49. Lake Tanganyika: Kalemie, Zaire to Bujumbura, Burundi

Trip route: pink for flight to Kalemie, Blue dots for steamer between Kalemie and Uvira, yellow dots for road travel in Burundi, Rwand and into Tanzania. Base map copied from TIMES Atlas of the World.

In our previous post we spent a few days in Kalemie, Zaire, waiting for the boat to Bujumbura, Burundi. At the time we made this trip there were so few foreigners trying our route that our first edition Africa on Cheap mentioned the possibility but had no other information.  As with the rail system the Tanganyika Lake steamer dated from 1926, and its own way of life had developed.  In theory there were two classes, where 2^nd class was not allowed up on deck.  However, as you will see, once we were under way it just happened that this was not enforced.  We knew this ahead of time so we were able to stake out a bit of the deck, and that is where we spent the whole trip.

Our spot on the deck of the Urundi

In 2012 Dan was on Lake Victoria, on the Kenyan side.  One could see that perhaps at this time (early 80s) there would have been “thriving rail and steamer” service inherited from colonial times.  At present this appears to have just about finished in Kenya and I assume Zaire (DR Congo) as well. Come to think of it, passenger rail and steamer service (including Lake Titicaca) pretty much disappeared in Bolivia over the same period.

It is also interesting to consider retrospectively that the Congo or Zaire side of Lake Tanganyika was where Che Guevara spent a year trying to get a revolution going.  He gave up and only  two years later showed up in Bolivia to have another go.  This part of Africa has certainly been one of  the most troubled parts of the world in the decades since.

LAKE TANGANYIKA, Tuesday, 10 May, 1983

We had been advised to somehow make our way upstairs to the first class deck. We immediately pushed our way to the bottom of the stairs, but a young man stopped us because we had no first class tickets.  Shortly two big, tough men pushed and yelled their way through, and Dan and I simply took advantage of the confusion and got up to the deck too. We wanted to keep a low profile because people were definitely being hassled about coming up, so we put our packs against a cabin wall and stood to one side. Gradually we started claiming our place for the night, and no one ever bothered us. To begin with there were only a couple of people on the prow, but by dark the whole place was full of stretched out, sleeping forms.

At first there were several arguments at the door into the first class deck, and they very conscientiously kept it closed and locked, but as though everyone knew it had to be, the door somehow finally was left permanently open. We decided that they had to go through the whole act to prove that the employees were doing their jobs, but they also knew that there was only room for those third class passengers to sleep on the first class deck. There are only 16 first class passengers, and the other 200-odd passengers must make do in the hold, the nearly airless lower level and the first class deck.

Dan and I had our bread and peanuts and settled down for a nice, peaceful night on Lake Tanganyika.

LAKE TANGANYIKA, Wednesday, 11 May, 1983

(DAN) Helena and I started out the night using our “Railway Station Schedule” of taking turns sleeping two hours lying down and sitting up two hours on watch. We were able to hold an area by the rail at the left side of the prow, right by the anchor winch. We put down a rain poncho and my sleeping bag to lie on, and the other person sat against Helena’s pack. Not a bad system, but not completely restful.

The main problem was the bathroom stench coming up the “hatch” from the two lower decks. If a steel boat with power water hoses can smell like that, after a few hours,  the transatlantic slave boats must have been unbearable. We were even in a place where there was constant fresh air.

That forward area surely filled up for the night. People (actually, Helena was the only woman there) put down mats and pulled a sheet all around them. Two men just slept in their clothes right on the old deck. About midnight it started to rain, and most of the people picked up and went down into the hold. The rain lasted only 5 minutes, so we were soon back in our place. There was enough room that we decided to try sleeping at the same time. We both stretched out, put our camera bag as a pillow and the food bag between Helena and the railing.

The Urundi pulling three other vessels on the trip.

That worked much better, but we did not get much sleep. About an hour later the boat slowed and turned. The big search light came on, and the captain started yelling in the loudest, cruelest voice we have heard in a long time. It turned out that the three barges we were towing had gotten loose, and we had to return into the darkness to look for them. The voice kept whipping the crew until half an hour later (maybe) one of the barges moved into the path of the searchlight. None of the barges had any lights, so it took more than two hours to find them and get them all hooked up again.

The securing took the longest. The waves on Lake Tanganyika have turned out to be considerable, and it is visibly difficult to circle the barges in those conditions and get a cable connected. Each consecutive barge was harder as they were connected not to the boat but to the barge in front, and it was more difficult to maneuver. The only light, even for the third barge, came from our spotlight.

