Nile, The

GEOGRAPHY, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND DEMOGRAPHY Robert O. Collins. The Nile. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. xii + 260 pp. Maps. Photographs. Diagrams. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.95. Cloth.

What is the Nile? The volume reviewed here, a lush compendium of images and ideas, provides some answers.

This is a story of water-water raised by the sun from the surface of the warm Atlantic and guided across the continent of Africa by unseen aerial currents, water precipitated in cool mists and gray torrential sheets onto the East African highlands, waters from countless alpine sources that begin as diverse highland freshets, become rushing and tumbling mountain streams, and eventually flow northward as a mighty river to the Mediterranean far away.

This is an evocation of landforms-the timeless tectonic agony of grinding plates punctuated by buckling, uplift, the rending of great faults or the brief and wrathful release of volcanoes, the slow decay and crumbling to sand and soil of mighty massifs corrupted by the chemistry of vegetation and the mechanics of rain and frost, the sculpture by relentless winds of unforgiving desert landscapes of sand and stone, and the gathering of precious highland topsoil for redistribution in favored lowlands far away or to be devoured, in the end, by the insatiable maw of a rising salt sea.

This is a colorful and eloquent tribute to the staggering biological fecundity of the Nile watershed, from the giant worts of Ruwenzori and gorillas of the Virunga to gigantic mezzodiluvian sanctuaries of birds and crocodiles of the sublacustrine swamps and the tame, productive fields of food and fiber crops in the cultivated, irrigated lands below. The author has walked this terrain over a lifetime, and his gift for etching vivid scenes from nature is given ample play.

This is a book about the men who sought to understand and tame the Nile, from ancient Egyptians who discerned and measured the basic patterns of the river's flow, to ingenious and determined engineers of the industrial age who have erected ever more elaborate devices to capture and distribute water on command, and the political leaders whose decisions, be they sage or otherwise, write the region's destiny.

This is a book about human history to the extent that northeast African people depend upon the great river. This is a useful perspective, if a very narrow one, and it generates a plausible, if reductionist, view of regional historical process. The Egyptians, totally dependent upon the Nile, will take any measures necessary to defend their supply of water. The upstream lands, whose populations have outgrown older sources of water, are turning increasingly to the Nile. Most visions of development both north and south assume that more Nile water will be available; the author warns that this is not likely now and will become increasingly unlikely in the future. For all the peoples of the region hydrology is destiny; the grip of the great river upon fate grows ever tighter.

Jay Spaulding

Kean University

Union, New Jersey

Copyright African Studies Association Sep 2003
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