DR Congo’s riverboat economy – how a floating transport system tells the country’s story

Road transportation in the Democratic Republic of Congo has received much scholarly attention. Some studies have examined the urban landscape (p.142). Others have studied transportation in the context of armed conflict in the east of the country, where roadblocks are a pronounced feature.

The Congo Basin’s inland waterways, of which 25,000km are classified as navigable, have been studied with regard to the taxation regime of larger pushboat-barge convoys. The less far-reaching scale of small- and medium-scale river transportation, however, so far has been less studied. This is despite the overwhelming reliance of cities such as Kinshasa, Mbandaka and Kisangani on these smaller craft.

A significant part of the traffic on these waterways is handled today by wooden cargo ships called baleinières (literally “whaleboats” in English). Measuring between 20 and 40 metres in length, these locally developed, handcrafted vessels connect the ever-growing cities with crop-producing communities in the rainforest hinterlands along distant fertile riverbanks.

Baleinières have been the focus of my ongoing research, centred mainly on the city of Kisangani in DR Congo’s Tshopo province. I have been interested in the emergence, transformation, materials and socio-technical realities of these handmade watercraft, their propulsion system and their crews. I have also paid attention to the systemic character of their artisanal infrastructure and its reliance on traditional environmental knowledge.

Wooden baleinières date back to the early 1960s. But since the 1990s they have been crucial to the reinvention of a transport system across the Congo Basin. These wooden ships ensure the food security of central Africa’s riverine cities, including the continent’s third-largest city, Kinshasa. They also connect the national capital to many of the country’s provinces.

Owing to a lack of statistics and limited research to date, reliable figures are available only for Kisangani, a city of two million at the upper end of the navigable Congo river. Here, about 80 baleinières arrive in the private secondary ports of the city every month, each carrying an average of 150 tons of goods and around 150 passengers.

Kinshasa, a city of 17 million, is estimated to welcome several hundred baleinières every month.

Sadly, baleinières are notorious for their frequent and often devastating accidents. Every year, hundreds, if not thousands, of lives are lost.

There is still a lack of detailed research into the complex socio-technical factors underlying these accidents, as well as into how hundreds of people cope with them every year. Key factors include structural weaknesses of the ships and lack of professional training and safe operation in a context of economic urgency.

Entirely the product of local, frugal innovation, these ships have been developed out of necessity. This accounts for their affordability, their uncompromising efficiency, and their capacity to operate without infrastructure like fortified harbours, cranes and docks, within a dynamic environment.

The Congo’s wooden ships encapsulate the realities and the paradoxes of Congolese life today. A grassroots technical and economic ingenuity secures the food supply of millions, yet enjoys no encouragement or protection against divisive, unregulated capitalism. This capitalism wears on the bodies of people and ships alike. Owners, crews, and the traders they carry shield themselves by working alone on the basis of interpersonal ties.

Origins, materials and propulsion

The colonial ancestors that gave the baleinières their name were nine-metre, deckless, engineless vessels riveted from prefabricated Belgian steel and towed behind steamers to carry building materials. Today only the name survives. The prototypes of wooden baleinières were built in the early 1960s by André “Bibeyi”, a Congolese craftsman who fused colonial carpentry skills with local traditional knowledge.

Bibeyi crafted the frame with local hardwoods and sealed it with bitumen, n'kasa ya kwanga leaves and strips of recycled aluminium sheet. The hull he made of the soft tola wood, the preferred timber for dugouts. In the 1980s and 1990s Bibeyi’s colleagues and their offspring opened shipyards on nearly all major waterways. In 2007, boat builders from Lake Kivu, in eastern DRC, introduced the Indian Ocean ship building tradition to Tshopo province. The presence of both these two building and caulking styles at the upper end of the navigable Congo spurred creativity among younger Congolese builders.

In the late 2000s, baleinières were further improved by converting low-cost Chinese-made diesel engines into a new propulsion system. Local mechanics soon modified the cooling system and started adding more engines as the ships could now grow in size.

