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Parts A and B are here. Today’s post concludes this story of my Congo River trip, 1973.
Wednesday midday the ITB and all the barges finally stopped for the first time in a place called Bolobo. No dock per se existed, but the lead starboard barge was near enough the bank that long planks were put out. No trucks disembarked. In almost no time, the entire perimeter of the flotilla was surrounded by pirogues, hundreds of them came out to meet us in the shallows, bringing passengers or picking them up, delivering or retrieving goods. A flurry of frantic exchange took place before the ship’s whistle sounded and, less than a half hour after stopping, Major Vangu reversed into the stream, again letting the current push us downstream and away from the bank far enough so that the engines could be moved “all ahead full” turning to port, and we continued the journey upstream.
Wednesday evening I lingered at the railing as I had previous evenings. Carlos slept. A large waxing moon rose opposite a setting sun; the colors hypnotized me. Black oily waters, purple to blue to green to yellow reflections upon them, all framed by the greenery on the riverbanks. Later, we passed another river boat downbound, its searchlights probing the banks and the channel ahead. When the light beam swept over the foredeck, it illuminated literally hundreds of people there, sitting, standing in groups, or possibly asleep in the cool night air on the river.
By Thursday morning I recognized that in the age of air travel, a journey taking more than three days is an epic. The longer I was on the river, the more a comfortable monotony set in: the river, the banks, this island of humanity headed upstream felt like my new normal, and I loved it. The summer had given me confidence in speaking French, and I chatted with other first-class passengers. A Belgian professor was making his way to Kisangani; he said he’d done this river trip more than a dozen times and seemed to genuinely enjoy the trip and the post-colonial country. A Russian-educated Zairian engineer was going to work on a power transmission project; other than talking about his project, which I didn’t understand, and his dislike for Russian winters, he said little.
A bespectacled man said he worked for ONATRA. A soft-spoken man and very polite, he denied being a riverboat captain, but he was very knowledgeable about the river and the boats, and what I recall inspired confidence. He conveyed that river navigation was not as chaotic as some might imagine. For example, he said it took eight years to become a licensed captain, some time in classrooms but mostly on the K boats. He talked about a crewman responsible each voyage for updating charts, both marking that information on charts themselves and communicating it somehow to passing river boats and the ONATRA office in Kinshasa. Reflecting on this all these years later, I find this impressive. On the other hand, this was way before GPS, and I saw no aids to navigation, and the country has never had a Coast Guard, begging questions about standardized landmarks and references.
I was especially intrigued by his explanation that Zaire bought boat propulsion systems from the United States; as the large Mississippi boats were in mid-century converted from steam to diesel, components of the US steam plants were sold for use on the Congo River system, especially for the smaller boats on the tributaries, where—as I would later see at my post—small river ports stockpiled firewood for the boats, the most plentiful fuel available to heat the water in the boilers for the steam plant. It’s unimaginable now that I never asked about the engine room of Major Vangu, but then again maybe I did and have just forgotten what he said. I’m quite sure Major Vangu was twin diesel, based on the smell of exhaust and pattern of the wake. Nor did I ask to see the wheelhouse. I now wish I knew what if any instrumentation there was.
After dinner Thursday evening, we heard references to a fête pour les commerçants, a party at the bar for the merchants, some of whom might be leaving the boat the next day in Mbandaka. Food was in greater amounts and with greater variety. I had by then discovered that our food was prepared in the accommodations barge alongside. I suspected it had been purchased from the river folk as well. The party meant people were drinking more.
The highlighted drink was a local moonshine called lotoko, which I’d hear more about later where I worked. With more potent drinks and louder volume on the soukous music, more people were dancing. The merchants must have been the same women who traded with the villagers who arrived by pirogue. The women were gorgeous at the party, as they danced, drank, laughed, talked. I did notice the cabins in our first class section seemed to have lots of traffic, couples in and out, couples I’d not noticed before, leading me to suspect the merchants traded not only in manufactured imports and food staples, but I’m only describing what I saw, not judging.
Late morning Friday, I felt disappointment as buildings began appearing more frequently along the starboard side, then more decrepit boats half sunken along the bank. We were approaching Mbandaka, where soon the flotilla would stop. Carlos and I would leave the flotilla and go to a company house to figure out transport to our respective posts. In my case, many adventures, discoveries, and misunderstandings awaited me in the 600+ days ahead.
A way to conclude this account that took so many years to be written is to look at some of Joseph Conrad’s prose, a very different story about the same river. You’ve likely read it –or seen the Apocalypse Now adaptation—at some point and recall some descriptive lines: “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. … A great silence, an impenetrable forest. … The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. … The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted … The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once—somewhere—far away—in another existence perhaps.”
