As mentioned in Image of the Month for August 2023, in a previous life I was the Exploration Director for a very small LSE-listed international oil & gas exploration and production company based out of London, UK. Despite our small size and market capitalization, we operated several exploration licences in East Africa, primarily in Tanzania.
Following a major onshore gas discovery that I made in 2012 (the Ntorya Gas Field, approx. 2 Tcf gas-in-place), which represented a significant breakthrough in understanding the geology and exploration potential in the onshore part of the Ruvuma Basin in southern Tanzania, I went on a field trip to the region a couple of months later to further evaluate the geology at outcrop in the light of our new understanding. This involved staying in the town of Ndanda with various daily excursions into the surrounding countryside to examine rock outcrops, verify existing geological maps (originally surveyed in the 1950s), and collecting various rock samples for laboratory analysis, including any natural seepages of oil and gas.
The problem with a field trip is that as soon as one leaves base and starts travelling to the remoter areas, one sees many interesting photographic sites and opportunities, but unfortunately the trip is a work trip with a full schedule that leaves little time for camera stops, if any. Furthermore, roads are rarely smooth, and attempting to instantly compose a decent photograph from a vehicle whilst travelling along an unmade road at anything up to 40 miles per hour is nigh on impossible!
It is particularly frustrating in the late afternoon/early evening, at the so-called ‘Golden Hour‘ when the light is often at its best just before sunset – one loses track of some of the potential ‘National Geographic‘ magazine cover shots that one glimpses but cannot stop and capture! Furthermore, most people regardless of culture don’t really appreciate being photographed by random strangers who suddenly appear out of nowhere, whilst going about their everyday business!
The first morning, we left our base in Ndanda shortly after sunrise, heading northeast along the valley of the Lukuledi River where it cut through the Makonde Plateau towards the historic port town of Lindi on the coast. At the time (2012), the road surface was a sandy dirt track or laterite, and crossed the shallow Lukuledi River via an old Bailey Bridge about 8 kms out of town. That first morning as we slowed to cross the bridge, I noticed lots of local villagers gathered on the river bed upstream of the bridge, where the river was broad and very shallow with clear water flowing over golden yellow sand. What struck me was the diversity of the bright colours of the clothes that the villagers were wearing and their bright plastic buckets and water containers, and how they were all gathered around small pits that they had dug for laundry I initially assumed, (mistakenly as it turned out). And of course there was no time to stop and photograph that morning.
A couple of days later we were travelling in the same direction as we set out, so I arranged for the driver to cross the bridge, and once we were beyond the river and out of sight to stop for 5 minutes so that I could go back with my camera to photograph the scene. Fortunately he agreed, and I was able to walk back across the bridge discreetly and snatch about 3 or 4 images before I was spotted.
As can be seen in the image, the villagers were actually collecting water, for drinking, cooking and personal hygiene. Only 8 kms outside of a town with piped water, and plenty of pumps and wells, and yet they were gathering unpurified water from the river. They weren’t pleased to see me with a camera, and the quick 3 or 4 images were all that I could take before many of the villagers were waving me away. But this is the harsh reality of much of rural sub-Saharan Africa – most people do not have ready access to clean reliable water supplies in their homes.
One thing we (as a company) and other companies always did whenever possible when drilling an exploration well was to try and drill a water well or two in the local communities, to tap into underground water reservoirs, and install a pump for community use. Such philanthropy however was not always fully appreciated – I know of at least one instance where the newly installed pump was used only in times of drought, as the local community preferred the taste of the very ephemeral local springs!
For such a bright sunny morning, one might ask why I used a fast shutter speed (1/640s) and relatively wide aperture (f4) at ISO-200? Simply because I knew that I wouldn’t have much time to compose the image before being seen, so wanted to be certain to avoid camera shake, as well as realising that there would be a lot of ambient light reflecting off the water over the bright sand. So as soon as my camera was out of my bag, I literally had 2 or 3 seconds to capture the scene.
I think I caught the scene ok. I cropped it slightly to remove a few part-figures towards the edge of the original image, but what I like about the composition is the bright clusters of people, with the rippled water flowing around and between them. The raised elevation of the bridge also allows for the clusters of people to be visually separated – had the image been taken from the river bed it would just have been a chaotic crowd of people milling about in a river – but the raised elevation allows all of the associated activities for collecting water to be clearly seen.
For many of us, we take easy access to clean and readily available drinking water for granted, and we forget just what a precious commodity it is when for many people it is a luxury that they can only dream of. If you want to learn more of the problems of sourcing clean drinking water in rural communities in Africa, a good place to start is via the web pages of the UK-based charity WaterAid UK.