The African Queen | Entebbe Waterfront — the other Queen, back on the lake

Two launches played the Queen. The one in Florida is the famous one. The other never left Africa.

She spent decades on Ugandan water, is credited with picking up Ernest Hemingway after his back-to-back plane crashes near Murchison Falls in 1954, and then went quietly to pieces in a country with other things to worry about. A full restoration completed in 2024 put her back in service. She now lies at the Waterfront Beach in Entebbe, on the Lake Victoria shore below the botanical gardens, and takes passengers out on the lake.

The accounts disagree about which hull did which work. The Uganda operators say theirs is the boat that ran the Nile and Lake Albert and that the Congo boat went to Key Largo; the Florida boat's own history claims the Nile and Lake Albert service for itself. The 1951 paperwork was never tidy, and Huston's unit was not keeping careful records of its props.

Both are real. Both were on the picture. Both still float, which is more than most film property manages.

Go at the end of the day. Lake Victoria goes flat and metallic before dark, and a small iron boat sitting out on it looks exactly as underpowered as the story requires.

Photo: Entebbe on Lake Victoria, via Wikimedia Commons.