I was certainly far away from my previous existence, and the days in 1973 were the beginnings of a renewal for me. Away from all things familiar, I was becoming aware of a transforming self, certainly a different one for me than had I remained in the United States. My cynicism disappeared and curiosity took its place. And Conrad’s memorable though entirely colonial title Heart of Darkness notwithstanding, the sun is blindingly bright except of course in rainy season when torrential rain on tin roofs was deafening. Nights too could be deafening with sounds from the forest; the only human sounds might be drums marking some significant event or communicating it. Since I lived near the Lulonga, a tributary of the Congo, occasionally the rhythmic breathing of a steamer, was audible from miles away. Spending the next five years in the Congo watershed so isolated from my past, my people, facilitated my metamorphosis.
As with any journey and anyone’s life, I had no idea what lay ahead. One surprise was that I’d travel or aspire to travel other great rivers. Half century later I’d be near another great river—great in its importance historically to others and myself but not in its size relative to the Congo, and one once as pristine as the Congo. Shoals of regret and other obstacles always threaten, but you keep butting against them and pushing up whatever river or current or landform because it’s your river journey and you’ve never been to your destination yet; in fact, you don’t even know yet what that destination is or when you’re supposed to get there. So you just push past the obstacles and challenges, scramble aboard your ride, lean on the railings, watch what you don’t understand, and have a deep drink of it all.
Thanks for reading this. Since I can offer no photos, check out River Journeys: Congo River with Michael Wood, which shows a trip there not that different that what I saw. For the talking drum, see minute 31. For a steamer that could have come from the US, minute 59. But it’s best to just watch the whole doc through when you have an hour to relax; you’ll thank yourself. I was disappointed by the music choice, since so much sublime traditional music has been recorded, like Missa Luba.
For a discussion thread of contemporary Congo River issues from multiples perspectives, click here.
Adding this at the last moment: Henry Morton Stanley also kept a journal. Read extracts here.
Part A was here. Here is the start of the actual trip on the Integrated Tug Barge (ITB) that led to this blog.
Giant pusher tugs like the ITB Major Vangu were sometimes referred to as K-boats, because they ran between key river cities of Kinshasa and Kisangani. Waterfalls above Kisangani and below Kinshasa blocked continued navigation.
The other four ITBs were named Colonel Kokolo [see the image above from this May 2016 post], Colonel Tshatshi, Colonel Ebeya, and Capitaine Sakaroni, all named for early comrades of President Mobutu Sese Seko, de facto national leader from 1965 until 1997, formerly a soldier himself. Before independence, these boats bore names of Belgian places and men noteworthy in the colonial era. All the ITBs and other boats had to be built on the river near Kinshasa above significant rapids, Inga Falls, where the water tumbles more than 300’ in less than 10 miles. Without a canal around the falls, river navigation is cut off from the Atlantic Ocean port of Matadi, 100 miles away.
Today these boats all have gone out of service because of sinkings, deferred maintenance, and breakdowns, although 2021 reports say that two of them are at some stage of restoration for return to service. I recognize now that the design is quite similar to that of the largest pusher tugs on the Mississippi V, USACE’s largest tug on the US river.
Replacing the ITBs these days is a newer and more precarious type of vessel locally called a balenière [whale boat, ironically], precarious because of the number of passengers that crowd aboard. Interesting photos and blog post can be seen here.
Cargo upriver would be imported manufactured goods. Downriver it included a wide variety of food from the forest and river to feed the burgeoning population of the country’s largest city and capital. Since 1973, Kinshasa’s population has grown from about 1.5 million to 15 million. Also, barges moved forest products like tropical hardwood logs downstream for export through the port of Matadi. Cargo patterns were more complicated than that, of course, because an unknown number of the “passengers” on the ITBs were actually traveling merchants who left the Kinshasa and Kisangani with wholesale supplies of fish hooks, ammunition, steel wire, antibiotics, salt, cloth, plastic utensils, and other imported goods to sell to or trade with river folk in exchange for food items, which the merchants would then sell in markets in the cities. Many of these merchants were women.
As I said earlier, Carlos, my traveling partner, had already spent a year upriver. He’d grown up speaking Puerto Rican Spanish and English, now seemed fluent in French and self-confident in Lingala, the Zairian language used by a security official wearing the flag-pin who challenged our tickets, possibly surprised by two non-Africans making their way through the crowds to the boat. Months later I understood through experience, which I could go into another in an installment, that the official’s challenging of our documents was just a shakedown; if denied entry to the boat, he calculated we would be willing to offer a bribe. On this occasion, he backed off, but bribes later became a too-common annoyance .
