Water and Politics in Africa

Hello and welcome to my blog!  Over the next few months, we will explore the relationship between water and politics in Africa. This brief introduction will provide some historical and geographical context to help situate our future discussions. Hydrological stability is both essential to, and deeply reliant on, political stability. In order to understand development in Africa, it is vital to understand its hydropolitical climate.   In its most basic sense, ‘politics’ refers to the governance of any particular place, either on an international, national or local scale. But politics also concerns the impact of different competing power dynamics. This blog explores how these competing dynamics play out within Africa.   Discourse surrounding African development is riddled with tropes such as ‘the corrupt politician,’ and the ‘utterly helpless Starving African’, walking across their ‘hot and dusty’ landscape (Wainaina, 2005). These tropes find their roots in colonial justifications used t