Longola Marche Arrière! Chinese diesel engines on Congo’s inland waterways

Abstract

The comparatively cheap and mechanically accessible Chinese dakadaka diesel engines and their shotteur Z-drives have enabled wooden baleinières to significantly impact waterborne mobility, trade and transportation on the Congo River and its tributaries. While baleinières are artisanal watercraft made of local building materials, their engines are globally circulating technologies, which are able to unfold their economic, hydrodynamic and socio-technical affordances thanks to a number of local technical adaptations. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork in Tshopo province (DR Congo) foregrounding the engines’ use, the article discusses the adaptations the Chinese engines and their propulsion system undergo to enable a felicitous engagement of their intrinsic engineered forces with the muscular, natural, and social forces present in their local riverine habitat. While this entanglement of forces depends on the distributed character of collective onboard engine care, it also encourages the emergence of baleinière owners (armateurs) as a new group of local entrepreneurs. These insights help us understand why, despite frequent breakdowns, the engines and the boats they propel enable and democratize the access to new forms of connectivity and mobility for large parts of Congo’s riverine and travelling urban populations. In a context of enduring economic precarity, the technical intervention of ‘removing (the engine’s) backward gear’ (Li. kolongola marche arrière) is therefore also of metaphoric significance.