Lingala is a trading language that developed on a stretch of the Congo River system. A trading language, sometimes called a creole or lingua franca, is in fact linguistic infrastructure essential for communication among isolated places. Along this long waterway, an entirely different language is spoken every 50 miles or so. To overcome this, a dominant language, Bobangi, eventually got simplified, to ease learning it and to streamline business transactions. Eventually referred to as Lingala, I can vouch that this language has easy grammar and vocabulary and many borrowed French words. I recall listening to a Mobutu speech once and hearing repeated phrases like “Yoka ngai. Ezali tres important! [Listen to me. It’s very important.]” During colonial times, Lingala was further simplified, regularized, and written down for use by missionaries and colonial administrators. Since it’s currently used for lyrics in soukous, a popular music with a following all over West Africa, familiarity has spread regionally, beyond the country’s borders. Announcements in airports were made in Lingala first, and then French. In eastern Zaire and in East Africa more generally, that role is played by Swahili, a name you may be more familiar with.
Challenges notwithstanding, Carlos and I got to the river’s edge and crossed the narrow wooden gangway. Once on board, a crewman showed us to the second deck, where “first class” cabins opened to wide, shaded hallways running along either side of the boat. Carlos and I would share a small starboard cabin with one bed. The all metal room was stifling hot from the tropical sun baking down on the steel deck above. The small basin in the room also had only hot water, since it came from a steel storage tank above the cabin just behind the wheelhouse, a sunny spot.
The deck barges, at least 100’ by 300’, were cabled together, two by two; they served as a parking lot for a dozen or more trucks, tarps tied securely over their cargo. They were 1960s Mercedes Benzes with rounded-cabs painted jade green and mustard yellow. Between the trucks, many dozens of 55-gallon drums, blue, red, black, or just rusty, were arranged in clusters for their different intended customers in ports upriver. I saw strong men roll some barrels on board, one by one across the wooden gangplanks. The flex in the gangplanks gave evidence of their weight. Other cargo was carried across those planks atop the heads of strong, barefoot men.
A surprise was the number of people already camped out on the deck barges in the shade created by the cargo trucks. I imagined they may have been the drivers along with any passengers that had made arrangements to ride in or atop the trucks once they drove off the barge. Of course, I may have misinterpreted that, along with many other things. What’s clear is that in the US, no passengers would ride here. In fact, no mention was ever made of life jackets; I never saw any, which explain the high loss of life whenever an ITB, ferry, or baleinière sinks.
A fifth barge had been lashed to the starboard bow quarter of Major Vangu. It was an accommodation barge with a roof and open sides. People spread out raffia mats or just cotton pagnes to claim some deck space where they sat or slept. A large forward area incorporated a steel trough, for cooking over firewood; I concluded the women cooking there operated a sort of commercial kitchen, selling food to passengers throughout the journey. I later learned that this barge required a second-class ticket, and the space on the cargo barges among the trucks and barrels was sold as third class.
It was late Monday afternoon when the ship’s whistle sounded, and after crew cast off lines, Major Vangu dropped downstream some distance as it distanced itself from the bank and then pointed itself toward the river center, a floating city powering upstream between the drifting hyacinths.
I spent the first hours leaning on the railing taking it all in: the geography and the river itself, its current, the hyacinth islands, the dark water, the low banks. It was much cooler out by the railing than in the cabin. Soon the few traces of urban Kinshasa to starboard and more distant Brazzaville to port disappeared, giving way to grassy banks, likely unchanged from what Henry Stanley and Joseph Conrad after him saw.
As dusk descended, a bell rang, calling first class passengers to dinner. A restaurant with metal chairs and tables was located in an area just forward of the first class cabins. The wheelhouse was above this, only accessible to the crew. The fluorescent-lit mess hall had screened portholes, side windows, and doors, but swarms of flying insects covered the lights. A dozen or more first-class passengers gathered for dinner: well-used metal plates held boiled manioc, spicy greens, and fresh, grilled fish. It was delicious, and Carlos and I washed it down with a large bottle of warm Primus beer each. Soukous music played from a record player behind the bar, as wide as the tug and along the forward wall. The bar was as beautiful as it was massive: varnished surfaces of several light-colored woods, inscribed with exquisite carvings of Congolese river village scenes. Not having photos of this is just “wrong.”
That first night I recall not getting much sleep. Standing at the rail watching the river, I wondered about many things: the lives of several hundred people in our flotilla, my future, the next day.
Sunrise arrived gradually on the river, which varied in width from a quarter mile to several miles, although it was hard at any given time to know if we were traveling between long, sinuous islands, or in fact a narrow portion of the river that formed the international border between Zaire and Congo Brazzaville. Hindsight and our current access to satellite images 
tell me it was the former; the single line drawn on maps in no way represents what the river actually looks like; it’s more like an irregular braid of channels draining the vast and wet forest. Low-lying land to the east was mostly flat, so when the first hints of dawn came, I imagined us at sea, with palms and other trees marking islands.
