Near Miss Demonstrates Peril of Lake Victoria

The radar alarm suddenly goes off. Capt. Manase Kombe frantically begins raking a searchlight over the dark waters of Africa’s largest lake, trying to locate whatever might be in the path of his ferry.

Finally, the beam spotlights a dugout canoe carrying two men. A voice rings out -- “May God protect you!” -- as the tiny craft rocks perilously in the swell of the passing 185-foot-long MV Serengeti.

“They’re supposed to have some kind of light,” the 35-year-old captain said. “The radar often fails to pick them up.”

Mishaps and tragedies are common on Lake Victoria, the second-largest freshwater lake in the world. But the millions of people who live near it still prefer to travel by boat because roads in central Africa are bad or nonexistent, and banditry is rife.

On Nov. 6, a small overloaded wooden vessel carrying 30 passengers and cargo struck another boat at night near the lake’s Kenyan shore, causing at least 18 deaths.

Dozens of people have perished in the last year in accidents off the Ugandan shore.

In May 1996, more than 700 people died when the badly overcrowded MV Bukoba capsized just outside the Tanzanian port of Mwanza.

Dangers on the water are not confined to this part of Africa.

Across the continent, the ferry MS Joola capsized in the Atlantic off Gambia on Sept. 26 while carrying twice its legal passenger load. The official death toll stands at more than 1,000.

On Kombe’s near-miss with the canoe, the Danish-built Serengeti carried 405 people and 120 tons of goods, well below its capacity of 593 passengers and 565 tons of cargo, the captain says.

It is the only big boat now making the 110-mile trip between Mwanza and Bukoba, another Tanzanian port. The 262-foot MV Victoria, with a passenger capacity of 1,254, is in dry dock for servicing.

“It’s true that people are scared of my boat because it’s smaller and sometimes rolls, but I can assure you it is very safe,” Kombe said.

He says he keeps a close watch on its load because overloading is one of the main causes of boat accidents in Africa.

Most of the passengers on the three-deck Serengeti make the overnight trip spread out on the deck of a third-class lounge. Some have brought mattresses; others rent them from enterprising crew members.

“I am confident I will travel safely although it is very uncomfortable,” said Fatuma Sued, huddling with her three children amid bundles of second-hand clothing she has bought in Mwanza to sell in Bukoba.

Thomas Hansen, 19, who is from Denmark, is doing volunteer work in Tanzania. He and his friends are taking the boat to neighboring Uganda for a holiday, he says, because there is no other way to get to Uganda’s Ssese Islands off Tanzanian territory.

The captain, however, is not completely comfortable navigating the 26,500-square-mile lake, which has not been surveyed for nearly a century.

“We’re using navigational charts from surveys done in 1908,” said Kombe, who has been a lake captain for 12 years. “So many things have changed.”

On his chart, the Kenyan port of Kisumu is labeled Port Florence. That was the name in British colonial days, when the town was named after the wife of the chief engineer on a railway completed in 1902 to link Lake Victoria with the Indian Ocean.

Kombe says one of the cargo boats operated by Marine Services, owner of the Serengeti and Victoria, was badly damaged last year when it struck a rock not marked on maps. Lighthouses along the shore were vandalized years ago, and there are no buoys to mark rocks and other obstacles, he says.

He also doesn’t like that there is no centralized radio communication across the lake. If his ferry got in trouble, he reckons that he would have to wait as long as five hours to get help.

Josbell Sikazwe, a supervisor at a diving firm in Mwanza, blames the management of shipping companies.

“They are there for profit, they are not following proper safety regulations, and they’re not interested in improving the marine systems,” he said.

After the MV Bukoba capsized six years ago, the International Maritime Organization suggested that the lake be surveyed, but nothing has happened.