The African Queen | Butiaba, Lake Albert — the dead port that played a mission village

Butiaba is a hard place to find a reason for now. A sand spit on the eastern shore of Lake Albert, a scatter of fishing houses, nets drying on frames, and the ribs of the SS Robert Coryndon lying half-submerged where the harbour used to work.

For decades this was a serious port. Cargo came across the lake from the eastern Congo and southern Sudan, went overland through Masindi to Masindi Port, crossed Lake Kyoga and eventually reached Mombasa by rail. When East African Railways was wound up in the 1970s, Butiaba simply stopped.

In 1951 it was still busy enough to host a film unit. The great water sequences were worked along Lake Albert with Butiaba as the base, and the village of Kungdu — Rose Sayer's mission station, church exterior and all — was built here from nothing, filmed, and left.

None of the set survives. The shoreline does: flat brown water, the escarpment standing up behind you, the light going orange by four in the afternoon. Walk out to the landing and you are standing where a mission village was nailed together in a fortnight, for a story about two people who could not stand each other.

Photo: Lake Albert, via Wikimedia Commons.