Water

I’ve never been a fan of bottled water, though I remember the fascination it held when we went to France in the old days. But now it has become a strange fad that so possesses people that they don’t dare try anything else. I was truly shocked to find that, at a meeting in the Ministry of Water Affairs in South Africa, we were offered bottled water – that in a town with the highest quality tap water in the world.

The funniest story was Coca-Cola’s attempt to con the British public into drinking bottled water. They used tap water from Sidcup, called it Dasani, and sold it for more than a pound for a small bottle. The absurdity started when their (American) advertising gurus came up with a campaign in which it was called "bottled spunk" and featured the tagline "can't live without spunk". Any schoolboy will tell you that that is not a word you hear without an embarrassed snigger. Then the word leaked out about the source of the water – Sidcup?? Hardly a highland spring, is it? To make matters worse, government inspectors found an unacceptable level of a carcinogen in the water which had been added as part of their high-tech “purification” process. Never has the mighty company been so humiliated, and they shut down their operation in record time.

Kinshasa, of course is different: we know the water is likely to be polluted, and we should take precautions. All the same, some people take this to ridiculous lengths. Many won’t use the tap water to even clean their teeth. Washing vegetables is one thing, but someone won’t even allow their baby to bathe in tap water. Luckily for such fanatics you can get large bottles of purified water so it is not ridiculously expensive, but buying and lugging around these things is a pain.

For those who think that Kinshasa’s tap water is undesirable, it might be salutary to go to the outskirts of Kinshasa and observe what a precious commodity it is for those residents. The problem is that there is not enough of it, and the ration which suburban areas receive is both unpredictable and tiny. When there is water in the pipes, word spreads like wildfire: our driver talked about being woken up at 2 a.m. when water started coming out of the taps. Everyone gets up and must queue for hours, and hoping against hope, as they watch those in front of them filling buckets and plastic bottles, that it will still be running when they reach the front of the queue.

Mind you, Kinshasa at least has a system. It is old and badly maintained, but it works after a fashion. Mbuji Mayi, with 2.3 million people, is the second largest town in the Congo. It has the distinction of being the largest town in Africa without a piped water system.

Curiously, in areas of Kinshasa which do have a relatively reliable water supply, people waste water in shocking ways. No one seems to see the connection between wasting water in one place and not having enough in another. They wash cars with hosepipes, which are left to run on the ground even when the water is not needed, they wash the roads with it, they water their lawns with it.

Suddenly, there’s a new angle: cholera has spread from Brazzaville to Kinshasa. What everyone knows is that cholera thrives where there’s not enough water, so there’s a real risk of an epidemic. For the bottled water brigade, of course, even washing the dishes in tap water becomes a risk, and their paranoia is now proved justified. But for little Brian, the dogsbody husband of the ever-nagging Priscilla, maybe this offers him the chance he’s been waiting for: “How about a nice glass of water, my darling . . .”