It seemed meaningless to measure distances to the shore from the boat in abstract units like miles or kilometers; in fact, distance there was not measured at all but perceived in color: gray riverbanks are the farthest, as we approached them, they turned blue, and finally when you could easily swim to the edge, they looked green and yellow. In narrow parts of the river or at least the channel, the grass defining the bank made up a living breathing undulating being as our bow wave passed through. Land and water crawled past all day long, unexplored, water sometimes seemed oily or rusty brown from tannins from all the decaying organic debris from the vast forest.
Another riverboat passed, an assembled flotilla just like Major Vangu. Some ferries crossed ahead of us, but I never learned either their routes or their frequency. In this remote area not that distant from the capital, news and information didn’t always travel. Many pirogues, some motorized with 15-hp outboards and others with from two to eight standing paddlers, dipping and leaning on their oars in perfect synch, would approach from invisible villages along the river. (Click here for 55 images of pirogues; I include the same link at the end.)
Major Vangu never even slowed down for approaching pirogues. The villagers loaded these pirogues deep with fish, fresh and smoked, chikwangue (fermented manioc paste wrapped in banana leaves), fruits of all sorts, some I didn’t recognize. Fresh and smoked fish was piled in woven baskets. One fish was easily five feet long, a foot in girth. I imagined its mouth could encompass a soccer ball. This monster Congo catfish (called el capitain ) weighed at least 100 pounds by my estimate. The merchant who bought it soon disappeared into the second class accommodation barge.
Some pirogues came with baskets of forest meat—monkeys, antelopes, crocodiles, scaly pangolins, and unidentifiable animals. The Congo basin and river is home to varieties and species as yet undiscovered. In most cases, the “bush meat” appeared to be smoked, hair singed off, but the original carcass still recognizable. [Those are links to check out.]
Whenever villagers brought their pirogues alongside the flotilla, traveling merchants, mostly women and some with children helping them, would gather as they approached to study the products in the deeply-laden dugouts. A merchant wanting to buy a basket of goods tossed a wet rag onto those goods into the pirogue, as a way of placing the bid. A few arguments, vicious in tone and volume although I understood nothing they yelled at each other, happened whenever wet rags landed on a basket almost simultaneously. A similar image that comes to mind now is excited traders on the stock exchange floor when the market is rallying or tumbling.
Given the size of these pirogues and their minimal freeboard, I marveled at the skill and speed of the paddlers. They arrived at night as well as during the day. When we passed some larger though mostly invisible villages nestled in the trees along the stream, sometimes pirogues were rafted up four deep alongside the flotilla. “Landing” was always the same; at the right moment the bow person would drop the paddle, grab a painter, and jump onto the barge, even if that meant walking across one or several pirogues closer to the barge. Making it even more remarkable, that person would step only on the gunwales, not inside the pirogue itself.
But at least once, I saw paddlers misjudge the size or speed of the flotilla bow wave as they approached, only to lose their balance and capsize, sending paddlers and all their baskets of wares into the river, an incalculable loss.
To be concluded in part 3. Again, here are 55 images of pirogues, typical of the ones I saw.
Jumping forward for a marginally related story: When I got to my post and got “adopted” by a guy who became my resource and local guide, I told him I wanted to buy a pirogue. His name was Bontoli and he kept making excuses for not making arrangement, even while taking me into the forest to observe as he hunted. Later he told me that he was so horrified by the idea that in a pirogue I might drown, be attacked by hippos or anacondas, or eaten by crocodiles that he went to the local fisherman and threatened them NOT to sell the white guy a pirogue. I’m not sure what he threatened to do to anyone who sold me a pirogue, but no one would talk to me. Bontoli likely saved my life. Melesi mingi, ndeko ngai. I’ve many stories about Bontoli, below, the only photo I have of him, and yes, monkeys were a menu item, market price per pound being calculated here.
How did I get interested in tugboats? Here is an autobiographical and long response, even though it’s only part 1 of 3, or in this case, A of A B C. Bear with the scintillating prose, but I possess nary a single photo from this period.
To answer the frequently asked question above, I’ve alluded to the Congo River and an unplanned trip I took almost half a century ago, my first gallivant. Memory of that voyage still burns brightly even though the trip took a mere four days and nights. As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ve written this overdue account. Open an internet map and follow along; the following Congolese (DRC) cities are mentioned in this order, not all the river voyage: Goma, Bukavu, Kinshasa, Mbandaka, Matadi, Bolobo. The country then was called Zaire, which I’ll use in this narrative. So, let me set more of the scene.
I was 21 when this trip on the Congo River swept me along. In 1973, I had a young person’s standard illusions of invulnerability, too little wisdom or information to know fear. Today my fears discourage a repeat trip, although I occasionally consider doing it this way, mostly to take photos, but the lens in my mature brain would differently process the now-changed country and its river traffic.
Back then I didn’t even own a camera. I subscribed to the notion that with a pen and notebook I could describe everything; the error there is failing to predict how many years would pass before I returned to read those descriptions. Today when I open those notebooks, the paper is crumbling and either the ink bled into the paper or sentences I can read have references so piecemeal and cryptic that memories triggered are faint, almost useless. My memories have the challenge of illuminating across half a century, but I trust them more than the notebooks. Another source are the lush Archives of Everything called the internet, a jungle of information.
Call me no Charlie Marlow; although he and I have yarn spinning in common, Marlow’s detail is as lush as the river, but then again the literary giant Joseph Conrad himself devised the character Marlow to narrate a the journey to an intimate audience seated in a yawl around him, and they were likely NOT drinking tea. Although Conrad knew the river from the wheelhouse, I was a passenger, and new to exotic places. As you read this blog post, feel free to drink whatever you choose. As I said earlier, my account is long, so pour yourself an extra. I’ve divided the account into three parts. If you choose to think I was intrepid in taking this trip, fine, although the truth is that as a quite typical 21-year old, I saw fewer causes for alarm, an innocent abroad not quickly enough moving from naïveté to experience.
It was the summer that I traveled abroad for the first time, a July series of flights from western New York to to eastern Zaire, a town called Goma. Then I got on a bus that crept along a narrow, sinuous road beside a volcanic lake the last 120 miles to Bukavu, specifically, a Peace Corps training center in a place beyond my imagining. Bukavu was a hilly border city of 150,000 on Lake Kivu, one of the Great Rift Valley lakes in the center of the continent. To be clear, most of the 150,000 inhabitants lived in wattle/daub houses with no electricity or running water. Bukavu in colonial times (pre-1960) was referred to as the Switzerland of the Congo, an almost temperate getaway for wealthy colonials—many working in the hot, mineral-rich south—who built villas in stone and concrete curvilinear Art Deco homes and business district. Click on the image below for the Atlas Obscura story.
After 1960, however, many of these buildings were abandoned, some damaged in the Simba rebellion, and almost all in decay, some with roofs collapsed. As impressive as they were to me, an outsider, who saw them as beautiful ruins, I understood they were for the locals a painful reminder of colonial history, practices, abuses.
In Bukavu, I studied French and Lingala, adapted to life in a new language, spending long days in small groups speaking only French. In free time, I explored on foot, with Amy—also a trainee—who spoke better French than I did and who insisted we speak only French as we hiked to markets, farms, and even had adventures (for another telling) along the Ruzizi River border with Rwanda. We both passed language tests, and became paid volunteers with the company (Peace Corps or PC, hopefully not mistaken for a member of a group Conrad mentions, the Eldorado Exploring Expedition). We were both disappointed that Amy was assigned to stay in the Bukavu area, and I to the opposite side of the country, but we said our adieus, expecting to meet up again. My destination was a boarding school near Mbandaka, a river town on the Equator itself and in Equateur Province, where I’d work for the next two years. I never saw Amy again, although I know she has done well.
At the time I knew little more than that Equateur was huge, much of it hard to get to, the least populated province of the country, the heart of Africa’s equatorial forest, the tropical wilds. I had already heard anecdotes about Equateur from my traveling comrade, Carlos, who had been a volunteer the previous year at a post not far from my destination.
To get there, Carlos and I took an Air Zaire DC-4 from Goma to the capital, Kinshasa, the most direct route. Once in Kinshasa, however, we learned that the upcountry airplane had broken down, canceling flights to Mbandaka, possibly for six weeks. With that information, we returned to the company office in Kinshasa, hoping this allowed us to be “free” until that airplane was repaired.
I had a work ethic already, but I was not ready to get to work. Time had sped by that summer, bringing so many changes that I wanted to stave off the future for a few weeks longer. I can’t stress enough how different everything becomes when you speak a new language all the time. At the training center, we were strongly encouraged to speak only French from waking up until going to sleep. This is called language immersion; you acquire a new language much more quickly if you immerse every waking hour in that language. I considered my language learning a success when I first dreamt in French. Changing languages is like changing lenses; you see the world and your interactions in it differently, you think in the new language, and you might behave differently. My “French” personality is less serious, much freer, a feeling I retain to this day whenever I’m speaking that language.
Going upcountry to Equateur also meant isolation, I imagined, whereas Kinshasa in the company hostel and money in my pocket meant socializing with new friends, other volunteers, the newest of whom had been in the country only since early July, like me. Amy wasn’t there, but being with these companions helped me process my transformative summer. They for the most too were abroad for the first time, although one volunteer had grown up in near Kinshasa, the son of missionary parents. He shared much insightful information about the country and its cultures.
