Will Africa be Self Sufficient in Clean Water?

Such self-sufficiency involves two things:

• sufficient humidity overall, as opposed to dehydration;
• accessing the water as ground water through wells.

Before going to each, I will go to the European Middle Ages. 1400 AD even the Portuguese were not involved in Africa. It is a period from which I will highlight two technologies.

• windmills
• water pumps.

Windmills were invented in pre-Islamic Persia but were of another type. And they were used for irrigation. They came to Europe, in the modified form we now know, through Crusaders. In the Netherlands, they are not just used for grinding wheat flour or other cereal products, they are also used to drain polders of water. You know the polders? The ground there is below the sea surface. Why are they dry? Well, they are surrounded by walls, shielding them from the sea, and they are pumped empty of water (draining to dykes accessible to windmill powered water pumps).

Water pumps have an Islamic past too, but were put into normal use in Europe around 1400. Arguably in a simpler form. Normal people with shovels and pickaxes can dig a well, and normal blacksmiths create what is needed for a pump.

The first project would be to create big dykes* from the Mediterranean to the South of Libya (ideally the conflicting tribes ceding land to the project and gaining shares in it), pump water through them on several levels, by windmills, as international powers that be are not likely to accept nuclear power (as Ghadaffi and LaRouche wanted), then let the sea water evaporate from salines in the Sahara, giving both salt, as in La Camargue, and more rain.

Some care should be taken to avoid the Mediterranean is drained too much at a time, the Straits of Gibraltar should ideally not become a waterfall.

The other project would be to allow Africans from different countries to study Medieval pump making and well digging techniques.

At present, a charity for water is offering to dig wells supplied with pumps, with modern drills and with pumps probably made in Europe for the African use, or perhaps in South Africa. With the know-how for Medieval pumps, Africans would be free to do it themselves.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
for Septuagesima Sunday**
13.II.2022

* Including sluices? Or just different polder levels? Up to them!
** Prewritten on 9.II.2022