The ferry from Kalemie arrives at a dirt jetty. From there, a rutted road climbs 400 meters out of the lake basin and up to Kirungu, the larger town on the plateau above. That five-kilometer stretch of dirt is most of what connects Moba to the outside world. There are no paved roads here, and none within several hundred kilometers in any direction. When the rains come hard in February and March, the two dirt tracks that reach Moba from the west and south dissolve into impassable mud. For weeks at a time, Moba belongs to the lake and the mountains, as it has for centuries.
Moba occupies a sliver of land along the western shore of Lake Tanganyika's southern reach, 140 kilometers southeast of Kalemie. Behind the town rises the Marungu massif, a range of steep, rugged hills that hems the settlement against the water. The Mulobozi River cuts through the highlands just to the north of town, dividing the range into two sections. The smaller northern block climbs to about 2,100 meters. The larger southern block reaches 2,460 meters, crowned by Murumbi, Moba's highest peak. From the lake, the Marungu hills look like a green wall. Climb the dirt track to Kirungu and the view reverses: Lake Tanganyika unfolds below, one of the deepest lakes on Earth, stretching 140 kilometers southeast to the horizon and across into Tanzania.
The town the White Fathers founded here in 1893 was not called Moba. The Catholic missionaries established their post at Kirungu on the plateau and named it Baudoinville, after Prince Baudouin of Belgium. For most of the twentieth century, that imperial name stuck to the map. The Belgian prince the colonizers honored had died young in 1891, never becoming king. The name he lent to a mission station five thousand kilometers from Brussels long outlived him. The colonial label has since been peeled away. Moba and Kirungu go by Tabwa names now, though the stone mission buildings remain, and Catholicism with them.
Between 1998 and 2003, the Second Congo War drew in nine African nations and killed millions. The triangle of territory between Pweto, Moba, and Moliro became one of its grimmest battlegrounds. In November 2000, DRC government forces launched an offensive here, fighting alongside Interahamwe militia and former Rwandan army troops who had switched sides after fleeing the 1994 genocide. They captured Pweto and Pepa and attacked the port at Moba. Weeks later, RCD-Goma rebels and Rwandan Patriotic Army soldiers counter-attacked and retook both towns. Civilians lived through it, or didn't. Refugees fled across Lake Tanganyika into Tanzania and Zambia. The UNHCR began cautiously repatriating some of them years later. The war's official end did not erase what the region had been called: the Triangle of Death.
For most of its history, Moba had no electricity at all. That changed in 1996, when an Italian NGO called Mondo Giusto funded a small hydroelectric dam on the Ngandwe Fuamba River, just in time to keep the town lit through the chaos that followed. Today the 25,000 or so residents get by through farming on the slopes, fishing the deep lake, and the small-scale gold mining that has long drawn prospectors to this corner of Tanganyika Province. Rafiki, the largest and most comfortable of the ferries plying the lake, still connects Moba to Kalemie on a regular schedule. For those who cannot or will not brave the mud roads, the water remains the highway it has always been.
Moba lies at 7.04°S, 29.78°E on the western shore of southern Lake Tanganyika. Recommended viewing altitude 4,000-6,000 feet AGL. The Marungu highlands rising to 2,460 meters behind the town make a dramatic visual backdrop. Nearest airports: Kalemie/Tumbi (FZRF) 140 km northwest, and Lubumbashi (FZQA) to the southwest. Weather can be unstable over the highlands; afternoon convective buildups are common in wet season (November-April). Lake Tanganyika itself is the primary navigation landmark - the world's second-deepest lake, nearly 700 km long.