These barges, I found out later, are actually shells of cargo steamers that had wood-burning engines and are no longer feasible. This tow system in general does not seem that efficient. Though there is a crew on each of the barges, it appears that the rudders are loose and the barges weave widely from side to side in our wake.

The First Mate on the bridge of the Urundi

I had several long conversations during the day with Kasongo Dinanja. He is the Chef de Service Technique at Kalemie for SNCZ (Zaire railway and the company that runs our boat) so he had a lot of information that we have normally not been able to get in Zaire. I mentioned to him that our boat, the Urundi (colonial name for Burundi) was built in 1926, and I asked him what sort of a plan there was for replacing the vessel when it wore out. He said that there is no plan, that such a thing is financially impossible, that they do not even have enough foreign currency to buy adequate diesel for SNCZ, much less replace machinery. When I asked him about the SNCZ Mercedes Benz sedan we had seen in Kalemie, he just shrugged and smiled.

The motor is the original, and he says that two men are occupied full time looking for spare parts. Belgium has long since stopped producing the spare parts, and the only recourse is to scavenge such motors as are left here in Zaire. The electricity in Kananga is provided by two 1926 boat motors. He says that there are no plans for returning to coal or wood burning steamers. The South African rail system for example is supposed to use a lot of coal. Not feasible here. He added that in fact SNCZ leases ten old diesel locomo­tives from South Africa that they have replaced with coal. “But they have the technology.”

Kasongo is a mechanical engineer and is on his way to Bujumbura to take an English proficiency test because he wants to go to the States to further his studies. He does not think that he could return after that to work in Zaire. He said that he is not from the president’s part of the country, does not speak Lingala (the army language) well and can hope to get no further than he is now.

He is (was?) a Methodist from Mwene Ditu, a good Methodist town in Central Zaire; in fact his father-in-law is an assistant to the bishop of that conference. He did some of his primary and secondary school in a Methodist school at home and in Lodja. He went to Kisangani to start his secondary school, but it was interrupted by the Simba Rebellion. Then he got a Belgian government scholarship to study in Belgium. When he got to Kinshasa, the Belgians changed their policy and merely paid his way through the University in Kin­shasa. He, like Mama Mutambuela’s husband, was caught in Mobutu’s Africanization drive. The university students were forced to go to rural areas to teach or if they were engin­eering students, they could work for SNCZ. He has been with them ever since.

He of all Zairois with whom I talked was the most openly critical of Zaire and Mobutu. We talked around and around about Zaire’s problems and always came to the inevitable conclusion that as long as the system continues, nothing can change. A typical “deep” conversation in Zaire involves several exchanges of examples of increasingly bad problems and corruption. It usually ends in a frustrated silence with the participants staring at the beautiful scenery.

Speaking of scenery, this lake has been spectacular. The lake on this stretch is completely bounded by steep hills of varying heights that drop straight into the lake with virtually no shelf. It is very reminiscent of Lake Titicaca, though the latter is wider and the mountains surrounding it higher but more distant.

It has been partially cloudy most of the time which causes incredible sunrises and sunsets. At first hour in the morning you can see the mountains to their peaks, all the crevices and gradations. Then as the day progresses, the clouds get lower, covering the tops.

The sun above us was unimpeded, and by 0930 we were the only passengers left in the prow. Rather than take to the holds, we made a shelter with our clothesline and rain poncho and spent the entire day in our perch. It was quite low, and we could not sit on our packs but rather leaned against them. I got a lot of reading done in Washing of the Spears. It talked about the man, Shepstone, who was the originator of the Bantustan con­cept in Natal Province. At the time he was considered a liberal for wanting to give the blacks any land at all (while the Boers claimed a right to a summer and a winter farm for each household, each farm of 6000 acres).

I wish we knew more about our fellow passengers. There are two men who were in the ticket line with me and then showed up today. They were quite open when talking about us and the possibilities of studying in the U.S., but when I tried to find out what they were doing, all they would say is Petit Commerce. It surely has to be smuggling in these iso­lated border areas, but of what? There are a slew of spiffier-than-usual soldiers and their women. Kasongo opines that they are headed to Kivu to an area where gold is being mined. There is great resistance to all the gold and diamonds going through Mobutu and his Ndugus (relatives) and the army. A group of rebel miners have taken up arms. He says they have to keep sending a steady supply of army recruits to the area because most just desert to get gold[1].

