MV Liemba: The ship that waited

A Saturday at Kigoma port

On Saturday, June 3, 2023, I stood at the gate of Kigoma port with the Genya brothers, Steven and Samson. Kigoma sits on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo across the water. I’d been to the town before, for national service and work, and I’d heard of MV Liemba, but I had never gone to see her. This time I was on holiday, and the ship was on my list. I knew little about her beyond the name and her reputation as a legendary vessel, and if she’d been operating on a shorter route, I would have bought a ticket and sailed.

We were tired. The drive from Dar es Salaam had been a journey in itself, followed by an even longer one to Mahale Mountains National Park. Still, I wasn’t leaving Kigoma without seeing MV Liemba. The guard explained that because it was Saturday, we’d need to call someone who worked aboard and ask him to show us around. We made the call, arranged the customary tip, and a little later a guy in his early 30s arrived and took us on.

Liemba was grounded. She’d been out of service since 2018, and no maintenance was taking place during our visit. Our guide gave us a proper tour anyway, through the passenger rooms, across the decks, into the cargo spaces, and down to the engine room, explaining the ship’s history as we went. From a layman’s view everything looked fine, though I had no way of judging her actual condition. I left having seen far more than I’d expected, and with a much better understanding of why a ship sitting quietly at a port could command so much attention.

A ship that arrived in crates

Liemba began life in 1913 as the Graf von Götzen, built at the Meyer Werft shipyard in Papenburg, Germany, and named after Count Gustav Adolf von Götzen, a former governor of German East Africa. Getting her from Germany to the middle of East Africa was an extraordinary piece of work. She was dismantled, packed into thousands of crates, and shipped to Dar es Salaam, and from there the parts travelled inland by rail and foot to Kigoma, where German shipbuilders reassembled her on the lakeshore.

She was launched in February 1915, during the First World War, and converted for military service. Armed with a gun taken from the German cruiser Königsberg, the Graf von Götzen became a formidable presence on Lake Tanganyika. Control of the lake mattered to the German, British, and Belgian forces fighting across the region, because it offered a route for moving troops and supplies. The British needed a way to challenge that control, and their solution involved two small motor launches named Mimi and Toutou.

Mimi and Toutou take the lake

The two boats had been built in Britain. In 1915 the expedition sent them by sea to Cape Town, then north by rail into what was then the Belgian Congo, and from there getting them to Lake Tanganyika became an expedition of its own. They were hauled overland on specially built carriages, pulled by steam tractors and teams of oxen, with local workers helping move them through difficult country. The journey ran across steep slopes, rough tracks, rivers, and more railway before the boats finally reached the water. Transporting two small gunboats thousands of kilometres across African terrain to fight a naval campaign on an inland lake was a strange and remarkable thing to attempt.

Under the command of Geoffrey Spicer-Simson, Mimi and Toutou joined the Allied effort against the German vessels. They helped capture the German gunboat Kingani, later renamed Fifi by the Allies, and shifted the balance of control on the lake. The Graf von Götzen was a far larger vessel, though, and as Allied forces advanced toward Kigoma in 1916, the Germans faced losing her to the enemy. Rather than surrender the ship, they deliberately sank her, coating her engines and moving parts in grease in the hope of recovering her after the war. The war ended with Germany losing, but the ship’s story did not.

Raised, renamed, and returned to service

In 1924 a British salvage team raised the wreck and found the grease had helped protect the engines. She sank again during preparations for repairs and had to be raised a second time, and by 1927 she was back in service as a passenger and cargo vessel. But first she needed a new name. British colonial officials initially considered Livingstone, after the explorer, but the proposal was rejected because other vessels were already registered under that name. They then looked for a local name associated with Livingstone and the lake he had explored.

The name chosen was Liemba, drawn from Liemba Lya Mfipa, a name used by the Fipa people for the lake and often translated as the sea of the Fipa. The vessel was relaunched as MV Liemba in May 1927. A ship built in Germany for a colonial war had become a transport vessel serving the communities around the lake, and her history was no longer only about the forces that had fought over Tanganyika. It was also about the people who would depend on her for generations.

A century of work

For most of the next century, Liemba carried passengers and cargo between Kigoma and Mpulungu in Zambia, stopping at lakeside settlements along the way. She connected communities that had few alternatives for moving people and goods, and her journeys supported trade, travel, and everyday life along a long stretch of the lake. She changed with the years. Her original steam propulsion was replaced by diesel engines in 1970, further refits followed including a major overhaul in 1993, and by the time we visited she was rated to carry up to 600 passengers and 200 tonnes of cargo.

She also carried people through some of the region’s hardest years. In 1997 the United Nations refugee agency chartered her, alongside MV Mwongozo, to help repatriate refugees who had fled to Tanzania from what was then Zaire, and she reportedly made 22 crossings between Kigoma and Uvira over five months as part of an operation involving more than 75,000 returnees. In 2015 she carried Burundians fleeing violence across the lake to Kigoma. For these passengers Liemba was not a historical attraction. She was a way to reach safety.

Her working life was not always smooth. Delays became common, and rumours sometimes spread along the shore that she had finally sunk. After surviving a world war, a deliberate scuttling, and repeated salvage operations, the ship was showing her age, and in 2018 she was taken out of service because of her deteriorating condition. When we visited in June 2023, she had already been grounded for five years.

Liemba carries another, more unexpected claim to fame. The Graf von Götzen is widely credited as the inspiration for the German gunboat in C.S. Forester’s novel The African Queen, later the 1951 film with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. She is also often described as one of the last vessels of the German Imperial Navy still in service

MV Liemba sails again

In 2026 the Tanzanian government completed a major overhaul of MV Liemba costing around TSh34 billion. The work included new engines, generators, and navigation systems, along with improvements to passenger facilities. On the night of October 6 she departed Kigoma for Kalemie in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on her first post-refurbishment voyage. After eight years out of service, Liemba was back on the lake. Her return matters for more than her age or her history. For communities around Lake Tanganyika, she is once again doing the work for which generations of passengers have known her.

When I read the news, I thought back to that Saturday at the port. Steven, Samson, and I had walked through the passenger rooms, the decks, the cargo spaces, and the engine room, and our guide had taken us through more than a century of history, from a German warship to a vessel that connected communities across national borders. I still haven’t travelled aboard her.  Now she is sailing again, and next time I’m in Kigoma I want to do more than walk her rooms and stand on her deck. I want to experience Lake Tanganyika as a passenger, watching the shoreline pass from a ship that has been part of its history for more than a century.

Welcome back, Liemba.