Hope yet for African Queen gunboat on Lake Tanganyika

[Gerald]

Ships don't come with much more historical ballast than the MV Liemba. The steamer still shudders and belches its way across Lake Tanganyika every Wednesday and Friday, a century after it was built as a warship in Germany.

In its time it's been a pawn in the colonial scramble for Africa. It's been scuttled and then raised again from the deep. It was the model for one of the vessels in The African Queen, the film starring Katharine Hepburn as a prim spinster and Humphrey Bogart as the rough captain.

And now it's a ferry on Africa's longest lake, invariably packed with hundreds of people plus their jumble of bundles and baskets as it churns the water between Kigoma in Tanzania across the lake to Mpulungu in Zambia.

But for how long? Such is the ramshackle, dented state of the vessel that the company which runs it has asked the German government to help with refurbishment. The basis of the appeal is that this is a piece of German history. The steamer that serves the citizens around Lake Tanganyika was once the Kaiser's gunboat.

Cat and Dog

A spokesman for the Marine Services Company told the BBC: "We have requested that Germany help in its rehabilitation. This is because of financial constraints but we have not had a concrete commitment."

The Liemba started life as the Graf Goetzen in 1913 when she was built as a warship in Papenburg on the River Ems in northern Germany. It is said that the Kaiser himself ordered the construction to further his imperial ambitions.

The Graf Goetzen was then transported in parts, in 500 crates, from Hamburg to Dar es Salaam on the coast of East Africa - and from there over mountains to Lake Tanganyika where Germany, Britain and Belgium were all engaged in colonial jostling.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-14677418


Note: 29 August 2011 Last updated at 00:42 GMT