Innumerable tributaries feed the Congo river along the arc of a circle which is being crossed from its sources, to the border between Zambia and Democratic Republic of the Congo, until flowing into the Atlantic. On the road or 4700 km, the river winds through dense jungle and mangrove forests accumulating so much power that flows into the sea 41,700 tons of water per second, its  debit being exceeded only by the Amazon’s one.
When the river estuary was discovered, in 1482, by the portuguese explorer Diogo Cao, he could not cross the cataracts upstream of the river mouth, today named Livingstone Falls, so the river has remained unexplored for nearly 400 years. For Europeans of the nineteenth century, this area was known as the “darkest Africa”.
The upper Congo River is partially navigable. Initially, it flows to the north through a narrow, steep and rocky gorge, then winds through swamps covered by reeds and flowing into Lake Kisa, a paradise of egrets and seagulls, but the fishermen in the area. Further, navigable portions alternates with thresholds before Nyangwe, where the river enters into the dark jungle which frightened Livingstone in 1871, preventing him from going forward to the north. The river crosses 7 waterfalls along the 90 km, with the largest flow of water in the world, approximately 166,850 tonnes per second.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 3:46 am and is filed under Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.