Kisangani
— — the city at the last bend before the falls.
Not only on a wall.
“Kisangani sits at the head of navigation on the Congo River, a thousand miles of brown water and forest from Kinshasa. The Wagenia fishermen still set their conical traps in the rapids the way they have for generations, walking out on lashed poles above the white water. Conrad came through here when it was Stanleyville and wrote it into the dark. Naipaul came later and wrote it again. The forest closes around the river in every direction, the colour of wet bronze, and the city holds its ground at the bend. from the studio
Kisangani, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Kisangani is the capital of Tshopo Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the third-largest city in the country, with a population estimated above one million. It sits just below the equator on the left bank of the Congo River, at the upstream limit of large-vessel navigation from Kinshasa, roughly 1,750 kilometres downriver. The site marks the transition from the navigable middle Congo to the Boyoma Falls, a chain of seven cataracts that step the river down through ninety-six kilometres of forest. Founded as a Belgian post in 1883 and known as Stanleyville until 1966, the city anchors a wedge of equatorial rainforest in the upper Congo basin.
The Boyoma Falls — historically called Stanley Falls — drop the Congo River about sixty metres across seven cataracts over a stretch of roughly ninety-six kilometres ending at Kisangani. They are the most voluminous cataracts on Earth by mean annual flow, moving in the range of 17,000 cubic metres per second. At the seventh and final cataract the Wagenia people fish with large conical traps lashed to wooden scaffolds driven into the rock, a technique that has been practised by the same community for generations and remains visible from the riverbank at the eastern edge of the city.
Kisangani sits within a degree of the equator, so there is no real winter and the daytime high stays near thirty degrees Celsius for most of the year. The rhythm of the year is rain, not temperature: two wetter peaks, one centred on April and one on October–November, with relatively drier stretches in January–February and June–August. Annual rainfall runs to roughly 1,700 millimetres. The river itself rises and falls about a metre and a half across the year, fed by the entire upper Congo basin and the Lualaba tributary that joins above the falls.