This article considers the centrality of waterways in the Kilombero Valley of Tanzania to the region’s histories of development from above, particularly in terms of infrastructure, crop production, trade, and transport. Early colonial investigations hoped Kilombero’s riverine system might prove a navigable link from the coast to the Southern Highlands. The British colonial era instead focused more on utilising riverine networks for internal goods transport. Throughout these colonial visions – simultaneously ambitious and naïve – the prevalent dug-out canoe was considered unsafe, inefficient, and replaceable by modernised methods. But the canoe – a symbol of indigenous knowledge and practice – prevailed in the wake of failed efforts to effect such change from above. Kilombero’s waterways are indelibly entwined to its environmental, social, and economic landscapes, yet efforts by colonial powers to establish systems of river transport – whether to transport produce from valley depths towards railheads and markets, or as part of wider networks – were repeatedly frustrated. This article first offers a survey of this period of flawed development efforts, and then considers how perspectives on waterways as infrastructure shifted into the postcolonial era through ambitious schemes for hydropower and irrigation, when visions for rail and roads replaced rivers as the means for systematic conveyance. Waterways also complicated communications, and successive governments neglected the impacts of waterways and their annual inundations on the mobility of local communities. While floods brought agricultural fertility, they also destroyed crops and isolated communities, threatening lives and livelihoods. As a coda, the article notes how the first bridge over the Kilombero was only opened in 2018, ending decades of regional isolation and a stream of fatalities from ill-fated ferry crossings, highlighting this contested environment in which much of life was defined by its waters.
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