“Living with Water” is a comprehensive social and environmental history of Nzulezo—a community on stilts in the middle of the Amanzule River in southwestern Ghana—that seeks to broaden our understanding of how human relations around water over time resulted in complex relationships between culture and ecology. It further explores how these relationships shaped spirituality, community identity, and human adaptation to slavery and physically challenging environments. Nzulezo is the only stilt-house community in Ghana and one of the few in Africa whose history dates to the mid-eighteenth century. For over two centuries, Nzulezo people have lived on the Amanzule River, enduring challenging environmental conditions like seasonal flooding and unfavorable historical events like the Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism. This dissertation delves into the reasons why the Nzulezo people chose to build their homes in the middle of a river, how they have managed to survive on the Amanzule over the years, and how their past fits into the broader history of the African continent.Through oral histories, archival research, and community-based ethnographies, I argue that religious and environmental factors—such as meeting the spiritual demands of the Nzulezo snail deity, evu, as well as gaining access to freshwater and its (non-)edible resources—necessitated the creation of the Nzulezo community in the middle of the Amanzule River. These findings reconsider received orthodoxies in African historiography that suggest that pre-colonial West Africans constructed settlements in the middle of bodies of water, or hard-to-access spaces, during the Atlantic era primarily as a defense against the Atlantic slave trade. In the case of Nzulezo, spiritual and environmental factors were crucial in shaping the people’s choice of settlement location. These findings allow us to see pre-colonial West African communities in greater complexity and to understand the lives of individuals beyond and outside the frame of the slave trade. Significantly, "Living with water" challenges conventional approaches in African environmental history that often historicize the African environment solely from a land-centric viewpoint. These theoretical approaches tend to overlook the significance of water to the lives and history of Africans. In this dissertation, I re-center water in the symbiotic relationships between humans and their environment, arguing for a shift in research focus toward water-based regions like Nzulezo. I emphasize the position of water as both an agent and a context for understanding how Africans have forged dynamic relationships with their environment.
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