Baleinières’ Riverine Environment and the Materiality of Transport Regulation on Congo's Inland Waterways

Abstract

Encouraged by a crippling road infrastructure and the proliferation of Chinese low-tech engines, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo)'s baleinières have reappropriated and significantly increased the potential of DR Congo's inland waterways by democratising and tacitly decolonising the national river transportation. Given their role in the country's food security, and in the face of frequent accidents, effective regulation is requested by some as a salvatory necessity. Baleinières’ origins in the local rural economy and their clever recourse to artisanal rather than hard infrastructure make regulation difficult, however. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on and around the DR Congo's waterways, this article explores attempts and challenges to regulate medium-scale river transportation between the rural and the urban. Looked at from within the same analytical frame enabled by ethnography, governmental, and economic actors jointly emerge and condition each other's work and ethics. This challenges the conceptual binary of a putatively formalising state vs. a putatively evasive informal economy.