Field and river

20th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (ICES20)
Mekelle University, Ethiopia

"Regional and Global Ethiopia - Interconnections and Identities"
1-5 October, 2018

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THE POLITICS OF HYDRO-IMAGINATION IN THE NILE RIVER BASIN [Abstract ID: 1211-14]

WONDWOSEN Michago Seide, Lund University

Dam collects both water and memory. Dams are the ‘lieux de memoire’ (sites of Memory). The Nile River does not respect boundaries. Yet, dams force it to respect boundaries. Dams animate the waterscape into national space. Nilescape, just like landscape, can easily be transferred into a site of collective memories. In the Nile Basin, the Egyptian Aswan High Dam, AHD and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, GERD have been defining water structures. Both dams were and still are the iconic image of nation building and symbolic of ‘psychological modernism.’ It is surprisingly interesting to note that there are astounding similarities and stark differences between the GERD and AHD. The Egyptian Revolutions had preceded the construction of the two dams. It was only four months after the July 1952 Egyptian Revolution, that the then Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser initiated the AHD project in October 1952. Similarly, it was only four months after the January 2011 Egyptian Revolution erupted that the construction of GERD was launched by the then Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in April 2011. AHD immortalized Nasser, as the GERD does for Meles. Though in different context, the two Dams are the result of revolutions- they are ‘revolutions’ within the revolutions. Both dams collect not only Nile waters, but also collective memories. But, Egypt and Ethiopia have different, if not divergent, collective memories over the Nile. Memory, just like power, is contestable. As Foucault (1977) put it, ‘memory is actually a very important factor in struggle, if one controls people's memory, one controls their dynamism” and hence there is ”counter-memory…that differ from, and often challenge, dominant discourses” (cited in Ibid.:126). Hodgkin and Radstone (2003) succinctly put that “to contest the past is also, of course, to pose questions about the present, and what the past means in the present. Our understanding of the past has strategic, political, and ethical consequences. Contests over the meaning of the past are also contests over the meaning of the present and over ways of taking the past forward.” (ibid. 4). In similar vein, Edward Wadie Said (1979) once said that appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present. In the Nile Basin both power and memory have been countered and contested. The Nile politics of memory is full of fierce struggles and misperceptions. There are contesting perceptions of the Nile and that they may reflect divergent memories about the Nile and “the other”. These conflicting memories that Egypt and Ethiopia accumulated over hundreds of years impinge on the past water agreements, the present dams (AHD and GERD) and future water security. Put differently, Egypt romanticizes the past and wants to sustain the status-quo, while Ethiopia regrets the past and imagines a different Nile-scape. This paper, therefore, tries to respond to the following questions: What do the Basin people remember and forget about Aswan High Dam and Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam? What role does collective memory play in transboundary water analysis? What is the role of collective memory and the dominant ways in which the Nile River in Ethiopia and Egypt were imagined at a popular “national” level? How do such memories and imageries shape the ‘Nile Nationalism’ and the politics of the Nile, its ‘cooperation’ and ‘conflict narrative?