Water is central to local accounts of colonial settlement and trade and oral histories link spring water to inter-regional conflict as well as anti-colonial sentiment and resistance. These distinctive regional narrative genres and associated practices suggest that throughout the colonial period, spring water continued to play a central role in the contestations over power and place and was a key enabler of both war and peacemaking. This agency of water, and people's relations with it through the hydrosocial cycle, is shown to continue to recalibrate relations into the present.

Chapter from book 'Water Politics and Spiritual Ecology: Custom, Environmental Governance and Development'