The Tamsen Chronicles

A River That Lit An African City

When I worked in Dar es Salaam on Africa’s east coast as a foreign correspondent in 1954, this former German colonial stronghold was experiencing serious electric power shortages but no one in the city could be made to believe that a local river held the secret to their continuous blackouts.

The problem was that Dar es Salaam had experienced an unexpected rush of up-country Tanganyikans and migrants from Zanzibar and Pemba Islands. As a result, the city’s ancient power generator could not keep up with the demand for street and home lighting.

Whenever I found myself temporarily domiciled at Dar es Salaam’s Oyster Bay, I was often asked to provide the local Tanganyika Standard newspaper or its sister, The Sunday Mail, with an article entitled “With Oscar Around Dar es Salaam.”

On one such particular occasion, I decided to produce an article on the difficult power shortage and jokingly suggested that the almost 40-year wreck of an old WWl German battleship in the Rufiji River may provide an answer with the possible use of its main engines.

My glib tongue-in-cheek suggestion had followed research I had undertaken into the story of the German Kaiser’s highly favoured SMS Koningsberg launched as his pride and joy to do battle with the British in the Indian Ocean.

During my research, I had enquired into what armoury and equipment the Koningsberg had been fitted with and I detailed this in my article.

As soon as the Tanganyika papers had hit the streets, a couple of adventurous ex-British Defence Force personnel made it known that the Koningsberg should be thoroughly investigated to see whether its engines and power generators could be of use to the city with its many blackouts.

The Tanganyika Government soon became involved, and efforts were immediately made to try and resurrect the Koningsberg from its watery burial place many miles up the Rufiji River.

When I returned to Dar es Salaam some while later, I was greeted with the news that the Koningsberg’s heavy generator had been rescued, among other things, from the depths of the Rufiji River, had been cleaned up and was already providing the city with more of its much-needed additional electricity.

It turned out that, when the Koningsberg sank while in hiding up the Rufiji, it’s engine rooms immediately went below the river’s fresh waterline with less chance of becoming rusted.

The story of how the Koningsberg and one-time pride of the German Navy had been sunk by Allied forces is as good as that concerning the famous hunt for the Nazi’s Bismark battleship during WWll.

In a nutshell, the British Royal Navy was pledged to find the Koningsberg which had been causing havoc to its vessels off the East African coast.

A couple of Royal Navy gunboats had finally intercepted the Koningsberg and had chased it along Tanganyika’s coastline until it had arrived at the mouth of the Rufiji. To the utter surprise of those aboard the British vessels, the Koningsberg made a dash up the largely unnavigable river.

Fearing a German trap, the British pursuers decided not to follow and to instead guard the river mouth to prevent the Koningsberg from making a sudden dash to relative freedom. I understand that several volleys of shells were fired to no effect up the river in the hope of immediately hitting and disabling the German vessel.

Unknown to the British sailors at sea, however, the Koningsberg’s captain managed to sail his battleship several miles up the Rufiji and well out of sight.

A further problem to the British was that the Rufiji was within the borders of Tanganyika which in those early days of WWl was still under German control as one of their African land possessions.

So desperate were the British to annihilate the Koningsberg as a danger to their shipping that they requested assistance from a White South African bush pioneer, one Phillipis Jacobus Pretorius. This man was immediately enlisted, was taken to Mafia Island near the Rufiji River with instructions to find the Koningsberg’s exact location so that the British could accurately aim a barrage of gun shells from just outside the river entrance.

This man became a South African military hero for taking a compass and morse code machine, trudging for days through thick African jungle to a point where he could provide the British with highly accurate navigation information.

The upshot of his heroic lone safari by foot was that the two British battleships were able to pinpoint the Koningsberg’s exact location and sink it in what is reported as having been one of the most deadly fusillades of WWl naval armoury.