ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the gendered nature of a traditional irrigation system against the background of its history. It focuses on the ways in which gender relations structure and is structured by the organization of the irrigation system. There has been even less attention to the ways in which gender relations influence them and are constructed by them. The position of women in the economic life of the village is determined predominantly by their relationship to land and by their access to water. The new administrative organization was not based on family or ethnic relations but on the basis of the ideology of being all-Tanzanian in the first place. How the reorganization coincided with or was instigated by the incorporation of villages into the national administrative Tanzanian system after Independence is not clear. 'Traditional' was the adjective most commonly used by villagers to describe the nature of the irrigation systems around Arusha Tanzania but this meant different things to different people.
