The water diamond

<<Give a man a fish, and you feed him for an hour; show him how to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.>>
Anne Isabella Ritchie, 1885.

Just like one of those classic films that, although we have not seen, we recognize as famous (sometimes even as masterpieces), the image of Africa was established long ago in the mind of the average European. And if we could take a moment to properly think, we would  recognise how small, inaccurate or simple our description is: an aggresive shot of sarcasm when realizing the physical enormity of the African continent. How many lands might there be embraced, how many deserts and forests, how many countries, how many rivers and lakes ... how many people. How much life might there be contained - of course contained, by the continent, as there would be no better word.

We always have that picture of Africa, the one with the starving background, half-naked bodies, colourful clothes, tribal dances. But it's like an all in one. Not even I could distinguish between two African tribes, or name all the African countries, or guess how many languages are spoken from north to south. As Binyavanga Wainaina suggests in How to Write about Africa, the average caucasian person has that plane, yet taken for lovely, image of Africa in which poverty, ribs, flies and dust are the main characters. Anybody (this said from a general perspective) in the developed countries seems to know much deeper about the main African content, about its heart. Apparently there is only one thing that is clear, automatically linked to its regions: thirst.

Nowadays, poverty index in Africa is estimated at about 45.7% in average, but getting to exceed 70-80% in some countries such as Madagascar or the Dem. Rep. Congo [2]. A great part of the problem is water shortage, not only involving thirst itself, understood as the biological need of water, but also referred to its key usage in farming crops, sanitation and industry processes.

Again, an irony gets born, as recent mapping of the World's greatest aqüifers has shown several important masses of water in the African continent, many of them laying beneath the Sahara's desert. Although considered fossil deposits (they are thought to have appeared more than twenty-five years ago) this water could represent a hopeful, definitive solution for an entire continent's worst problem. Why is it not yet?