“The Sea Has Waves, The Fula Has Cows”: Moving Waters, Labour and Capital in Anthropocene Senegal

Abstract

In times of climate crisis, water has become a crucial resource of environmental justice and geopolitics, but its scarcity is socially constructed. It depends on socio-economic structures, cultural politics, and the sciences that are mobilized to manage its fluid processes. This essay argues for the necessity of a hydrosociological approach that integrates the current Anthropocene debates on the technological transformation of planet Earth with more reflection on waterscapes, especially in the Global South. Drawing on a recent publication by Maura Benegiamo, Capitalist developments in the Senegal Delta are here considered as exemplary of global investment strategies that produce brutal forms of extractivism, while displacing money, water, land, and people. Waterscapes reengineering of the Senegal flows, for the monocrop production of agrofuel, is alienating the Fula people of the Sahel the grazing land for their cattle. Such case calls for a political reassessment of the hydrosocial question of the Anthropocene along complementary lines of inquiry: socio-economic, cultural-political, ideological, and epistemological.