More than 200 people have died and more than 100 are missing after two separate boat accidents this week in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to residents of the area and local news reports.
One of the boats was carrying mostly students between the ages of 12 and 15, officials and residents said. They said the students had been on their way to a town, Basankusu, for the start of the new school year, after spending their holidays in their home villages.
More than 100 people, dozens of them students, died in that accident, in which a motorized boat capsized on Wednesday night, residents and civil society groups in the area said.
Local authorities have refused to confirm those numbers, saying they were still investigating.
A day later, another boat carrying about 500 passengers caught fire and capsized in the Lukolela territory, killing more than hundred and leaving more than 100 missing as of Friday, media reports said, citing Congo’s humanitarian affairs ministry.
Both incidents happened in the resource-rich Central African country’s Équateur Province, hundreds of miles northeast of the capital, Kinshasa.
President Félix Tshisekedi of Congo was on a state visit to Kazakhstan when the disasters occurred. He held a council of ministers meeting shortly after his return on Friday, but he has not yet publicly addressed the tragedies.
River transport is the only practical means for people or goods to move through large parts of Congo because of the lack of reliable road or air access. But there is little regulation or oversight of river travel, and poorly maintained boats are often overloaded with passengers and travel at night, despite a ban on doing so.
The Wednesday incident occurred around 10 p.m. local time, at the confluence of the Nsolo and Maringa rivers. The boat, identified as the Bokenda, was overloaded and collided with three motorized canoes because of the poor visibility, according to Bienvenu Liloku, commissioner for navigation at Lokolela River Navigation.
It remains unclear how many people were on board in total, as passenger lists are rarely available in such situations, and the exact death toll is not known either.
“It is difficult to give you an accurate assessment because many bodies remain unaccounted for,” Mr. Liloku said.
But local civil society groups, media reports and others said more than 100 dead bodies had been recovered and that at least eight people were rescued.
Then, on Thursday evening, a boat identified as the HB Bonga, said to be carrying about 500 passengers, caught fire and capsized on the Congo River. At least 107 people died, 209 were rescued, and an additional 146 were still missing as of Friday, media reports said, citing Congo’s humanitarian affairs ministry.
Most boats on Congo’s busy rivers are slow-moving wooden barges that take days or weeks to travel between major destinations. When passengers cook meals on these long journeys, often in the open and on overcrowded boats, the risk of accidental fires increases.
There have been at least half a dozen similar incidents this year, mostly in the northwestern area of Congo. At least four major boat disasters have occurred in the Équateur Province alone since January, killing over 500 people, according to civil society groups.
Saikou Jammeh is a reporter and researcher for The Times based in Dakar, Senegal.
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