A selection of stories about Lake Kivu issues

Welcome to select Lake Kivu blogs and posts. This is a diverse choice of opinion, writings, musings, tributes and even rants triggered by related topics. Scan through posts below for topics from climate change, technical explanations, the gorillas of Virunga, social changes and personalities.

I share a passion with many Rwandans, Congolese, international travellers and experts for Lake Kivu and its splendours. We are all drawn to it. But Lake Kivu is a special and almost mystical environment, unique for its nature. Indeed, legends have grown around attempts to explain the lake’s resource treasure and how it behaves. Yet sometimes it presents itself as dark, moody, deadly and stormy.

Two live volcanoes define it. Just 10,000 years ago they turned the waters from being the source of the Nile River to flowing south and west through the Congo River to the Atlantic.  From its waters at night one sees the red glow from Mt Nyiragongo’s lava bubbling in the caldera. At other times the lake is calm and bright, a mirror-calm surface that defies its great depths and often violent history.