Paper short abstract:

Boatmen and their boats on Congo’s and Senegal’s rivers have been and continue to be agents and platforms of 'floating urbanity'.

Paper long abstract:

For a long time boatmen on Congo's and Senegal's rivers have been economic, but also cultural brokers who assure the nexus between urban and rural populations and their livelihoods. Congo's larger river boats (Integrated Tug Boats), but also the locally developed Congolese baleinières, are floating platforms of urbanity that carry Kinshasa's urban culture of music, consumption, beer and electricity into the 'interior' of the country. As part of the kinetic hierarchy of Congo's multi-modal transport network, boats are not just technologies of propulsion - both in the kinetic and the social sense. Ever since the introduction of steam and Diesel, they are also technologies of capitalistic penetration, pushing on to conquer the remote. While for passengers travelling on a river is often connected with ludic joy and liminality, the boat journey also oozes boredom and regularity, turning the up-river cities at the end of the trip into harbours of arrival and relief. Inspired by Wolfgang Schievelbusch's thesis that transport technologies can lead to an industrialisation of space and time, the paper investigates whether this experience of 'floating urbanity' and the shipping technology as such has historically conditioned the ways in which urbanity in African up-river secondary towns is practiced and performed.