by Jo Wardhaugh Doyle                                   Ireland                               24.04.2026

In 1934 CS Forester authored a book called The African Queen. The book was eventually adapted into a film. With two unlikely characters, Katherine Hepburn, who played Rose, a lay missionary, and Humphrey Bogart who played Charlie a Canadian boat man who had a small launch. It was an adventure film made mostly on location in 1951 and was about German East Africa during colonial times in World War One.
There was a complex history to the making of the film and was loosely based on a true story where three thousand Germans and 11,000 Africans held off 300,000 Allied troops.

The fight was about keeping the food supply open on Lake Tanganika. That war was between Germany and Belgium. The Germans had decided to bring over a ship from Europe in eleven sections, and it was called the Goodson. They put the eleven sections together and ruled Lake Tanganika, to stop any chance of allied troops getting food. The Germans had two other smaller ships which were viable.
At that time, the fighting in Gallipoli was in full swing, so there was no added planning, finance or care given by the British given to the problem in East Africa. There was no money. So, the British commander in East Africa decided to bring two small speedboats, launches really. They were small and agile and carried guns and mortar fire.

The large German ship had one fixed gun pointing in one Direction, whilst the ship lumbered to turn itself around, the two speedy British launches could nimbly attack. And they did and blew the hull out. The two other large German ships suffered the same fate as the first. And with that, the British and Allied troops had control over the food supply through Lake Tanganika.
The author, CS Forester, authored the book based on that story.

The film was made in 1951 when Hollywood was:
1. Struggling to make independent films.
2. Struggling to find money to make independent films.
3. Struggling with McCarthyism and the fear of communism and lack of patriotism.
This film was showing that they were super patriots.

Humphrey Bogart and his wife at the time, Lauren Bacall, went to Washington, petitioning against McCarthyism. Katharine Hepburn was too big a name in Hollywood to be picked on. John Houston was the director of the film and suggested at that point that they should shoot the film on location for eight weeks!

They arrived in the Belgium Congo, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. They cleared some jungle and lived in the rapidly built bamboo huts. Boggart thought he was going to Nairobi and John Houston flew off to some game park to hunt the animals.
As they said later, gosh it was extremely hot there. It was obvious that they were not prepared. They all became sick. The water they used was from the lake where all the Crocs and hippos lived.

One after the other they were hit by amoebic dysentery, then malaria. The only two who never became ill where John Houston and Humphrey Bogart. They refused to drink the water and only drank whiskey for the whole 8 weeks, even to brush their teeth with. Bogart said that when the mosquitos bit him they fell dead immediately.

Not only did they get dysentery and malaria. But due to paddling in the water, they got jiggers and were infested with soldier ants in the makeshift compound. They cleared out of there quickly. Katherine Hepburn had wanted a private bathroom. So, one was built on one of the two boats that had been built for the movie. But as they moved along the lake, the low-lying trees hit it and the porta loo was left dangling in the air. Katherine Hepburn was told she would need to be like everyone else and go into the bush to spend a penny.

The film was made in Technicolour, and the cameras were heavy and enormous. For the first two weeks it rained every day. Lauren Bacall became cook, nurse, and letter writer for the crew. The locals, sensibly were the only ones allowed to remove the jiggers from the actor’s feet, they were the experts. Mostly all the men dealt well with the conditions of filming as they had all been in World War 2.

The crew also dealt with angry elephants, hippos trying to tip the boat over at the Murchison Falls in Uganda, and the ever-threatening position of getting stranded on a sandbank when there was an abundance of crocodiles all around them.

The actual story of the film was of Rose and Charlie. An unlikely pair stuck together for survival through some of the harshest of times. It was a romance story if you like, but the story of a small tugboat defeating the large German dominance. Mostly everyone thought that the film was an enormous waste of money and would flop at the box office. The stars of Hollywood looked rough in the film because they authentically felt rough in the film. However, the African Queen was an amazing success with Bogart winning an Oscar for it.

One small fact which has never been mentioned in documentaries was that during the rainy season of the filming, there were no flowers out on the trees or bushes. Houston, the director, wanted them in shots. He wanted hibiscus flowers, all pink and white. There was a convent of Irish sisters living just off Lake Victoria in Kampala. They were asked if they could make a couple of hundred paper hibiscus flowers for the film. Indeed, they could, and they happily obliged. Every single flower you see in that film was made by Sister May Murphy. