In 2008 Rowe Morrow began the process of recording the practices of the Konso people to preserve them for future generations, with the hope that one day their language may be written down and that they will then have a document that can be translated.

This is the first of a series of 3 articles written by Rowe. It first appeared in The Permaculture Activist.

Because the Konso people have been quite isolated and haven’t “married out” (to use a Quaker term) until recently, their knowledge is similar to that of Aboriginal Australians, but more coherent and sustained. Their children haven’t been stolen, nor their lands and language denied them. Commercial and Christian influences are, however, biting in.

There is also a great need for a small project to rescue women and girl children in Konso from being beasts of burden. Funds are now being sought for a project to address this. We welcome donations to the Institute to support this project.

 

Integrated water management in Ethiopia

Background

In the high mountains of south-west Ethiopia live the Konso people who are known for their outstanding abilities to work with water, stone and plants completely integrated with the contours of the land.

In early June, during a break between teaching two PDCs in Konso a team of us visited eight dams of more than the 185 owned by several villages and administered and maintained by village councils.

We wanted to participate in:

• recording their oral history and conserving the knowledge (The Konso language has not yet been written down)

• assessing present conditions and problems

• listing the measures needed to restore new and old water sources as back-up drinking water sources able to cope with future water uncertainty

• providing information for a potential EU agricultural project

We looked at the strengths and the recent problems with traditional water supplies, and compared them with new ponds built recently.

The value of recording this history of traditional siting and building dams and, maintaining dams, springs and rivers for drinking water is that the practices are universally valuable and,
• can be re-instated, and,
• are easily transferrable to most countries and cultures.
For example, the dam design would be particularly valuable for Australian farmers.

Our team consisted of:
Enrico Castello: manager of CISS, a local NGO in Karat, Konso.
Kambro Kussia: consultant from Konso Development Association (KDA). Kambro knows the 185 ponds in the Wareda (district)
Rosemary Morrow: permaculture teacher/writer
Dan Palmer: permaculture teacher

The highly aware and knowledgeable, Kambro Kussia, told me of the Konso and their drinking water care of dams. I only wrote down and arranged what he said. Evidently he knows much more and this is only a small part of his knowledge. However, as most Konso are illiterate and their own language is not written down, I wanted to put his words down and then give them back to conserve their knowledge.

Kambro spoke also of springs, rivers and forests in order to provide an integrated view of long-standing cultural practices.

The Konso people live the high mountains of south west Ethiopia and are outstanding in working with water and stone. For more than six hundred years they have built subtle water systems thousands of kilometres long which snake across the landscape and deliver water to fields considerable distances away, without flooding or eroding the land. They built large dams known as harta and, they protect soil, rivers and springs. They built extensively in stone and many villages are fortified by stonewall, and creeks can be stone-lined up to two metres high. Their stone terraces wind across the mountains following the contours at altitudes from 1800 to 4000m. All the land works are essentially designed through intuitive knowledge of contours. Every student was totally ‘contour literate’.

This culture developed from needs for protection, sustainable water supplies and fields sited on steep slopes in a difficult environment high above the Rift Valley. This Konso ‘architecture’ because that is what it is, supported crops, animals and fields through elaborate, sophisticated agricultural designs in stone which took hundreds of years to build with whole village participation and strict social and environmental controls to maintain.

Some of the works simply look like simple roadside canals and others, like medieval terraces. However they all represent longstanding agreements about who gets the water among the constant competition from shepherds for their animals, the people and field crops. Over hundreds of years they have also constructed, village dams of drinking water quality, known as “harta” in the Konso language of Afa-konso. These traditional works, which are unique to the Konso, kept the people healthy for centuries and built a distinctive culture and agriculture in a harsh, steep environment with unpredictable weather patterns. Because of these works, the area has now been proposed as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

These traditional drinking water structures are very large and deep. The bottom is curved and the sides are lined with huge pieces of stone forming sloping stonewalls. Sites are chosen for their water holding capacity, ability to harvest water, then to distribute surplus water. The pond wall is an enormous earth structure built from the site fill. Villagers dug the ponds by hand and stone-lined the walls and every villager was required to be present; if too old or too young to dig, then at least to exhort the others. Villagers had to return to their own village to help with this work even if they were occupied in another town.

 

As the dam was dug and the wall constructed, women and young ones danced on the wall, sometimes all night, to compact the newly dug earth. When stonewall maintenance or cleaning was required, the dancing recommenced and again the older people sang the story of building the dam and how to clean and maintain it and the young ones sang their commitment to do the same as their elders. Each dam had its story in song and dance. Some ponds took a hundred years to build and were well maintained until recently: Custom forbade growing large trees on the harta wall, nor were animals allowed to drink or graze around it. In this way the structural and water integrity were maintained.

The dams were normally placed at the end of a ridge or high on the land to give control of water distribution to all the fields below it through a series of channels when the pond overflowed. (P.A. Yeomans you were preceded)

The drawing shows the architectural structure of a typical traditional dam and its effectiveness in maintaining clean water especially with the traditional social controls. Water was siphoned off from a permanent or ephemeral river (spring) and carried along a side canal to a fairly flat surface, up to twice as large as the surface area of the pond. This is the silt trap. The silt trap is well vegetated and often had a gravel bed. Here water was spread, slowed and cleaned before it entered the dam. (Why don’t western dam builders do this?) Then the water bounced through a stepped stone race further improving water quality.

In addition, environmental social control of water and vegetation was rigidly enforced

• animals were watered in stone troughs outside the clean pond water
• buffer vegetation zones surrounded the area where animals were watered but not allowed to graze
• no animal was allowed to graze the dyke on which grasses and shrubs grew
• a thick spikey living fence surrounded the whole area
• windbreaks reduced evaporation
• water from the spillway was delivered equitably to crops and fields
• a silt trap for entering water was bedded with gravel and planted with grasses and shrubs to reduce the silt load entering the dam

Special plant species were grown around each part of the dam for different purposes. For example, Balenites egyptica, a traditionally planted tree used for shading, was grown because its roots go deep vertically in the ground and do not seek the water and reduce it. It is a very useful plant because the leaves and fruits are eaten in time of famine (although they have to be carefully prepared for eating or they cause illness.) The tree survives even extreme erosion, as shown by the living roots transformed progressively into wood. Its leaves are prickly and so beehives are placed in its branches for the bees to access water and yet inhibit bee predators. This is also just one example of hundreds, of the profound knowledge of the uses and functions of vegetation common in Konso agriculture and culture.

There were traditional environmental sanctions over water dams. From childhood, the Konso were taught and warned about the special nature of water and how to care for it. No structures around the dam were allowed to be moved and if this happened, the community punished the person: if anyone removed a single resource from the dam (even a single stone) then the materials had to be returned. This was considered a criminal activity and if a person continued, they were banished from the community. This was the worst punishment.

There was seasonal maintenance work to be completed and everyone had to stop other work to assist at these times. All the community members, even children and the very elderly, had to be present. There is punishment for not coming to work to repair the dam. Others from the village who live outside must leave their work and return to their mother village and participate. “Only the dead or gone to unknown area were excluded”.

When the dry season was coming to an end and the dam was almost dry (but importantly before the rains), the villagers removed the all exposed silt and use it to build up the dam walls again. As the silt was collected, people in generation-by-generation cohorts danced and sang to on the wall to compact it. And the older generation sing of what they have done to preserve the water and the younger sing for what they would do to care for it. Both women’s and men’s groups participated equally. Carrying stones to repair the walls is very heavy work and: “women carry on their backs and men carry on their shoulders.” Those men who carried the biggest and heaviest stones were cheered on by women and sisters who clapped, sang and counted how many stones each carried. “No one knows how many good things you have done in your grain field but carrying gives your name public dignity in the community. It is like an exam.”

Most springs are down deep chasms (walls) and the water is drawn up by skin buckets and ropes. The Konso’s spiritual beliefs teach them they must not cut any shrub or bush around any spring because plants provide shade and protect the water. The Konso believe that the water will disappear if the vegetation is cut.

Visiting times to the springs were regulated: people could take water in the morning from 4.00am to 8.00am when “the world was quiet – all birds and animals are still sleeping”. Also quantities of water to be removed were limited so that those with big families did not take all the water. In times of famine or drought, a guard was put on the spring to ensure equality for each person or family. Then if some water was left, there could be a second round of visits. Destitute or disabled people got priority at springs because they couldn’t go far away to get water from other sources.

When the spring needed maintenance, the whole community was again required to help. Sometimes flood works were implemented to divert flood water and ensure it didn’t not enter and contaminate the spring. Similarly the nearby washing of clothes or one’s body was forbidden because it could contaminate the water. There were restrictions preventing visits by menstruating women or new mothers (up to 40 days). The same controls as for the harta, refused access to grazing animals, and to cutting nearby vegetation.

Kambro beside a tree illustrating the extent of the erosion near a traditional dam: notice the goats

Terracing protected the rivers from erosion and silting and ensured that runoff was clean. In addition trees were regarded at inalienable and always left along the banks of the rivers to provide structural support for the river banks. In dry times how much water each family could take was regulated fairly.

