The Principle of The Bucket

’Water Fetching’’ courtesy: ‘’Emmanuel Obuobi Bekoe’’ Courtesy: Kuenyehia Prize for Contemporary African Art,
 
Is what you’re fighting for worth fighting for?
''They drowned me in the Jordan
When they tried to wash me clean
They got the stains out
But now it's too damn hard to breathe
They told me he's a good Lord
As they tied the shackles to my feet
They drowned me in the Jordan
And then they walked away from me...''
- Jordan, American singer-songwriter Joy Oladokun, 2021
 
What is the principle of the bucket?

In my youth in Ghana, we were plagued by a lack of clean running water, even in the capital, Accra.
When the taps went off, which was very common, my parents used to send us with buckets. We would walk, sometimes for hours, to get clean water, which we stored in large barrels for weeks at a time.
If we were lucky and it rained, we devised ingenious methods to collect the rain from our corrugated roofs into specially made containers to store. This was as pure as we co...