A Century in Service: Kaiser's African Gunship Enjoys New Lease on Life

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It's really all his grandfather's fault. When Hermann-Josef Averdung was a boy, his grandfather would often tell him about the most wonderful ship he had ever helped build -- and about the great adventure it embarked upon.

Averdung is now 66 years old. His hair is white, and he is a councilman in the northern German city of Papenburg. But the years have not dimmed his memory of this story. The story, in fact, has brought him to where he is now: standing at dawn on a rusty pontoon on Lake Tanganyika, in the heart of Africa. As a large ship slowly glides up alongside the pier, Averdung goes weak in the knees, and tears well up in his eyes. Its name, Liemba, is still visible on the front of the hull.

The ship is pockmarked with dents suffered in a war and collisions with thousands of boats and wooden canoes. Its timbers press against the sheet-metal hull like the ribs of a hungry dog. The Liemba shudders and belches out thick clouds of smoke. Though almost every part of the ship is broken, it still sails up and down the world's longest lake ferrying traders, prostitutes, diamond smugglers, refugees, fishermen, missionaries, soldiers and prisoners.

Long ago, gangs of African workers carried it in parts over the mountains to the lake. The ship has been scuttled once and sunk once. Indeed, its story is one of the most bizarre episodes of World War I. But it is also a tale of colonial insanity, African massacres, Humphrey Bogart, Clint Eastwood and a British naval officer who wore skirts and was worshipped as a god. This is the tale of the Liemba, which once carried the name Graf Goetzen, the story of the last gunship of Kaiser William II.

Germany 's Jewel in Africa

"I knew that the ship still existed," Averdung says, "but I still can't believe it." In early March, he traveled to Lake Tanganyika with the intention of bringing the Liemba back across the mountains, back home to Germany. The state-run Tanzanian company that owns the Liemba suggested it would be willing to part with the vessel in exchange for a newer one.

The day after he arrived, a propeller airplane landed on the red clay tarmac of Kigoma's airport. Its passengers included the German ambassador to Tanzania and a large delegation from Hanover. Christian Wulff, the governor of the German state of Lower Saxony, also wants to preserve the ship -- but for and in Africa. As part of this effort, he dispatched this delegation and recently approached Germany's foreign and development aid ministers in Berlin for help.

After all -- though it might have served the German Reich and its story really starts in Berlin on the eve of World War I -- the Liemba was built in Lower Saxony. At the time, rival European superpowers Britain and Germany were locked in an arms race. German strategists knew that they would have trouble keeping the country's colonies, and they were particularly reluctant to lose the country's most important overseas possession, German East Africa, which made up of what are today Burundi, Rwanda and the mainland part of Tanzania.

The Germans tried to derive as much profit from their colony as possible. They even laid a railroad -- the "Central Line" -- more than 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) into the heart of Africa from the coastal city of Dar es Salaam. A massive station, able to handle up to 30 trains a day, was erected at the planned terminus in Kigoma, on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, though so many trains wouldn't ever arrive. On the hill overlooking the town, Kaiser William II had a palace built for himself. But he never made it to Kigoma, either.

A 1,200-Ton Jigsaw Puzzle

Modern-day Kigoma has a population of 120,000 living in huts along potholed roads. There is a hospital and a base for the UNHCR, the United Nations' refugee agency. But Kigoma is the only city in western Tanzania.

From the imperial palace, you can see the black mountains of the Democratic Republic of the Congo some 50 kilometers away, on the far shores of the lake. In 1913, Belgian forces occupied the Congo, while British troops were stationed at the southern end of the lake, which juts into what was then Northern Rhodesia.

If Germany was to hold on to East Africa, it had to control Lake Tanganyika, whose 670 kilometers in length make it the world's longest. Lake Tanganyika was the only way to travel either north or south, and it still is.

Still, the Germans had a problem: Its fleet on the lake consisted of only the Kingani, a small customs cutter, and the Hedwig von Wissmann, a sorry-looking, 60-horsepower steamer. So the Kaiser secretly commissioned the shipyard of Joseph Lambert Meyer, in Papenberg, to fill its largest order ever. With a length of almost 70 meters and beam of 10 meters, the new steamer -- which bore the model number 300 -- was to be the biggest ship the yard had ever built. Most importantly, the model had to be constructed out of pieces that men could carry over mountains by foot, wherever they were in the world, before assembling them into a ship.

Meyer handed the task over to Anton Rüter, a tough, hard-working man who was also his most capable employee. Rüter's team began screwing together hundreds of thousands of small parts into a ship. In essence, model number 300 was a 1,200-ton jigsaw puzzle, none of whose pieces was too heavy for a man to carry on his back.

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• Next

• Part 1: Kaiser's African Gunship Enjoys New Lease on Life
• Part 2: The Long Haul to the Lake
• Part 3: The 'Insane' British Plan
• Part 4: The Battle Begins
• Part 5: Almost a Century Later...
• Part 6: A Very Old Woman in Papenburg