Beyond cost and simple spare parts, the advantage of this new propulsion system was that when one engine needed repair, the others kept running. So there were no more real breakdowns. What had been a makeshift solution for occasional travel gradually became a regular and reliable transport system.

Baleinières are indeed one of the DR Congo’s very few locally developed and exported technologies. Congolese shipbuilders have opened mobile shipyards in the neighbouring countries of the Republic of Congo (Congo-Brazzaville), the Central African Republic and Cameroon.

Baleinières are floating microcosms of life in the DR Congo today. They embody, in short, what French anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1966) called a total social fact: their material constitution incorporates different layers of the DR Congo’s history, while their operation reveals the country’s geographic, economic, political, infrastructural and cultural realities.

Enabling an economy of survival

Across the DR Congo, decades of demographic growth and disintegrating long-distance connectivity have shifted the centralised colonial system — once funnelling towards Kinshasa — into a patchwork of disconnected territorial islands. Baleinières developed to meet the need for medium-range transport around them.

The craft carry food (rice, cassava, palm oil, poultry, caterpillars, local spirits, livestock, bushmeat, fish) to the city. They haul back to the villages manufactured goods (roofing sheets, furniture, motorbikes, mattresses, medical drugs, mosquito nets, phones, flipflops, clothes).

They also carry the traders themselves, as the economy they serve allows small-scale traders to earn a modest living with little or no starting capital. They are a window into the economic reality of most Congolese, who live day to day in a popular economy of survival. Because the thin margin of a trade is too easily lost if entrusted to anyone else, one travels with one’s goods. Officials who cite nocturnal navigation as a main cause of accidents often forget that, if one cannot travel at night, only half the trade journeys can be made, leaving little chance to make ends meet.

Artisanal infrastructure

The system’s secret lies in how it meets the infrastructural challenges of river transport. Top of these challenges is loading and unloading under ever-changing water levels, without fortified harbours, cranes and the like. A baleinière’s operability rests on the skilled integration of engineered, muscular and natural forces, through kinetic solidarity and learned technique.

One such artisanal infrastructure is “kotindika”: when the loaded ship settles onto the riverbed, porters wade in and push it into deeper water. Since a ship’s stewards are always porters too, a baleinière with two dugouts serving as mobile gangways effectively carries its own port, loading or unloading wherever it wants.

The system is more inclusive than “hard” transport infrastructure: hundreds of porters, stewards and their families depend on it. It is also cheaper and more adaptable.

Local river markets rise and fade at shifting stopover locations, in tune with the rainforest’s yearly production cycle and the volatile purchasing power of travelling traders.

However, driven by a weekly rhythm their passengers dictate, few crew members can spare the time or money for training, maintenance, or rest. Baleinières are a solution, but a double-edged one.

Governance at the margin of the state

The sheer size of the Congo Basin and its waterways makes governance difficult. Operating at the margin of the state, baleinieres’ success is clearly tied to their ability to avoid tight bureaucratic control, since roadblocks are hard to mount on the water.

At the same time, state services tap into this economy through taxation and hassles in the ports of river towns.

A few development initiatives have tried to fix the accident problem by regulating the design and construction of vessels in accordance with foreign standards. Their impact has been limited because these initiatives do not account for local operational realities. This is a phenomenon known as a “revenge of contexts”.

However, the baleinière phenomenon has grown so vast, and the need for transport too pressing, to leave the system as it is. Any future initiative hinges on its embeddedness in local communities of practitioners and their existing ways of doing, speaking and operating.

Peter Lambertz has received funding from the Gerda Henkel Foundation (grant no. AZ 37_F_18) and the EU's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Marie-Curie grant no. 846498). His research is also supported by the Mobeka initiative of applied anthropology in Kisangani (www.mobeka.org).

This article was originally published on The Conversation by Peter Lambertz, Research associate, Centre d'anthropologie culturelle, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and is republished here unaltered under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-ND, no derivatives). Read the original article.