CONGO_WHALEBOATS · Whaleboats in the Forest: Subaltern Technologies of Transportation on Congo’s Inland Waterways

Whaleboats in the Forest: Subaltern Technologies of Transportation on Congo’s Inland Waterways

Locally developed since the 1960s in post-colonial Zaire (nowadays DR Congo), baleinières are an authentic Congolese innovation that combines longstanding local traditions of craftsmanship with transnational South-South technology transfer “from below”. Baleinières (literally “whale boats”) are frugal transport technologies made of wood, recycled aluminum sheets and other locally available materials. Since the advent, in the early 2000s, of Chinese water-cooled, two-stroke Diesel engines, which are locally referred to as “moteur Chang Fa”, Chang Gong or onomatopoetically, as "moteur dakadaka", baleinières have dramatically multiplied and increased in size (nowadays they are up to 50 meters in length and up to three stories high). Together with the baleinières technology, these “low-tech” engines have revolutionized the transportation culture on Congo’s inland waterways, where they are also mounted onto dugout canoes and replace the more costly and dangerous outboard engines. As a result, nowadays about 50% of all food crops that reach city ports of Africa’s second city Kinshasa arrive aboard of baleinières. As expensive large scale pushboat-barge-convoys made of imported steel with their high-tech marine engines remain totally out of reach for the ordinary Congolese population, baleinières and their Chinese propulsion systems are today vital for the mobility and the survival of millions. Their material composition and the ways in which they integrate engineered, muscular, and environmental forces lend baleinières a number of infrastructural advantages that help them reinvent and reconfigure the DR Congo's fluvial transport geography from below. They add transport facilities to remote villages and riverborne periodic markets and thus renegotiate the relationship between the urban and the rural in times of intense demographic and environmental pressure. Studying baleinières and their actors means to better understand these transformations in times of rapid transformation, not without exploring the socio-economic impact of this frugal innovation and its significance as a unique case of endogenous development. Besides this overall goad, the research aims to 1. trace the baleinières’ "chaîne opératoire" of materials and skills in time and space, from the cutting of trees and the recycling of materials (tar, corrugated aluminum sheets, etc.), to the actual building of baleinières and the repairing and maintenance of the Chang Fa Diesel propulsion system; 2. to investigate the material and spiritual lives and ontologies of fossil-fueled internal combustion engines (ICEs) in the realm of African river transportation, which have been crucially overlooked by anthropologists so far.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз