Contesting Colonial Waterscapes: African Water Management and British Anxieties in the Cape Colony and Natal, 1855-1900

With the growing scarcity and contamination of clean water in South African cities, people point fingers at corrupt governments or problematic individual actions, along with climate change. However, the kinds of solutions that South African municipalities enact often draw on older forms of infrastructure and methods of environmental control that colonizing forces introduced to the African landscape, few of which saw local knowledge or behaviors as valuable. Building on work in the environmental humanities, history of science, medicine, and technology, and African history, this talk will discuss local African water management methods and their relationship to urban public health regulations in two prominent Cape Colony and Natal port cities—Port Elizabeth and Durban—at the height of British colonization.

Whereas environmental histories of health in sub-Saharan Africa predominantly focus on vector control and rural developments, this talk will turn our attention to how non-white behavior influenced understandings of health and resource allocation in the urban African environment. By observing and analyzing the relationship between African knowledge and colonial urbanity, colonial municipalities framed African water management as “problematic” and, in the process, set British water management methods as the standard. Ultimately, this work allows us to better assess how the legacy of western notions of “normal” water use and disposal have come to dominate discussions of water management in South African cities and the inequities they perpetuate.