Some of the ‘sacred’ river trees are especially thorny and it was into them that the Konso placed their beehives. Honey was the main sugar source and it was highly valued. Today, the Konso still love honey but they can now get large quantities of refined cane sugar which they eat in huge amounts.

Away from the river, on the hillsides, trees for special construction purposes were planted and maintained. These mature trees could only be used for very special purposes. ‘Unfortunately today, the Konso don’t care and will even burn trees more than 100 years old’, said Kambro.

Parts of the natural forest known as the “moora”, were endowed with special spiritual properties and in this way protected wildlife and biodiversity. No-one was allowed to cut and remove any part of the moora. People were often buried near the moora and these cemeteries acted as buffer zones. While no animals could graze around the sacred moora it was possible to plant trees and crops. Other “closed areas” also existed which were spiritual and so they also maintained biodiversity.

However this was to change; a rumour was introduced that there were ‘evil spirits’ living in the moora and so people cut down the trees. This may have come in with Christian missionaries or with other interested parties. During the time of the Marxist government known as Durg, these forests were felled because they were considered to be the sacred personal inheritance of village chiefs and the Durg wanted to introduce a socialist system of equal ownership of land.

“In former days, Ethiopia had a very high density of forests but now due to irresponsible interaction with the environment and the consequences of severe poverty, the forest cover has been significantly reduced. In Ethiopia, the regimes of Haile Selassie and Durg were catastrophic for the forest cover. During the former, immense clearing of the forest lands owned by the feudal lords occurred. Similarly, with the collapse of the Durg regime, [Ethiopia’s Marxist government in the late 20th century – ed] considerable forests grown on communal land by coercive participation, were cut down, due to the lack of felt ownership by the community. This forest destruction greatly contributed to the failure of Ethiopia’s food security programs. The original forest cover, for instance, had been reduced to 16% by 1954 and there was a dramatic reduction to 3% by 1991 (UNCED report 1992). To worsen the situation, the number of people depending on forest resources for survival is geometrically increasing, due to poverty, crop failure, population growth and lack of alternative means of income generation.”

Over the last 25 years, the water systems, the stone terraces and the dams have started to breakdown and with them the social environmental controls.

We encountered several problems and the main ones were:
• The neglect and breakdown of drinking water dams which now function primarily as goat drinking troughs, with a subsequent huge increase in goat populations, land degradation and eutrophic water from the abundance of nitrogen and phosphorous from animal faeces.

• Conflict for water among people for domestic use, agricultural crops, animals and a burgeoning population
• Interventions from NGOs and government departments who do not understand the traditional systems
• Neglect or disregard for traditional environmental controls normally exerted by the village councils
• New major and minor construction works ignore the traditional dams and sacred forests either because the detail is not visible, their significance is denied, or are workers are not educated as to their importance.

• muddy water from cows and goats allowed access
• broken stone embankments – in some cases stones carried away
• tree removal and lack of shade results in high water temperature
• lack of windbreaks hastens surface evaporation.
• animals graze and damage the dyke walls
• vegetation removal and silt-trap erosion
• community environmental controls not enforced
• only remnant shrubs remaining of the original trees and living fences – due to animal grazing and tree removal by local people

Below are three case studies of recent works which affect traditional water supplies.

Farm Pond in Jarso village was built in 2002 by Farm Africa in the style of a traditional pond. It was well constructed but fell into disrepair. The local people told us that there was a new project from Safetinet NGO to restore nearby stone terraces by paying for village labour. This new practice destroyed the traditional practice of local volunteer maintenance. While some social controls remained and did not allow the removal of stones or the taking of wood, we saw where the trough built to water animals outside the pond has been completely obliterated by the hooves. We can see how modern practices have contributed to the corruption of what was traditionally a successful holistic system for maintenance of fields and water.

At Kumbalaya also in Jarso, another dam was built, by Farm Africa in 2002. We were shocked when we visited at noon, to see huge numbers of goats were present drinking from it. Insert photo 4 of goats licking seed out of soil Local people told us of another and different well-meaning NGO who provided and connected town water to their village. The unforeseen result is that this village is now dependent on a water source, the town supply, which is much less secure and less under their control.
(The local town had completely run out of water to the high school and the church, and we were only able to access town water twice a day for two hours)

The presence of goats at this pond showed that the community has lost its commitment to preserving its dam as common useful property. The people rely on the town water and the dam is only watering goats. If this is not remedied, the goats will overgraze the surroundings with appalling degradation of the land and desertification.

