I have a tendency to ignore this newsletter until I want to write a Long Blog, but lately had been itching to occasionally get some thinking out in short form. I’ve always been attracted to the concept of grounding in Rastafari tradition — community members discussing personal struggles in an attempt to relate to them universally, or dismantle illusory thinking. That all sounds very serious (and it can be!) but it can also be about trivial stuff, like whether someone is doing their laundry wrong. It can’t be heavy all the time, right?
Putting that kind of stuff into a free newsletter seems fine. In the meantime, sign up or tell people to do that if you want.
I spent this week thinking about fresh water and parables about John the Baptist and East African geopolitics. It was more fun than it sounds, but there are times I wish all of this stuff was just esotericism. The Blue Nile acts as an incredibly good metaphor for East African politics in the 20th century, but it’s more than literary device. It’s the fulcrum in Ethiopian - Sudanese - Egyptian politics.
The oil and gas industry is explosive and tends to underpin international conflict, such that petroleum politics overshadow regional nuances to ethnoreligious conflict. In East Africa, the Nile River is fed, in part, by the Blue Nile from Ethiopia’s Lake Tana. Lake Tana is sacred ground, housing monasteries and treasures of Tewahedo Church and the remains of notable Amhara rulers. However, given that the Nile River is the fresh water source for all of East Africa’s agricultural economy, the importance is quite material in nature. Britain needed a lot of cotton in the late 19th century after the Confederacy died. Ethiopia needed to sell a lot of coffee, too. Can’t do any of that without the Nile.
It seems cosmically appropriate that most of the focus is on the energy industry and its subsequent chaos; appropriate that consensus concern is on access to the fuel for modernity. Everybody loves the pharmacy and there’s plenty of fresh water over here in North America. Seems weird that arable land is going down, but that’s how it goes. We got trucks to build, baby. Some of them plug into the wall now.
The Blue Nile is still causing problems between Egypt and Ethiopia with the Grand Renaissance Dam. That sentence is technically accurate, but the framing is silly. The Blue Nile is a river that has served the peoples of East Africa since the Biblical era and well before nation-states and international law existed. That’s a Babylon thing: now that nation-states have the lawful right to enforce borders, things like “Biblically important rivers” are geopolitical cudgels. The Blue Nile is the problem somehow; a villain of circumstance incapable of satiating the endless appetite of modernizing industrial economies.
The problem is not the Nile, but the shifting of its tide. Prior to the reign of His Majesty Haile Selassie I and the modernization of Ethiopian security and infrastructure, Ethiopia had no material capability to use its territorial ownership of the Blue Nile’s source against its neighbors. Threats were made by past Solomonic rulers, but even the great Haile Selassie I was initially incapable of building a dam in the 1930s. The terrain was too difficult; location too remote for the underdeveloped infrastructure.
It wasn’t until the 1950s when Haile Selassie I had the international clout, American economic and diplomatic support, and resources to begin developing in the Nile Basin. Nasser started increasing the pressure on Ethiopia by funding resistance movements in Eritrea. Things got ugly quick after Haile Selassie I was able to secure autocephaly for the Tewahedo Church in 1959, officially breaking administrative ties with the Coptic Church of Egypt. Since the 19th century, the Sudan and Egyptian governments have — with the assistance of the British — signed multiple treaties guaranteeing themselves the rights to water that originates in Ethiopia. Haile Selassie I secured Ethiopia’s material power — spiritually, economically, and militarily — to challenge those rights and chaos soon followed. Ain’t no fun when rabbits get guns.
Oil and gas had something to do with it, too. It’s not possible to discuss things like Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Israel or Iran without the specter of the shifting post-war global petroleum market hanging over it. That’s where all the money is, after all. Unfortunately, the conflict between Ethiopia and its neighbors is not about money. Money is abundant in the Middle East. Fresh water is not.