“Use an alternate route but get up there ASAP” the company told Carlos and me when we mentioned the broken-down airplane. An alternate route meant only one thing, the river, the natural infrastructure. You couldn’t drive a very direct route along the river through jungle; that might take two weeks or longer with a Land Rover; no public road transport existed there, and the roads subject to washouts. River navigation was managed by ONATRA (Office National des Transports). At their ticket office, an agent said the next upbound riverboat boarded in three days, with departure whenever boarding was complete. Previous tugster posts about Congo River transport can be found here.
Departure day soon arrived, and we caught a taxi from the hostel to the port. The river port was not an orderly place like an airport. Taxis, huge cargo trucks, motorbikes, porters with hand trucks, and hundreds of people moved slowly, randomly but decisively toward the water’s edge. Describing that crowd requires words like chaotic but also colorful and diligent. Zairian women, many of whom carried baskets or bundles on their heads and maybe a baby on their backs, wore bold colorful cloth wraps called pagnes, sometimes matching headscarves and tops, never pants or anything factory made, rarely shoes. Many men dressed in clothing washed in muddy water so often it seemed a uniform ochre; others wore parts of green military uniforms or—if economically or politically elite—they wore an abacost in shiny blue or brown fabric and patterned after what the president wore; political party members might wear a lapel pin with the green/yellow/red national flag. Men carrying the heaviest loads—on their heads—did so bare-chested and, like the women mentioned earlier, barefoot.
Descending a taxi, Carlos and I hired one of the many men there with a push cart—a box on an axle between two compact automobile wheels—at a small price to move our bags to the boat, which the ticket identified as Major Vangu. We then plunged ourselves into the crowd, pushing gently toward the river, funneling through the most obvious opening between rickety one-story buildings and improvised fences made of roofing sheets and car sheet panels. Ahead, boats of all sizes and in mostly decrepit condition were concentrated along the bank. Some were rusty wrecks, oxidation the same shade of ochre as the exposed dirt, the clothing, and the unwhitewashed buildings. Partly beached barges linked with wooden beams formed an improvised pier. The river current was visible from random floating islands—clumps of water hyacinths—hurriedly moving downstream toward Inga Falls several miles away. The hyacinths, with pretty white flowers, were an invasive species, introduced by a well-intentioned colonial who thought they might be an exotic decorative plant. They thrived and now they floated everywhere; some lodged between the boats, giving the impression of a ragbag marina inside a garden. Countless dugout canoes called pirogues, impossibly narrow and moved by one or more standing paddlers, navigated randomly as well in this anarchy of boats and plants.
Major Vangu didn’t look like a riverboat. It was more like a flotilla, a set of barges cabled together and at the downstream end, the prime mover, an immense “four-decker” tugboat. It had huge push knees on its squared off bow. The top deck—the wheelhouse—extended only about a third of the way toward the stern. It had once been painted white, but the surface was dulled, as if it had not seen paint or wash since Congolese independence in 1960, maybe since it left the Congo River shipyard in the 1950s or earlier with a Belgian name I’ve not yet been able to discover. Major Vangu was one of five integrated tug/barges (ITBs as they seem everywhere referred to in the records, French language records I might add) that moved goods and people the roughly thousand miles between Kinshasa and Kisangani, with about once-weekly departures from those terminuses. The barges had no names that I recall, but they could have had numbers that I didn’t even notice.
To be continued in parts 2 and 3. Meanwhile, since there are zero photos here, check out this panoply of Congo riverboat images at this site. The sixth image below “sans nom” 1974 Yangambi” might very well be Major Vangu. It is as I remember it.
A few years have already passed since I posted the first in this series, which I should have called and I’m still in search of a photo of the ITB Major Vangu back in 1973 and 1974. But I was thrilled to open my email the other morning and find these photos taken in 1992 by Matt Schoenfelder. Check out his impressive range of galleries here.
The huge pusher tug in the photo below is Colonel Kokolo, recently refurbished and returned to service on the Congo River. Click here for a map of key waterways in the Congo; upper center, I lived west of Basankusu for two years teaching at a high school.
