River Karma

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Paddling as hard as he could, Steve Fisher
traversed the muddy mountains of water, some
20 feet high, cresting and breaking all around
him like an angry brown sea. He’d just completed
a quarter-mile sprint to reach the midpoint of
the Kinsuka Rapids and was still catching his
breath when the river snatched him.
In an instant, a massive whirlpool opened up
and sucked his stern under water. Spinning
wildly, the violent water flipped Fisher and
plastered him flat against his back deck. Held
underwater for a full sixty seconds, he badly
needed a breath but the river wasn’t letting up.
It wouldn’t be the first time the Congo River’s
mighty rapids killed an explorer.
Located on the outskirts of Kinshasa, the
sprawling equatorial capital of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, the Kinsuka Rapids are a
set of extremely dangerous high-volume whitewater.
But for Fisher and his team, this was
merely supposed to be a warm-up. The real focus
of his expedition was 140 miles downstream – a
first descent of the legendary Inga Rapids, a 50
mile stretch where the Congo’s flow is infinitely
more deadly.
The indigenous BaKongo people who inhabited the banks of the Congo River called it nzadi or “the river that swallows
all rivers” – a fitting name indeed. Along its nearly 3,000-mile horseshoe-shaped path from its source in northeastern Zambia
to the Atlantic Ocean, the river crosses the equator twice and is joined by hundreds of tributaries. All told, the Congo
River Basin drains more than a million-and-a-half square miles, approximately one-eighth of the African continent. With
such a massive drainage, it’s one of the world’s most powerful rivers, boasting a flow of about 1.5 million cubic feet of
water per second - second only to the Amazon.
It was this immense flow that first attracted early European explorers. In 1482, Portuguese navigator Diogo Cao was
exploring the western coast of Africa when he came upon the Congo’s massive muddy delta. Speculating the river might
be a path to the interior of the Dark Continent, Cao and his crew sailed upstream to explore. They managed nearly 100
miles before their progress was halted near the modern-day port of Matadi by an enormous cataract known as the
Cauldron of Hell.
That cataract is the tail end of a 220-mile section of the Congo that’s studded with more than 30 major rapids. The most
dangerous stretch, the Inga Rapids, is a series of cataracts with up to 40-foot waves, deadly hydraulics the size of
semi-trucks, and unpredictable basketball court-sized whirlpools. At the time of the mission, a mind-boggling 1.5 million
cubic feet per second coursed between the riverbanks, dropping 315 feet in nine miles containing seven major rapids.
For comparison’s sake, the Inga Rapids are twice as steep and 30 times larger than those of the Grand Canyon; the power
of the whitewater in the Niagara Gorge pales by comparison. They are, at once, both awe-inspiring and terrifying.
Throughout history, other well-known explorers have tried to trace the Congo’s flow. The expeditions of British Captain
James Hingston Tuckey sponsored by the Royal Geographic Society, and the infamous Henry Morton Stanley both
attempted it during the 1800’s. But for those explorers, and others who followed, the treacherous Inga Rapids were
always the choking stone, the sole reason a source-to-sea navigation of the Congo was deemed impossible.