Floating City Is a Center of Trade in Zaire

The Colonel Ebeya is a floating town that never sleeps.

The boat and the six double-deck barges it pushes are jammed with more than 5,000 people, making the ungainly flotilla one of the largest towns on the 1,077-mile stretch of the Zaire River between Kinshasa, Zaire’s capital, and Kisangani, its fourth-largest city.

Lashed by vines to the boat, 150 or so pirogues, huge, hollowed-out hardwood trees, wave in the current like suckerfish attached to a great shark.

“This is not just a boat. It is a social service,” says Capt. Kilundu Katianda from the helm. “There are no roads here and very few other boats. This boat is the only market, the only pharmacy, the only clinic and the only bar for hundreds of miles. We bring the town to the people.”

Aboard the flotilla, women wash clothes and bathe children and themselves in water drawn by lowering powdered-milk cans over the sides, Robert Caputo wrote in National Geographic. Caputo spent nine months traveling the Zaire River, once called the Congo.

Women also pluck chickens, butcher monkeys, pound plantains and cook for their families in the passageways.

People sleep and make love in sweltering cabins crowded with bundles of merchandise and smoked meat. The hundreds of passengers without cabins pack the gangways and rooftops, spreading out sleeping mats, napping, playing cards and getting together in the bars.

Barbers and tailors practice their crafts. Some people haggle over the price of river rats. On one roof young men practice karate; on another, a choir rehearses for Sunday Mass.

The boat police arrest a thief. Having no brig, they handcuff him to the air conditioner outside Caputo’s cabin. The wails and rattling chains, accompanied by the bleating of goats and sheep and the squealing of a tethered pig, create a Congo lullaby.

The Zaire River cuts an enormous 2,700-mile arc through the heart of Africa, crossing the Equator twice and draining the Congo Basin’s vast rain forest.

Countless tributaries feed the waters that make the Zaire the world’s second most powerful river after the Amazon. The river system offers more than 8,500 miles of navigable waterways, an unparalleled network of virtually maintenance-free highways reaching into every corner of the nation and beyond.

The voyage from Kinshasa--this trip left a week late--can take 12 to 30 days, depending on how often the flotilla runs aground or breaks down.

Through the years, public transportation between Kinshasa and Kisangani has been reduced to one voyage about every six weeks. The only other way to travel between these cities is by plane.

“This boat is our life,” a fisherman says as he dumps two small, trussed crocodiles onto the deck. “Without the boat we have no way to sell what we can catch and grow, and no chance to buy the things we need.”

The farther the flotilla moves from Kinshasa, the busier it becomes. “After a few days the corridors became virtually impassable,” Caputo wrote.

One deck is smothered with squirming, 7-foot-long catfish, giant eels and masses of unidentifiable bottom fish with bulbous lips and whiplike feelers. A 10-foot crocodile, trussed to a pole, has been dumped under the tables.

The traders lean over the boat railing, yelling at the hunters and fishermen who arrive nonstop in their pirogues. One group of men hurls the fresh carcass of a male sitatunga antelope onto the deck.

Others scale the railings laden with tortoises, clawless otters, monitor lizards, parrots, giant forest pigs, snakes, bats and baskets of caterpillars. White-nosed monkeys are passed from hand to hand, their tails tied around their necks so that they can be toted like furry purses.

Dead and alive, salted and smoked, the abundant fruits of the forest and river are brought in an unceasing stream to the great movable market heading up the mighty river.

Zaire is immensely rich in minerals and has an agricultural potential so great that it could easily feed its 35 million people. Yet Zaire remains one of the world’s 10 poorest countries.