TANGANYIKA GENERATION

Cholera, a fatality?...

Isabelle SERRO


This post is also available in: French

With its 677 km, Tanganyika is the longest freshwater lake in the world but it is also the second largest lake in Africa by its surface area equivalent to that of Belgium.

Known for its biodiversity and the hundreds of species found only in this lake and nowhere else, it is estimated that it was formed more than 20 million years ago.

In Uvira, a city of 467,000 inhabitants, in South Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with water supply networks being almost non-existent, Tanganyika is in fact the first source of water used by the population.

All day long, an intense and varied human activity swarms on its banks. Children gather there to play, bathe, dream, but also to carry out daily water chores before or after school.

Every day, hundreds of women and men fill their jerry cans with water for household chores and for consumption, due to the lack of access to a drinking water source.

Watching the fishermen returning from their nighttime outings on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, the housewives washing their dishes or clothes, the children diving headfirst, it is tempting to think that this immense 32,900 square kilometre stretch of water is calm, unalterable and harmless.

But Tanganyika, which also borders Zambia, Burundi and Tanzania, is suffocating under the effects of global warming.

A disaster because it alone accounts for nearly 20% of the world’s freshwater resources.

People wash, wash clothes, wash dishes and, due to the lack of individual or collective latrines, convert its banks into toilets.

Under its turquoise waters, a veritable breeding ground is multiplying with the effects of global warming and the increase in human activities.

A real boon for the bacteria responsible for cholera, which thrives in abundance, causing deadly epidemics every year.

Although a very broad sensitization is carried out by the humanitarian organizations, many still do not believe in the existence of cholera, denouncing the bad fate, and when they believe in it, they leave it to fate.

The recklessness on the banks of the Tanganyika could have stopped there, the dreams vanish, but despite all these alarming phenomena, the lake remains, for lack of anything better, a source of life until death sneakily catches up with one of them.

 

Isabelle Serro

Country : Congo
Region : Sud Kivu
Place : Uvira

Number of photos : 40