Der Zentralsee Afrikas wurde 1935 vom deutschen Architekten Herman Sörgel geplant. Der Plan bestand im Wesentlichen darin, das Innere Afrikas durch die Schaffung einer Reihe riesiger Binnenmeere völlig neu zu gestalten.
Sein Plan bestand darin, den Kongo-Fluss dort aufzustauen, wo er durch eine Reihe tiefer, enger Schluchten fließt, nachdem er in einen seiner Nebenflüsse, den Kwa-Fluss, mündet.
Dadurch würde ein See mit einer Fläche von 350.000 Quadratmeilen entstehen – größer als die Flächen von Kalifornien, Nevada und Oregon zusammen.
Sobald sich der See füllte, musste er von einem anderen seiner Nebenflüsse, dem Ubangi, in den Shari-Fluss überlaufen, der einer der Zuflüsse zum heutigen Tschadsee ist. Der Tschadsee würde auf die Ausmaße anschwellen, die er vermutlich vor über 10.000 Jahren hatte, und sich über das Ahaggar-Plateau ausbreiten.
Dann würde ein Fluss entstehen, der durch Algerien führen, nach Osten nach Tunesien abzweigen und schließlich am Golf von Gabes ins Mittelmeer münden würde. Dieser Fluss könnte schiffbar gemacht werden, sodass Schiffe direkt ins Innere Afrikas gelangen könnten.
Von RevolutionBusiness27
14 Comments
Congo people love the project 👍🏿
This is crazy and probably wouldn’t technically work but, for those nations who wouldn’t lose any significant land and even for some of those who would, this would be a blessing.
Obviously this guy isn’t going to win any awards for not being racist, but I’m curious if he mentioned the people living in these areas and what would happen to them (did he care about their wellbeing at all, did it not occur to him or it was seen as a positive to displace or kill them).
Goddamn, the Nazis were idiots.
Again, Sörgel was what we’d call an ‘Idealist Architect’.
His designs, like Atlantropa, were never intended to be taken seriously.
Instead Sörgel produced designs to show the potential of the international community cooperating together on large projects after the horrors of the First World War.
Sörgel was very aware that even if one wanted to re-create Lake Chad at its largest, it wasn’t just a case of backing up the Congo and letting it flood the Sahara; Such a project would take literal centuries, and even then the water would be evaporating out of Lake Chad as quickly as the Congo pumped it in. Sörgel also knew that the hydrological table of North Africa had altered considerably since the Late Glacial Period, and that attempting to recreate Lake Chad would most likely just divert trillions of gallons of freshwater straight through the sands and karst of the Sahara into huge underground aquifers. Handy if you need trillions of gallons of water centuries hence, but hardly a useful project for People living at the time.
Sörgel was very successful at using these unashamedly vast but ultimately futile projects as a marketing tool for himself and his other designs. I’ve told the story before but an architect friend of mine once designed a mile tall coffee shop for the small genteel seaside town we both lived in at the time. Was it desirable or feasible? No, but it did get him a lot of commissions off the back of ‘Get a load of this guy!’ press in architectural journals and periodicals he received as a result.
I wonder if the evaporation in Lake Chad would leave enough water for an overflow..
Say it with me
Is that a …
As a Libyan I welcome having a second southern coast
World War II absurd projects.
This looks like it would displace millions of people from their homes and cause massive environmental upheaval. I’m guessing Mr. Sörgel didn’t consider the native Africans when he put together this plan.
But wouldn’t the water flow down….
(Kidding!)
It was the time, when men was will free to imagine. Now peoples are in panic when someone want to cut a single tree
Cool idea as long as China isn’t involved. If they own the hydroelectric dams and water reservoirs or are the lienholder on their generous infrastructure “loans” they will throttle the continent even more than they are already doing.