Matt writes, “I was looking through the web for some images of the Onatra barge from the Congo River and came across your site and read that you had traveled up the Congo River some years ago (my note: 1973-4). In 1992, together with a German man I met in Kisangani, I bought a dugout canoe and the two of us paddled 4 weeks down the Congo River to Kinshasa. Needless to say it was the adventure of a lifetime! Anyway, I have just recently scanned some of the old fuzzy and scratched film and thought you might appreciate a few images. From Kinshasa I wanted to get to Zambia and the “best” option available was to get back on the river and travel by barge to Ilebo, where I could take the train down to Lubumbashi. Well it sounded nice on paper but turned out to be an ordeal (as was ANYTHING in Zaire at that time!!) After the 4 weeks on the canoe I then spent another 13 days moving slowly upstream to Illebo on the river (tug and ) barge, which was supposed to be 5 days. The 3-day train trip from Ilebo to Lubumbashi took 30 days…walking would have been quicker! I added that last bit as I will include a few shots from the river barge I took to Ilebo. The images are far from high quality but you may find them interesting nonetheless.
That (tug and ) barge was called the Wandeka IV. Actually I was only on it for 8 of the 13 days. It broke down somewhere along the Kasai River and I was able to get on a German [vessel] from the company Strabag. I don’t have any images scanned of that barge but should I get around to that I’ll send you a few.
Incidentally, in that image of the Wandeka you will notice a small bag just behind me. This was my “day pack” and all it carried was my money. In Kinshasa (after being robbed at gunpoint by the police) I was able to cash in 200$ of travellers checks – after several days of going from bank to bank and hearing that they simply didn’t have any money. At that time 1 dollar was 2 million Zaires (when I entered the country 1$ = 1,000,000 Zaires – 3 months later when I finally left it was 1$ = 5,000,000 Zaires!). The largest note they had available at the bank was 50,000 Zaires so that 200$ translated to 8,000 bills and it was a huge load to tug around with me! I carried it with me for the next 6 weeks, happy whenever I could pay for something and relieve the load a little.
I doubt I would ever repeat that journey but it was perhaps the most incredible chapter in my travels. Hardly a pleasure but fascinating and exciting nonetheless.”
I remember from my experience that riding on the tug was considered first class; the folks on the barge in the photo above . . well, they would be traveling second class.
Many thanks to Matt for getting in touch and sharing these photos.
Some of my scratchy old Congo photos can be found here. And yes, that person below was me as a mere young manster.
Bokakata, DRC (then Zaire) 1973
This series is used to catch up on items started.
Gregory Farino took this foto from the wheelhouse of a tugboat on the Congo River around 1980. He does not recall the name, as he was just catching a ride. My question is this: would the minimal detail of the stem bitt and shape of the bow surrounding it give the impression that this may be an “American” style tug serving the end of its life on an African river. The problem with that theory is that most of the Congo River is separated from the sea by waterfalls. Although I heard stories when I lived there and there are and have been shipyards above the falls going back to the time of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” I have no hard information that any vessels were taken around the falls by train and reassembled for use here. Anyone help?
Recognize the vessel below? The foto was taken by Jan van der Doe. Today it’s called Samuel de Champlain and appeared in this blog recently here.
Although it was built in Texas in 1976 as Musketeer Fury, it operated for a while as well as an Italian tug called Vortice, shown here post-fire. Here’s what frequent contributor Jan van der Doe wrote a few weeks ago: “While plying the waters near Trieste in 1993, she suffered a devastating fire to her upper engine room and deckhouse. The accommodations were completely destroyed and much of the steel deck and superstructure warped from the heat. The vessel was laid up in Italy until McKeil Marine Ltd. purchased Vortice on spec in the mid-’90s and towed her to Hamilton, Ontario. The engines were not damaged, probably the reason the tug came to Canada. I [was] onboard a few times during her lay up in Hamilton.” Here’s a link and foto suggesting the fire happened on the Atlantic off the Azores.
Excuse my parenthetical insertions, but Capt. Thalassic wrote this of Sachem, featured here recently: Sachem was built (1902, Pusey & Jones, hull #306. By the way Cangarda was built in the same yard in 1901 as hull #302) for J. Roberts Maxwell. It had elegant lines and significantly a very large main cabin for entertaining. Power was provided by a Fairbanks 8 cylinder slow speed diesel. During WW 2 the yacht was passed to the Navy and I believe engaged in submarine patrols and training in the Caribbean. After the war it was sold to the Circle line and probably had the most elegant lines in a fleet of converted landing craft although I am sure the direct drive diesel was terrifically difficult to maneuver with in NY harbor. Eventually it was retired and sold as junk to an organization known as the Hudson River Maritime Academy which was based in West New York NJ. The organization was less about maritime or learning than it was about drinking and it went bust. The owner of the pier sold the vessel to Butch Miller from Cincinnati. (Butch owned a company founded by his father that had developed those augers which you see on all those utility trucks.) Butch would drive a van from Ohio to NJ to renovate and get the vessel running. This proved almost impossible and Butch was convinced that he had to get the vessel closer to home. He purchased a Murray Tregurtha unit and plopped it on the rear deck. His first plan was to sail up the New England coast, down the Saint Lawrence. He sailed out of NY harbor with a complete compliment of road maps and promptly ran aground in the fog. He was towed back into NY harbor and was put up in Newtown Creek for another year. Eventually he headed north up the Hudson. The helm was a lawn chair on the roof and steering was done with a broomstick tied to the controls on the MT unit below. Amazingly Butch got upstate and through the canal all the way to Buffalo (I often repeat his description of the canal as “floating through a corn field”) and then through Erie, Huron (where he was detained by Customs for wandering over the border line near Windsor/Detroit). He went all the way down Michigan to Chicago, through the Chicago River to the Mississippi, down the Mississippi to Cairo and then up the Ohio to the Cincinnati area. It was truly an adventure of a life time and it is incredible he made it. As far a I know the vessel sits in a backwater on the Kentucky side of the Ohio near Cincinnati. It is sad retirement for an elegant vessel but it was an amazing adventure. It is fun and satisfying to see that every once in a while the eccentrics with old boats do live out a dream. ” In this Halloween season, it may just be part of the entertainment there . . . given this story. The foto is by Seth Tane, showing Sachem in that appears to be waters off Yonkers.
