Africa’s oldest ship rescues Burundi refugees
REFUGEES fleeing oppression or poverty in their homelands have been much in the news recently, both in the Mediterranean and in south-east Asian and northern Australian waters.
The problem is exacerbated by unscrupulous human traffickers who encourage refugees into making ocean crossings, often with no intention of them ever reaching their destination.
The number of such refugees in the Mediterranean has reached astronomic proportions, with 168 000 being rescued and taken ashore by the Italian Navy alone in 2014.
This year at least 2 200 refugees are known to have drowned at sea – those are from the vessels that have been recorded, but the number may be much higher.
Most crossings are attempted from the coast of Libya, where a civil-type war is raging and where there is no government to step in and prevent the tragedies from occurring. Smaller numbers leave from Egypt while others flee from Turkey – the latter being mostly refugees from war-torn Syria who have made the overland journey into Turkey from where they have placed their futures and finances in the hands of the traffickers.
Now comes news of another flood of refugees fleeing unrest in their country, who cross a lake to escape. The refugees are fleeing from Burundi in central east Africa, where strife has broken out after the president in office announced his intention of running for a third term. Burundi has an unfortunate recent past in which tribal disputes reached horrifying proportions amounting to genocide.
That was in the early 1990s – recently enough for families to have vivid memories or even experiences of this time. Perhaps it is this that has caused so many to move away into neighbouring countries as the threat of civil war again rears its head.
As a result of this, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which is working in the country, hired a 102-year old ship to take refugees to safety in neighbouring Tanzania. The ship is the MV Liemba, whose history goes back to colonial days when Germany ruled what is now called Tanzania.
Some 23 000 refugees have already reached Tanzania, while the UN reports another 33 000 have fled to neighbouring Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Liemba is able to carry up to 600 people at a time and ferries them from the Burundi/Tanzania port town of Kagunga to the Tanzanian port of Kigoma, which is near the spot where Stanley met Livingstone in 1871. Each voyage costs the UNHCR the equivalent of 16 per person.
The ship was ordered by the German authorities who instructed their railway commissioner in east Africa to study the British lake steamers on Lake Victoria, and to come up with a suitable recommendation for Lake Tanganyika.
Although the commissioner suggested three ships of about 1 000 tons each, war clouds in Europe meant only one ship was completed at the Jos L Meyer shipyard in Papenberg on the river Ems.
The ship was to be 67m long with a beam of 10m and a draught of 3.2m. Its steam engines would drive two screws and give it a speed of 9.5 knots. It was given the name of Götzen, in honour of Graf Adolf von Götzen, the colony’s military governor.
After completion and testing in Germany the ship was stripped down to manageable parts, crated in no fewer than 5 000 crates and shipped out to Africa in four freighters.
Travelling with the ship were three German shipwrights to oversee the reassembly on the lake, Herrs Wendt, Ruter and Tellmann. In due course, the parts were railed from Dar es Salaam to the railhead 20 miles from the lake, where thousands of porters were hired to carry the crates to the lake. This alone took several months to complete.
In June 1915, 100 years ago next month, the ship was completed and launched on Lake Tanganyika where it was soon fitted with two large guns taken from the German cruiser Königsberg which had been scuttled in the Rovuma River in southern Tanganyika.
The Germans now had the services of three lake steamers, the Kingani, the Hedwig and the impressive Graf von Götzen. Opposing them, the British and Belgians had two little 40ft (12.19m) wooden motor launches, named HMS Mimi and HMS Toutou, and a Belgian speedboat. Each British boat was fitted with a Maxim machine gun and a three-pounder Hotchkiss gun on the bow. They had been shipped out to Cape Town and railed from there to Rhodesia, after which ox wagons were employed on roads which had to be cut through bush and mountains.
The British Navy contingent was led by a rather eccentric, tattoocovered, skirt-clad commander named Geoffrey Spicer-Simson, whom, it seems, the Royal Navy did not otherwise know what to do with.
In the coming months there were two naval “battles” on the lake. In the first the German ship Kingani was rammed and run ashore, leading to its capture by the British. In the second the German steamer Hedwig was sunk by gunfire from the Mimi and Toutou’s three-pounders. German morale deteriorated and when Belgian forces prepared to attack the port town of Kigoma, the German commander ordered that Graf von Götzen was to be scuttled. Thus it was that the Royal Navy’s two motor boats and one Belgian speed boat took command of Lake Tanganyika for the Allies.
The steamer remained in its watery grave until after the war ended, when the Belgians raised it, but unfortunately it soon sank again. In 1924 the ship was raised once more, this time by the British on instruction from Winston Churchill. It was renamed Liemba and placed in service as a lake ferry.
In 1970 the little ship underwent extensive alteration including new Caterpillar diesel engines. Its appearance remained much the same and today it has been described as one of the most beautiful steamers ever to grace Africa’s Great Lakes.
Now adding to its illustrious history is the carrying of refugees to safety.