Paper short abstract:

The success of Congo's baleinières lies above all in the skillful integration of mechanical, natural and muscular forces that unite in temporary bundles of 'artisanal infrastructure'. These challenge the rural-urban divide from an infrastructural point of view.

Paper long abstract:

Despite an alarming frequency of fatal accidents, wooden baleinières and their Chinese Diesel engines have considerably increased the transportation capacity on the DR Congo’s inland waterways. As grassroots innovations they have become indispensable for the arrival of food crops in Congo's waterborne cities, including prominently the capital Kinshasa.

This paper argues that the unprecedented success of baleinières lies above all in the interaction and skillful integration of mechanical, natural and muscular forces : three ethnographic instances show how the baleinière and its engines, the river and its current, and humans and their body techniques enter into mutual kinetic convergence and become momentary bundles of artisanal infrastructure that render the « hard » transport infrastructure inherited from the (post-)colony inadequate and obsolete.

The paper discusses these ethnographic insights from so-called "rural" Africa in light of recent scholarly work on urban infrastructure. The outcome challenges the rural-urban divide through the conceptual prism of infrastructure.