The hardships of doing business in Africa

IT IS a little after 10pm when the world’s oldest serving passenger ship makes her first stop. Rolling on a gentle swell, small wooden boats pull up alongside its riveted hull. Lights from the deck illuminate the packed vessels; ropes are flung up and tied to railings. Women in billowing wraps come on board with their suitcases, legs briefly flailing as they are pulled through the hatch. Men load enormous bags into a net hanging from a crane. In the other direction, boxes of gin, batteries, bags of clothes and, at one point, a sewing machine, are passed down perilously by hand. Miraculously, nothing and nobody falls into the black water.

So goes trade on Lake Tanganyika, the world’s longest lake. The ship is the MV Liemba, brought to central Africa as the Graf Goetzen by German colonists in 1913. Originally built in Lower Saxony, she was transported in 5,000 boxes by rail to Kigoma on the north-eastern shore of the lake and reconstructed there. During the first world war she served as a troop transporter and gunboat until 1916. After several skirmishes, fearing capture by either the British or the Belgians, her crew scuttled her. In 1924 she was fished up again and renamed. Among other distinctions, she is thought to be the inspiration for the gunboat Luisa in C.S. Forester’s novel, “The African Queen”.