Hafir
The Hafir is an artificially created water catchment basin , which was built from the time of the Kush Empire in the northern part of today's Sudan and is used for drinking water supply, field irrigation or as a trough for cattle.
history
More than 800 Hafires were built in a large water management building program in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. They are round basins with an earth wall and an inlet. The largest Hafires reach a diameter of up to 250 meters at a depth of 3–4 meters. They caught the water in the rainy season in order to have it available for a few months during the dry season . The construction of the Hafire is explained with the attempt to develop the hinterland economically and thus the political expansion of the empire.
Large frog sculptures were set up on the bank of the Hafire (as in Naqa and Basa ), which were supposed to attract the water. The Hafire were often built in the immediate vicinity of the temple complex, for example at the sun temple of Meroe . In Musawwarat as sufra and Umm Usuda the entrance to the Hafir was guarded by lion sculptures.
use
Hand-made hafirs were used for irrigation of fields and as cattle troughs until the 20th century. In the 18th century there were some settlements in the Butana region, the eastern edge of the Nubian Desert , which were only insufficiently supplied by the water points in the granite rock mountains and which therefore had additional simple hafirs with mud walls on the plain. At the time of the Turkish-Egyptian rule , this irrigation technique was improved. Numerous Muslim West Africans who came through Gedaref on their pilgrimage to Mecca at the beginning of the 20th century settled in this region. Another strong increase in population took place there in the eastern Butana after the completion of the railway line in 1926, which led from Sennar via Gedaref to Port Sudan . In the 1920s, the British colonial government had new wells drilled in the hills and over 40 hafirs built. At the end of the 1940s, an irrigation program was used to mechanically excavate larger hafirs, each with a capacity of 15,000 cubic meters, which were located further out on the plain and were supplied with water via canals from the mountains. With 50 of these hafirs, the mechanized cultivation of sorghum was made possible on large fields .
Today's hafirs hold between 10,000 and 60,000 cubic meters of water. Very few Hafirs are owned by individuals; Smaller hand-made hafirs are mostly managed by village communities and are used to irrigate the fields; only the hafirs that the government dug up by machine are also accessible to the nomads' herds. When water is scarce, there is often a dispute over water rights between the two groups. The dispute arises when hafirs that were originally laid out as cattle troughs are fenced in by vegetable farmers to prevent the cattle herds from entering. Conversely, herds of cattle occasionally trample on Hafirs that are owned by the village community.
Since the Khashm el-Girba dam on Atbara was completed in the mid-1960s, channel irrigation of the large fields, where mainly cotton is now grown , has become a priority.
literature
- Derek A. Welsby : The Kingdom of Kush. The Napatan and Meroitic Empires . British Museum Press, London 1996, ISBN 0-7141-0986-X , pp. 128 f .
- Dietrich Wildung : Sudan. Ancient kingdoms on the Nile . Wasmuth, Tübingen 1998, ISBN 3-8030-3084-6 , p. 396 .
- Anne Coles: Geology and Gender. Water Supplies, Ethnicity and Livelihoods in Central Sudan. In: Anne Coles, Tina Wallace (eds.): Gender, Water and Development (= Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Women ). Berg Publishers, Oxford et al. 2005, ISBN 1-8452-0125-6 , pp. 77 f., 91.