This essay counters the growing tendency in current scholarship to attribute nearly all the enduring water scarcity problems to climate change. Focusing on Harare, Zimbabwe's capital city, this essay contends that recurrent water crises can only really be understood within the contentious, long, and complex history of water politics in the capital city from the colonial to the postcolonial period. Although the colonial and postcolonial states in Zimbabwe had very different ideological and racial policies, for various reasons, neither was willing nor able to provide adequate supplies of water to the urban poor even as water was abundant in the city's reservoirs. It posits that while the colonial government racialized access to water by restricting its use by urban Africans, the postcolonial government failed to change the colonial patterns of urban water distribution and did little to increase water supplies to keep pace with a swiftly growing urban population and a geographically expanding city.

This essay explores the multiple ways in which the nexuses between water scarcity and climate change are socially and historically grounded in ordinary people's lived experiences and are embedded in specific fields of power. Here we specifically delineate four critical dimensions in which the water crises confronting the African continent in an age of climate change are clearly expressed: the increasing scarcity, privatization, and commodification of water in urban centers; the impact of large dams on the countryside; the health consequences of water shortages and how they, in turn, affect other aspects of people's experiences, sociopolitical dynamics, and well-being, broadly conceived; and water governance and the politics of water at the local, national, and transnational levels. These overarching themes form the collective basis for the host of essays in this volume that provide rich accounts of conflicts and struggles over water use and how these tensions have been mitigated.