Activity: Talk or presentation › Talk at a public lecture/debate
Description
The joints where two planks meet and water must not penetrate are the critical juncture of any baleinière riverboat. The longevity, long-term stability and also the safety of the boat depends on its builder’s ability to ensure that water does not penetrate these sensitive spots, which would cause the planks to rot. To do this, boat builders in Congo’s Tshopo province on the upper Congo River have started combining two different techniques of sealing planks: kobeta singa (caulking with cotton soaked in palm oil) from the Indian Ocean; and kobeta toles, which combines bitumen with nkása kwanga leaves, recycled aluminium, and nails. The paper focuses on Tshopo-based boat builder ingénieur Didier Somboyo and his work of ‘re-pairing’ wooden baleinières. Re-pairing occurs on different scales: on the level of the craftsman’s ‘aesthetic’ relation with the body of his boat; by re-pairing the connectivity of traders and their goods; as well as older spatial links between the Indian Ocean and West Central Africa. Re-pairing, thus, is more than just restoring a previous status quo: it promotes and drives creativity and innovation by bringing materials, skills and their entanglements into new social, spatial and technical interdependencies.