Africa's Ancient Battleground

Colonialism. A bad word. The British. Evil. Words that seem to be thrown about these days and synonymous with each other. Is this true? To an extent, but it seems the GERD conflict as highlighted in last week’s blog post does not paint colonialism in a great light. Tensions over the Nile date back centuries, with Egypt, initially attempting to gain control over the Nile in 1874, sparking the Ethio-Egyptian war (Jesman, 1959). Following this agreements were signed in 1929 and 1959 between Egypt and Sudan, which gave Cairo near-complete control of the Nile (Abdalla, 1971). Here lies the problem - these treaties were illegitimate to the existence of you guessed it - colonialism. During the 'Scramble for Africa' controlling the Nile resource was a major colonial goal for the British (Tekuya, 2020). 

Figure 1: Cartoon graphic depicting the 'Scramble for Africa'

The Nile Water treaties were agreements between the British and their colonial counterparts (Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania), with the rest of the riparian countries not being signatories to this. Exclusion, mistrust and hostility was the result of this in the following decades. It's fair to say the treaties Egypt are trying to refer to in response to the GERD dam are colonial relics of the past. Egypt and Sudan support these colonial laced treaties as it allows them to solidify their own status of power over the Nile resources - a hegemonic power dynamic within the river basin (Tawfik, 2016). However as Tawfik (2016) puts it, a new hydro-political order is emerging, and upstream riparian states are beginning to garner more power through adopting a common position in current negotiations for a new framework of governance of the Nile waters. 

The absence of a basin-wide common vision for the use and allocation of water resources within the Nile River has resulted in "unilateral actions and bilateral agreements rather than integrated action plans" (Hussein and Grandi, 2017) which has become destructive to the people who rely on the river. Even in present days, these hydro-political conflicts have deep colonial ties from the past, however recently these old precedents are becoming untangled. As upstream riparian countries band together to increase their share of water withdrawals from the Nile, with hydrological projects including the likes of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), the power dynamics within the basis are entering a new age. It is still unclear whether this shift in the balance will lead to greater cooperation of the Nile's resources, or simply an establishment of a new hegemonic power state.