Kinshasa

"The Congo River basin's only regret is that navigation ends at Kinshasa. At present, Kinshasa is the only city on the Congo River with the potential to rival Kisangani city, but all of this rests on one premise: access to the sea. Without a seaport, Kinshasa is merely a dead port, usable only by East Africa itself. Its cargo throughput is not even as important to East Africa as the Ubangi River."

In the original history, it was not until 1881 that the colonial explorer Stanley reached Kinshasa, where scattered villages and several thousand black people stood.

East Africa had seized Kinshasa three years earlier. At present, Kinshasa's population was only a little over three thousand, because East Africa did not count the local black population.

"The Congo River basin, aside from Hesse Province and several provinces in the plateau region, has exceedingly low economic value. Its richest resource is timber, but timber cannot be exported, which basically makes it worthless. Thus, the Congo River basin has virtually no output."

"At the same time, even if we opened a route to the Atlantic Ocean and seized a seaport from the Portuguese, Kinshasa would still be hindered by the waterfall clusters downstream. Therefore, there are basically two ways to connect the Congo River basin to the Atlantic: build railways for combined river-and-rail transport, or construct a canal."

If the canal project relied on the method of brute force moving bricks, it had a great chance of becoming reality. While East Africa's black population was still somewhat useful, building a canal a hundred kilometers long could indeed bypass the downstream waterfall clusters.

The main difficulty lay in the terrain, in reducing the river's drop in elevation. Moreover, East Africa's current explosives production capacity was considerable, so there was no need to rely