Colonial Remaking of Society–Nature Relations in Southern Africa: Reconfiguring Subjectivities, Producing a Commodified Waterscape in Blantyre City, 1850s–1890s

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to build on scholarship that historicises the commodification of water in Africa. It foregrounds this phenomenon as part of broader processes of colonial remaking of society–nature relations. An empirical analysis is developed that illustrates how the British colonists’ condescending attitudes to indigenous social-ecologies, as well as the attendant exclusionary practises relating to colonisers versus colonised body-space interactions, not only formed the moral and material justification for subjugating the “inferior other” but also provided legitimating narratives for entrenching a racially differentiated urbanism, imposing western sanitation attitudes and introducing modernist ways of capturing and domesticating water at Blantyre. These marked a watershed moment in reconfiguring water–society interactions from being quotidian activities performed by the indigenes to produce water as a use-value/basic need, to that mediated by the circulation of money, modernist public health concerns and water technologies primarily intended to serve the interests of the minority white settlers; thus setting in stone the production of Blantyre town in Malawi as an alienated and commodified waterscape.