Lake Tanganyika is vast (32,900 sq kms), which makes it larger than Belgium. The longest freshwater lake in the world, it is also the second deepest after Russia’s Lake Baikal. Plunging to depths of more than 1,433 metres, the lake stretches 677 kilometres north to south and averages 50 kilometres across. Much of the lake’s water is lost to evaporation and, since 1962; the lake is thought to have dropped by as much as 45cms a year.  

250 species of fish

There are some forty families of freshwater fish in Tanzanian waters, whose ranks include over one thousand species. Of these Lake Tanganyika is thought to host at least 250. The lake has few underwater predators, but one of the most notable fish hunters is the endemic and poisonous Storm’s water cobra. 

The Ha fishermen of the lake

The local people, the Ha, live on the eastern shores of the lake. On moonless nights they set out to catch the small sardine-like fish known in the local language as dagaa (stolothrissa tanganyikae). At night the fish tend to migrate upwards to feed on the microscopic organisms that live near the surface and, attracted by the lights that the fishermen suspend from the bows of their boats, they cluster around the boats. Then, at a given signal, all the men drum on the sides of the boats causing the panicked fish to fall into their scoop nets. Dried on the beach, the dagga is an important Tanzanian food staple, which is exported all over the country. 

Kigoma

The major town on the shores of the lake, Kigoma is the terminus of the central Railway which runs from Dar es Salaam. Trains usually depart from Dar twice a week and the journey takes around 40 hours. Kigoma’s deep harbour was developed by the Germans when Tanganyika was still German East Africa. With the outbreak of World War 1, the lake was of vital strategic important and in a bid to control it the German forces ordered that a warship be carried in pieces from Dar es Salaam to Kigoma, where it was reassembled as the 1,399-ton Graf von Gotzen. Hit by a bomb from a Belgian plane, the ship never sailed and was later scuttled in the Gulf of Bangue. In 1924, however, she was raised by the British, reconditioned, renamed the MV Liemba, and put into service as a cargo and passenger vessel.  Now the MV Liemba runs a weekly service from Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, to Kigoma, before sailing on south to Mupulungu in Zambia.