri- unfettered trade, uncensored Internet and, say, unre- ses spurred me, Walter Mitty archeologist, to dig deeper strained Emenem rap. Lastly, the historic modern incen- while interviewing my way up the banks of the Nile, tive driving all policy was to expand the flow of and ac- wondering whether something buried so long ago be- cess to crude oil. neath the Sahara might re-emerge, be dusted off and hauled to the surface. What about other depollution? These lessons ignored If, How, Why and Where water provided an evolution- What I sought (with others) was less tangible yet ary force in political history. Specifically, in arid Africa: more precious than King Tut’s treasure: independent self- Did rivers foster democracy? Had human control of wa- governance by irrigation farmers, a revival of hydro-de- ter smothered it? And could the pressure of aridity, rather mocracy. than petroleum or even water, help revive it once again? * * * I found just enough tantalizing hints that it did, it Admittedly, it was a quest worthy of Indiana Jones. had, and it could. Water’s role depended on who reined For its hypothesis rests on three shaky, un-American the river. After digging through the historical sand, I un- assumptions: First, that any democracy ever existed in Africa before it was buried; second, that it could peacefully surface through self-deter- mination without ‘help;’ and finally, that water, and infor- mation about water, may be the decisive variable in this un- folding political pro- cess. Before launch- ing my upstream ex- pedition to test it, I had to update childhood lessons. As kids we learned how the fertile, fluctuating, life-giving Nile spawned the first great civilization [al- though we bypassed exactly how water did this, and at what or whose expense]. Later we learned liberal de- mocracy was a West- ern ‘invention,’ born in slaveholding Athens, perfected in slave- holding America and thereafter ‘exported’ by us everywhere from post-royal France to post-WWII Japan to, presumably, post- war Iraq. Democracy thus resembled a catalytic converter, waiting to be in- 2 JGW-12 covered this: Egypt before the pyramids was in fact a weakened. Against water-rule’s powerful status quo came landscape filled with scattered, independent, self-govern- an equally potent force, aridity. Speakers lamented how, ing farm communities that eked out livelihoods from the for the first time since the pharaoh Menes united Upper flood and ebb of the Nile. While not rich and powerful, and Lower Egypt in 3100 BC, they were losing to the lat- they were, by necessity, egalitarian. ter. There was no longer enough water for the Arab State to use as compelling political, economic or spiritual le- “Throughout history, aridity has in most cases led to verage over its urbanizing, industrializing and expand- democratic decision-making on use of water, water allo- ing populations.2 Speakers from Yemen, Jordan and the cation and conservation,” said Paul Van Hovwegen, a Palestinian territories acknowledged that their peoples water-management expert who has spent decades in Ara- “hit the wall” years ago, consuming more water than na- bic countries. “Traditional social entities were often fully ture supplies. Those from Egypt, Sudan, Morocco, Tuni- run on such democratic principles.” sia and Syria confessed they too are hitting the bottom of a dry well. After 50 centuries of central rule, knowl- Digging deeper, I discovered how and why those edgable forecasters said Egypt was being forced to shift principles got buried. Riparian farmers be- back toward something resembling its ear- gan to grow enough grain to store. A few lier water-democratic self. opportunists used surplus grain to arm mer- cenary thugs. With thugs, they took over * * * neighboring lands and controlled sections of Why now? Day after day I watched the the river. More grain led to more hired hoo- timeless Nile flow through Cairo, just out- ligans and priests who duly assured “Da side the window and across the street. It boss” (and everyone else) of direct descent seemed strong, but slow. So much water got from the gods, until, presto! Civilization. siphoned off or evaporated upstream, that here I saw only 18 percent of what entered In this Hobbesian world water was no Egypt above. Later I visited Alexandria on longer the benign democratic force it began the coast. Skirting the Delta’s edge, I wit- as a river; water monopoly allowed rulers nessed huge pipes disgorging vast quanti- to crystallize their status quo. Anyone want- ties of Nile water into open canals that fed ing land or water was beholden to The Man. Water-Breathing green fields, bordered by desert. I reached This primitive trickle-down economic policy, Powers That Be: This the sea, but in dry years, the Nile never does. of course, had no patience for self-rule and recurring hieroglyph, It may be the world’s longest river, but it collective responsibility. By commanding here found at Luxor, was also, as it turns out, maxxed out. Finite. and controlling water, any arid state could depicts Upper (left) and grow (and tax) enough to feed its people and Lower Egypt united by Pushed and pulled in 61 million direc- still keep the armed, water-controlling bu- the Nile, looped and tions, the nation’s water autocracy could no reaucracy prosperous and in control. This knotted in the shape of longer absorb the strain of water’s innate formula for irrigated-food security helped the pharaoh’s lungs. centrifugal forces. Water falls apart; the cen- the world’s first nation-state unite upper and Rulers’ political fates ter cannot hold. lower Egypt along the Nile. Water control were indeed enabled an unbroken chain of pharaohs (and intertwined with the “Government has played the role of a later imperial usurpers) to grasp and cling river’s flow. helpful big brother for irrigated agriculture to power, right up to Egypt’s one-party rulers of today. for a long time,” said an Egyptian hydrocrat (perhaps unfamiliar with George Orwell’s novel). “But today we Western development banks and agencies were os- can’t count on big brother alone [to provide water] any- tensibly set up to grow democracy.