'For More and Better Water, Choose Pipes!' Building Water and the Nation on Kilimanjaro, 1961-1985*

In 1967, the government of Tanzania announced the Rural Water Supply Programme, an ambitious plan to provide piped water to the Chagga-speaking peoples of Mount Kilimanjaro. One of many development projects conceived during the period of Ujamaa socialism, its proponents claimed that it would fuel economic and social development by providing 'more and better water' to the people. This article contends that while projects such as the Rural Water Supply Programme were often couched in the values of Ujamaa, they also were crucial to the nation-building strategy of the majority party, the Tanzania African National Union (TANU). Political leaders, notably President Julius Nyerere, hoped to use water as a means of establishing a national presence inside rural communities in a way that would touch the daily lives of nearly everyone. This presence, in turn, would help to guide rural development, undermine 'traditional' forms of authority, and solidify the position of the national party in local affairs. On Kilimanjaro, the Rural Water Supply Programme promised to provide clean, reliable water to a growing population. At the same time, it challenged the centuries-old system of mifongo, or water furrows, and the clan-based societies that managed them. By introducing an alternative system controlled and managed not by locals but by government agencies, TANU in essence proposed a new understanding of water, as a 'national' resource rather than a local one. This article examines the development of pipeline systems under the Programme, and assesses the extent to which they both succeeded and failed in their objectives. In the process, it provides a unique window for analysing how local people interpreted and negotiated development projects of the period and, in turn, Ujamaa itself.