There are a couple of women who give many reasons for speculation. While most of the army wives seem to be congregated under a shelter just in front of the captain’s cabin, only two or three women actually are forward talking with the soldiers and other men. We wonder if this is a regular trade route. Such speculation is unpardonable, I realize, but after seeing the sexes always separated when they are talking, and to come upon women who actually act as familiar as U. S. teenagers, then you naturally begin a train of thought.

As the day wore on, it became evident that we would be nowhere near Bujumbura at the projected 1500. In fact we did not come into said well-lit bay until 2000 hrs. By that time we had been told that due to the late hour, the Burundi officials were not going to let us debark. What was worse was that tomorrow, being Ascencion, is a national holiday in Burundi; the port would be closed all day.

(HELENA) We felt panicky when we heard that we would be dropped at the Zairois port of Kalundu because we had already been stamped out of Zaire, AND our two-month visa runs out tomorrow. Kasongo took it all calmly (he can simply cross the border in a company car) but we really got to worrying.

We spent a couple of hours in the water near Bujumbura, but they only left off one of the barges and took on another two after much maneuvering round and round. We had already set up our sleeping arrangements when we tied up alongside another boat and heard a big commotion. We eventually found that several people had thrown their bags over to this boat and were themselves trying to clamber over while an SNCZ policeman tried to keep them from it and tried to throw their bags back onto the URUNDI. Gradually things settled down with a couple of people staying on the other boat with a bunch of bundles. We surmise that it must be things that the people would be able to take into Burundi by lake but would not be able to get by the customs on the land route.

From then on the night disintegrated into a series of disturbances that did not allow for much sleep. We forward deck sleepers had to move out of the way every time the anchor was dropped or lifted because its spool is right in the middle of our deck.  Same thing for when the different cables had to be let out or hauled in when they were dealing with the barges. We were especially cautious after Kasongo told us that an SNCZ employee had been killed by a flying chain just a month ago. One time in particular stands out. Everybody around us had finally settled down, wrapped in their sheets when someone dropped the anchor. It made such a loud, sudden noise that everyone jumped up to move out of the way. Dan was so quick that he disappeared before I could even turn around. We suspect that in his haste he may have stepped on one of the men’s faces.

We finally moved across the lake to spend the night off of the Zairois shore, but before long we felt a spanking breeze whip down from the mountains. Since we could see lightning, we all picked up everything and moved to the narrow shelter that covers the hallways in front of the first class cabins. The rain did hit, but it soon died, and Dan and I moved back to the freshly rain-washed deck. This time (I think it was 3:00) we settled down for good and had the whole place to ourselves. Before the rain Dan, who slept on the side toward the rest of the men while I was right by the railing, was feeling rather disgusted at the way a neighbor kept snuggling closer and closer in spite of the fact that there was room on his other side.

We were not completely alone during the afternoon when everyone else tried to escape the sun; for more than 3 hours two young women (one we decided must be Miss Burundi) worked on each other’s hair. Obviously they wanted to look their best for the landing, so we got a front seat for a spectacle (kind of a comfort to know we do not cause the ONLY spectacles). Miss Burundi’s coiffure required the use of some twenty little hair pieces, but since these had been braided for a previous hairdo, each one had to be unbraided. At one time they had three young men unbraiding them (one of them wearing a classic used tee shirt proclaiming “I’M PROUD TO BE AN AVON GIRL SCOUT”) while the other young woman divided the real hair into some twenty divisions. Somehow she would attach the hair pieces to the real hair and then gather the resulting tail along a thread until it formed a neat little bubble. Once these were completed, they were linked together on each half of Miss Burundi’s head. The second woman’s hair-do (by this time we could see Bujumbura in the distance ) was made of countless little braids, but I did not get to see the end result because we were by then surrounded by all of the first class passengers and anyone else who wanted to watch us approach our supposed-to-be destination.

Kalundu, Zaire- Bujumbura, Burundi, Thursday, 12 May, 1983

(HELENA) We arrived in Zaire exactly two months ago, and boy! were we ever aware of that all day today. Not much fun to know that it is your last legal day in one country, and you do not have anything saying you can enter the next country. It is a first for us as always before we have arrived at borders already in possession of the needed visa.

But let me start at dawn and give you all of the gory details of what has to be one of our most nerve-wracking days to date. As I said before, we were anchored right off the shore near Kalundu, the port for Uvira, Zaire. We awakened with all of the dawn activity to see a beautiful sunrise on the far side of the lake with rays of light reaching the green hills on the Zaire side. By 0700 we had started to dock. Most everyone else was all decked out in their newest, fanciest clothes, but Dan and I were GRRRRUBBY to say the least. Not only had we not had a bath since Sunday when we went to the lake, but our clothes had three days and two nights of wear.

