Samples of the Story
Preface
Author’s Note
1. The Elixir of Life
2. Farmers and Furrows
3. “Whoever has a channel has a wife”
4. Hohokam: “Something that is all gone”
5. The Power of the Waters
6. Landscapes of Enlil
7. The Lands of Enki
8. “I caused a canal to be cut”
9. The Waters of Zeus
10. Aquae Romae
11. Waters that Purify
12. China’s Sorrow
13. The Water Lily Lords
14. The Triumph of Gravity
15. The Waters if Islam
16. “Lifting Power more than that of a Hundred Men”
17. Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
| Book Extracts and Table of Contents
Chapter 3: “Whoever has a channel has a wife”
The water still flows steadily down narrow earthen furrows in northwest Kenya, ebbs around hillside boulders, through hollowed tree trunks. You climb up steep hillside paths, follow the gradually sloping defiles from the river high above through a patchwork of small gardens and growing crops. In places, men with iron hoes are clearing silt and piling it up downslope from the carefully graded channel. A small group of villagers gathers around a recently felled and hollowed out tree trunk. They are arguing about its length and where to divert the water as they replace the older wooden aqueduct As the their crops ripen, and just as they have for centuries, the farmers gather to argue over water allocations for crops and cattle. They still depend on consensus and public opinion to manage water brought from a distance, just as farmers have done since the earliest days of village farming.
In Kenya’s Eldoret region, water cascades down steep hillsides from the Cherangany Hills into the Kerio Valley more than 3,280 feet (1000 m) below. The Marakwet people of the Kerio have developed an impressive expertise in taming these fast-flowing waters. The farmers themselves see nothing unusual in irrigation, in the many miles of canals, furrows, wooden aqueducts and scaffolding that bring water to their fields. They call it keir ber, “to water the land”. They also speak of kekwat ber, “to level the land”, the most important element in any form of gravity-fed irrigation. Irrigation is part of the daily fabric of Marakwet life.
When the Marakwet or their predecessors first began furrow agriculture is unknown, but, judging from Engaruka, such practices date back many centuries. Perhaps they developed as a response to growing population densities, but, in the case of the Kerio Valley, irrigation may have come into use as a convenient way of growing crops, and then resulted in locally much higher population densities.
Marakwet farmers live in a world of highly variable rainfall from one year to the next. Each year, too, climbing temperatures lead to high evaporation rates. Here, farming would be a high-risk proposition without irrigation. From the beginning, irrigation was part of the Marakwet subsistence farming system, a specialized part it is true, but valuable because it made farmers less dependent on unpredictable downpours.
Once they invested heavily in canals and furrows, each family and household became closely tied to the land in ways that was not necessarily the case with farmers who cleared plots, cultivated them each rainy season, then moved on to clear new land when the soils became exhausted. Along permanent rivers, larger communities with stable populations flourished for many generations, as the scale of canals and furrows expanded. The ties between the people and their irrigated land were reflected in much closer links between different families and descent groups. Landholding descent groups constructed the channels, with everyone contributing labor. If you needed to get water to your land, you had to contribute labor to constructing and maintaining the irrigation works. Every member of the community was involved--they had to be. There was no problem recruiting labor for canal digging or maintenance; your genealogical status gave you a share in specific furrows. This guarantees access to land and water to all members of society.
The social equation was simple enough. Those who fulfilled their obligations of communal labor that helped keep the furrows in good repair were guaranteed water. Those who did not were excluded, despite continual negotiations over exactly where water went. Digging and maintaining the furrows was not a hardship, but a festive activity, despite the labor involved. We can imagine a group of men with hoes, digging in a row, singing as they swung their arms, the soil swept away with deft flicks of their tools. The work would begin in early morning, cease during the heat of the day, then resume as the shadows lengthened. No one was in any hurry. They would work perhaps two or three days a week under the direction of several elders who scraped and contoured the bottom of the new channel with the careful eye of long experience.
The Marakwet were far more than just hill-furrow farmers. They had a long tradition of herding, especially in the lowlands. Cattle were a source of pride and wealth. Acquiring livestock was an opportunity to move on to the plains and become full-time herders. Both anthropologists and colonial officers remarked that the Marakwet preferred pastoralism over the hard work of farming, but this is a misleading stereotype of a people, who are very flexible in their relationships and economic activities. In recent years, population growth has made it increasingly difficult for the Marakwet to maintain such flexibility, especially in an era of overcrowding and constant land disputes.
The first furrows must have led off the lower reaches of the rivers and streams, dug by small villages, even individual households. As the population increased and the farmers began to construct much larger and longer furrows higher up the rivers, the labor involved expanded. Someone had to survey the route with meticulous care and anticipate exactly where water would flow around large boulders and down slopes. There were gullies to cross, embankments to be constructed, potential landslides to be factored in, all this apart from the brutally hard labor of clearing bush and building passages through rocky scree, shared by communities the length of the waterway. There was always the risk of failure, of months of work being abandoned to the bush when the furrow was unsuccessful because of too-loose soil. Anthropologist Wilhelm Östberg of the National Museum of Ethnology in Stockholm describes how, in the 1970s, five elders of the Talai clan surveyed the route for a new 8-mile (13 km) furrow from the Embotut River that would not only irrigate the clan’s fields, but also provide water four schools, two churches, a dispensary, trading center, and all the households along the way. When the survey started, the people said that the elders had gone to negotiate some marriages. ”When water comes home, it is a marriage. Whoever has a channel has a wife.” They compared owning a furrow to possessing livestock—as a way of attracting women. Marriage prospects improve. “You will not have to talk long to a girl before she agrees. Women want a place with water, where mangoes grow.” By the time the furrow was well under way, 98 people were laboring, up from the original team of 22. People living many miles from the river desperately wanted water and were prepared to dig on two or three days a week, despite interruptions caused by attacks from neighboring Potok bands. The channel building took years.
The larger the scale of furrow agriculture, the more organization is required, which, in the case of the Marakwet, came from their kin-based land ownership. The same pattern of cooperation applied, and still applies, whether the Marakwet were arranging a marriage, clearing new land, preparing for defense, allocating water, or resolving disputes. Repairing a canal can take several weeks as people work for a few days, some hours, and the number of men working ebbs and flows. But eventually the work is completed, as it always has been.
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