Let’s sign off with this vessel . . . Bertha. See the foto on the left margin. Surely this can’t be lost!!
Thans to Gregory, Jan, and Seth for use of these fotos. I look forward to any and all followup to these fotos.
The last time I had Congo River fotos here was almost seven years ago! In that post, I mention being a Peace Corps volunteer in the DRC (then Zaire) back in 1973. When I completely training and tried to fly up to my post, I learned the airplane was out of commission and the river was my only option to travel up there. I was thrilled! And now I’m thrilled again to have these fotos. These are NOT my fotos but Gregory Farino–who worked there about five years after me–generously permits me to use these. We don’t know the name of this “pousseur” tug–not unlike some of the Mississippi River “pushers,” but it looks similar to
what I recall of my conveyance, Major Vangu lashed to four huge barges. I believe Major Vangu has since sunk. The “O” on the stack stands for Onatra (Office National de Transports). For four nights and days non-stop, the tow went north. I shared a cabin on the second level with another PC volunteer. The enclosed area forward was a bar/restaurant with beautiful carved wood. The two levels above that were crew accommodations and wheelhouse, which I didn’t see.
These are two “second class” accommodation barges. Our tow had one of these. It also had two “third class” units, regular flat cargo barges with barrels of fuel for upriver towns, breakbulk bundles, and truckloads of fuel and other cargo. As I recall this was a pre-container time. And passengers who hadn’t even enough for the “second class” barges, rested in the shade of the cargo and under the trucks.
Here is account and good fotos of some folks who did this river ten years after me. And here’s an Atlantic article I recall reading, a person who did the trip in the early 1990s.
During my trip, I watched dozens of dugouts (pirogues) like these, loaded deep with forest meat and dried/fresh fish, paddled up alongside the tow while underway to trade for products (medicine, blades, ammunition, fish hooks and line, salt) not available in the forest/river villages. And when I say “paddled,” I mean stand-up paddled . . . as it was then done. More than once, the pirogue, caught in the wake, capsized, sending paddler(s) and cargo into the river. And the tow continued upriver.
I’d love to hear from anyone who has traveled on the Congo River in the past 10 years. I have a fantasy to retrace this trip, dangers and inconvenience notwithstanding.
Many thanks to Gregory Farino for bringing these fotos out.
Not quite two weeks ago I did my first post of Blount-built boats in far flung places. Read it here; a list of sixth boro Blount vessels appears at the end.
Now I’m thrilled to put up these fotos, generously sent by Julie Blount, executive vice president of Blount Boats, Inc. This is the launch of Blount’s cargo vessel Kasai, 1960, bound for
the huge inland waterways of the Congo.
Unrelated but what you might see on the inland waterways of central Africa could include MV Liemba, the second oldest operating steam ship in the world. MV Liemba is the ex-Graf von Götzen built 1912 in Papenburg, Germany on the Ems River, taken apart, and reassembled on the banks of Lake Tanganyika) . See this fine fine video trailer of MV Liemba underway.
Gratuitous foto of an interesting Blount vessel Sailor, taken on the Delaware River south of Philly last summer, and
one of Twin Tube provisioning Songa Emerald taken in the sixth boro last week. Fire Island Ferries operates over a half dozen Blount boats.
Back to Blount’s Kasai, I wonder where it is today. For an interesting set of fotos of Congo River system vessels from the time of Joseph Conrad until the relative present, click here. The last shot of the skeletal remains of a steam vessel on a riverbank is haunting.
Thanks again to Julie Blount for the two fotos from the Blount archives. The last two fotos by Will Van Dorp.
tugster: a waterblog 
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