As we were docking, the captain (a tubby little man who always appeared in spotless clothes) announced something in Swahili, and one of our may-I-have-your-address-I’d-like-a-scholarship-in-the-U.S.A. friends told us that he had said that all those who had wanted to get off in Bujumbura should present themselves to the chef du port to see about transport. We doubted that SNCZ would worry about a bunch of stranded people, but we had to try.

We waited until the bulk of the passengers had gotten off, then we heaved up our packs and by now unmanageably bulky food bag and set off to see what new surprises the authorities could give us. We had no problems at the first gate, but then when we reached the chef’s office, he naturally was not in. He arrived about 30 minutes later, and Ka­songo (who knew him already) presented our case. The man listened in that maddening way which shows he does not think anything can be done (kind of half turned away from us) but he promised to radio his superior in Kivu to see about transport to the border. It looked hopeless for a long time, and Dan kept going back to remind him of our existence, but after two hours he promised Dan that he had the permission and that he would personally accompany the truck to the border to explain our awkward visa situation. Still more time transpired without any real action, so when Kasongo offered to give us a ride all the way to Bujumbura in the company car, we were sorely tempted to accept the offer. We felt kind of guilty about even considering it because we would be abandoning the cause, and with the wazungus gone, SNCZ could more easily back away from its promise. Just in time the truck showed up, we decided to stick with it in spite of the fact that it would only take us to the border, and we were spared the guilt of leaving the others stranded.

As we had been waiting for the truck, we kept seeing our fellow passengers eating these delicious-looking bananas, but we could not find how they went out the outer gate to buy them. As we drove through Kalundu and Uvira, we saw stall after stall selling beautiful, ripe bananas. Dan and I swear that we have never seen so many perfect bananas for sale at one time. Everybody seemed to be selling them out in front of their houses.

There were twenty of us to clamber aboard the huge trailer truck. Its last load had been dried corn, and it had been left out in the rain, so we struggled during the half-hour ride to the border to keep our packs out of the rusty corn water that had pooled in the truck. Impossible, in spite of putting my pack inside one of our huge trash bags and Dan’s on top of another.

Dan had carefully hidden a bag with our last Zaires (it is against the law to export Zaires) in the bottom of the can of granola. We had thought we were through with that since we had already been stamped out in Kalemie, so Dan had taken them out of hiding and now had to put them back in. Once again, though, they did not say a word about money or money declaration. Our friend, Kasongo, was already at the border post, so we decided to take him up on the rest of the ride. He said fine, but asked us to hurry as much as possible. Ha! The officials took their time, especially since our big trailer truck had to do all sorts of tricks to get turned around. Our official kept craning his neck to see what was happening, while Dan and I felt like telling him to PLEASE hurry. If there is one thing we have learned, it is that border officials cannot and will not be hurried.

Finally we left Zaire. Dan and I are quite proud that we did not pay a single bribe in our two months there because it is supposedly a country where nothing gets done without a bit of bribery. But we still had to (gulp) face the Burundi officials.

The passport man was one of these no-nonsense types. When we said we had no visa, he started to insist that we go clear up to Bukavu, Zaire, to get it. Luckily, Dan had read in “Geoff” that one can enter Burundi with a transit visa and get it extended once he is in. The man finally accepted that and agreed to give us 48 instead of the usual 24 hours because today is a holiday. Just one more stumbling block, but the baggage was of the mild sort as the official looked in our packs but did not insist on our emptying them. Did it ever feel good to be “IN”! All this time we felt a bit guilty about making Kasongo and the SNCZ chauffer wait, but after all, their company had been responsible for the whole mess.

Kasongo told us we would soon be arriving at a money-changing place, so we once more emptied the granola can to extricate the Zaires. We did not quite have enough warning because we were stopped in the village and surrounded with young men before Dan could be completely prepared. They have it down to an art wherein they stick wads of notes in your face and all clamor for your attention so you will be confused. Once again our friends had to wait while Dan sorted things out and changed the money. He later decided that he had not gotten quite the correct amount, but the rate was still good because of the good rate we got 2 months ago on the Zaire.

Total cost per person per day in Zaire US$ 2.52[2].  

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[1] Of course this part of Zaire is the one that has been in the most turmoil in the last 30 years.

[2] This was our cheapest country of the 21 we visited in Africa.  In the first place because we had changed all of our money on the black market, which was 5X the official rate against the dollar.  The other reason of course was that we spent a good portion of the time volunteering with the Frenchs and had our meals paid.