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Colonial Irrigation: Myths of Emptiness

Abstract Colonial efforts to develop irrigation in African colonies aimed to improve the colonies' productive capacity. The resulting systems, including Gezira (British Sudan), Office du Niger (French Sudan) and the French systems in Northern Africa, have many characteristics of an imposed factory-based production regime. A factory resemblance is reflected in the mathematical layout of the systems when possible: canals are straight and plots are square. This approach coincides with the general European opinion that Africa had no history; Africa (with the exception of Egypt) was perceived as an empty continent. In the African colonies, economic opportunities were obviously an important element of the discourse. It was ideologies of creating new social and geographical landscapes, however, bringing order in the wildness by filling the empty African landscape with modern irrigation facilities, that were dominating the colonial irrigation discourses and practices in African colonies.