Already the surrounding area shows signs of severe degradation of soil, which already has no grass cover at all. This dam had an extra wall for silt control but again lacks maintenance. The silt trap area was grazed photo 1448 and now the soil and filter gravel stones loose. Details of the previous fence and of the scattered stones photwhich were once a protection wall shows the water gate at the edge of the silt area marked by growing Euphorbia candelabrus of astonishing dimensions.
showing natural spikey regrowth

There is some awareness by local people we spoke with of the necessity for immediate intervention through repairs and a return to the prohibition of animal access. Rebuilding of surrounding terraces is required to control erosion.

The village of Karmote has a traditional dam just off the road. When we visited, to our surprise, we saw people washing clothes on its banks.

This very large dam shows signs of care with trees throwing their shade on the water and giving clear, cool water. However just as at the other sites, an elderly local man appeared and gave us its history of why it had lost its effectiveness. He told us that Mekane Jesus, an NGO with an evangelical mission, tried to clean the pond of bottom silt but the result was destructive because the bottom was flattened and not made convex as is necessary. Also the bulldozer driver threw the silt down the river destroying the wall that conveyed water to the pond. So the villagers had to divert a river upstream to direct the water to a larger area for silt cleaning.

To improve this dam, its walls will need to be rebuilt including a sluice channel to provide the dam with extra water. It now comes from the side catchments and is useless. The dam also requires protection from contamination human activities.

In the village of Gawadda Kebele a completely new pond was built to a new design by Mekane Jesus.

 

This dam is for a group of 37 families of potters who live just beyond the village. Down from the houses is a site where the potters extract their clay of such good quality it can be use without degreasing. The pots are made by hand without requiring a wheel or coil. The dam is only a few metres from the clay pit. It is above a road and only a short walk from it downhill. Insert drawing here and photo 8? Of new square cement dam with plastic cover.

The structure is unusual being square shaped, 8x8m and 2.5m deep like an upside down pyramid. In addition it was lined not with silt and stones but a thin layer of cement. Unfortunately this pond was empty when we visited because the cement had cracked. Now the dam will not collect water because there is no water capture system. The downhill water is directed either to fields below or erodes beside the dam and is wasted.

In addition the large surface area of this new dam is inadvisable because in dry areas such as this the smallest surface area with shading and windbreaks are required.

Another issue is that the dam lies completely across the traditional water harvesting channels which look like drains beside the road but have been in use for centuries. Evidently these were not seen by the builders. To compensate the farmers cut across the inflow channel and redirected water to their fields.

 

The new dams now serve primarily as “animal drinking dams: (mainly for the increasing populations of goats). The destructive behaviours of these goats have caused appalling erosion to the perimeters. Conflicts now occur between the goat and cattle herders and the community.

The NGOs who assisted villages with water from town or wells have unwittingly contributed to land degradation and a decline in emergency water availability and the authority of the local village council controls. The best solution would be to start again with advice from the Konso farmers.

 

Goats licking seeds out of the eroded bare land they created

These case studies illustrate the problems of competition for water between people, agriculture and animals, and what happens when there is intervention by outsiders. To resolve these problems, each dam requires remedial structural work and social sanctions.

Social intervention would come as the:
• reinstatement of traditional drinking dam environmental controls and sanctions by village councils
• building of community awareness for the protection of water as an environmental cultural heritage
• knowledge of its necessity as an emergency or disaster source.

Remediation would consist of:
• windbreaks on south-eastern side to reduce surface evaporation from prevailing dry winds
• carefully selected trees such as Balanites egyptica for shade and water quality
• cleaning out
• animals prohibited from the whole area, including the silt traps
• animals to be watered, as formerly, from troughs outside the pond water
• traditional and very savage, living fences of cacti and aloe to exclude grazing animals - fences in Konso are traditionally plants of extremely thorny, long lasting species
• extend sensitive buffer areas around ponds and avoid grazing on the walls and the silt traps
• make an area larger than the pond
• plant edge reeds to assist with water cleaning
• revegetate protective buffer zones
• some ponds require walls to be rebuilt and spillways reconstructed

In the future, climate change, peak oil, uncertain rainfall and animal and human populations increases will only further adversely affect the Konso. Their efficient traditional methods of water and slope management will need to be relearned, re-instated and managed again by traditional village councils.

Websites
http://www.virtualfoundation.org/proposals/tuethiop01.cgi

(Hallpike, C. R, (1972). “The Konso of Ethiopia. A Study of the Values of Cushitic People.” Oxford University Press, Oxford.)

Wiebke Förch (2003) Case Study: The Agricultural System of the Konso in South-
Western Ethiopia Published 2003 online: FWU Water Resources Publications 2003:1, University of Siegen, Germany (http://fwu.fb10.uni-siegen.de/bkd/FWU_WRP.htm)