Abstract
When the Merowe Dam was completed on the fourth cataract of the River Nile in Sudan in 2008, it began to flood a huge area of 476 km², which included large parts of the homeland of the Manasir people and 80 per cent of their farmland. Doubling Sudan’s electricity generation capacity, the dam also displaced 70,000 people, among them 30,000 Manasir, and significantly impaired regional livelihoods. Valerie Hänsch’s ethnography is not only an extremely detailed account of the classic narrative of the making of a sacrificial zone for “the common good” of national development, but also a unique description of the process itself from the perspective of the displaced people. She concentrates on the large majority of Manasir who opposed the state-sponsored resettlement programme in order to remain in their homeland, as close as possible to the river-turned-reservoir.
Bracketed by a brief outline of Manasir agrarian economy before the inundation, and a short postscript of events between 2010 and 2016, the ethnography concentrates on the years 2008–2009, including the agonising period of ten months when the reservoir was filling up without the Manasir knowing how high the water would rise. Hänsch follows a phenomenological approach, focused on experiencing together with the Manasir how the process unfolded for them rather than recording their memories afterwards. Thereby, she is able to trace the affects, practices, and performances of the uncertain and provisional improvisations through which the Manasir made ends meet. The author situates her work as a contribution to resettlement studies, which itself grew out of research with dam-affected people, criticising many concepts and methods in the field, particularly its technocratic undertones. Hänsch proposes a radically more participatory approach instead of the grand schemes that come with grand infrastructures, centred on the perspectives, independence, and agency of the affected people, who may refuse to move into even the best-intentioned resettlement projects.
The ethnography centres on manifestations of uncertainties among the displaced people and on their creative improvisations dealing with new challenges. Hänsch posits the crisis as an “opening” where new things emerge, some things are continued under different circumstances, while almost-forgotten ones may be revived. For example, the Manasir leave old inheritance disputes and land scarcity behind, and develop new fishing livelihoods based on their sharecropping models, or re-learn to procure drinking water from wet soil. Hänsch portrays Manasir people as utterly creative, making homes and fields in the former wilderness and continually identifying opportunities alongside limitations. Strikingly, there seems to be no emerging “memory” culture commemorating the lost places and practices. Only children appear to ask about the previous life; all adults seem to look ahead.
After an introduction sketching the theoretical and methodological background, Chapter 2 gives an overview over the planning of the Merowe Dam and the formation of opposition to the resettlement programme, contrasting life along the Nile to the Manasir people’s first experiences with the resettlement villages. Chapter 3 focuses on the development of the movement demanding to remain close to the Nile rather than resettle in the state-sponsored schemes hundreds of kilometres away, emphasising people’s growing mistrust of the government and their will to remain independent. Chapter 4 details the Manasir’s preparations for inundation and re-settlement, including new, compensation-oriented farming and settlement practices and emerging divisions and conflicts regarding staying or collaborating with the government. The chapter also describes the painful periods of hectic escapes from inundating villages and towns, which are characterised by people’s staunch optimism assuming that the water will not rise any higher and that it may recede again after the annual flood, an optimism that Hänsch interprets as a refusal to believe in the existence of the reservoir until it is too late.
Chapter 5 details the Manasir’s long-honed competence of improvisation through which they overcome their initial disorientation as refugees on the rising reservoir in the former desert wasteland. Reminiscent of ethnographies of refugees and other displaced people, the chapter deals with the typical post-disaster process of progressive differentiation and re-organisation, where constructing buildings performs the will to remain in place. Chapter 6 chronicles the boredom, frustrations, and fear of waiting for an uncertain future along the reservoir shore as well as the amazing optimism with which the Manasir forge their futures. This optimism is rooted in the trust in God-given fate and people’s certainty that previous problems, too, have been solved by their improvisatory creativity. Chapter 7 describes the gradual re-arrangement of kin and village communities with the widening reservoir, new agricultural projects that are much larger than those in the valley, the demise of livestock farming, and the development of water-based transport and fishing livelihoods. Finally, the conclusion and postscript make clear that even a decade after the first inundation, uncertainties and deprivations endure among the Manasir.
Alongside highlighting uncertainty and improvisation, the ethnography illustrates that for the Manasir, “where to live” means, above all, “how to live.” While the location of “the local option” gradually changes from resettlement villages closer to the homeland to the makeshift settlements emerging from refugee camps right at the fluctuating shore of the reservoir, its implication remains constant: independence from the government and the dam administration, whom the Manasir have learnt to mistrust in previous decades. In order to remain independent, some farmers are even happy to become fishermen. Retaining this independence also means exhibiting a patience and optimism that is rooted in a time horizon spanning generations, rather than that of the researcher, who seems to be struggling at times with the people’s stubbornness.
The ethnography’s most productive tension lies perhaps in the question to what extent the inundation represents a radical rupture for the Manasir, or in how far it exemplifies another case in a long history of existential challenges that the Manasir have mastered through their improvisatory abilities. Hänsch provides material and interpretations supporting both positions, leaving the tension for the reader to explore. On the one hand, she writes about life before the inundation in the past tense, and the many years since in the present tense. She outlines pre-flooding routines and emphasises the lack of routines and perspectives afterwards, stating that this was a crisis with no relation to previous challenges. On the other hand, Hänsch suggests that Manasir history is replete with shifts in residence and livelihoods, creative appropriations of new opportunities like diesel-powered irrigation pumps, and a propensity to improvise with what is at hand. Whether or not the ethnographic gaze overstates routines and stability prior to inundation, the book clearly demonstrates both the people’s suffering in the name of “national development,” and the amazing creativity and improvisation, through which the Manasir continually turn challenges into opportunities.
The great detail and wide scope of the ethnography amount to both its greatest strength and weakness: the long text provides valuable insights for those readers who persevere to plough through its entirety. Alongside adding to a growing body of ethnography with Manasir people, this book is a valuable contribution to – and critical commentary on – resettlement studies. Hänsch engages with influential literature and concepts from this field throughout, outlining in particular how they often fail to understand uncertainty and the accommodation of novelty. She argues convincingly that uncertainty is crucial in the experiences and strategies of displaced people as they attempt to build new lives by re-combining various skills, which amounts to neither a reproduction of their old ways nor a complete reinvention. These discussions make the book also relevant for other fields that deal with displaced people, including migration studies and disaster studies.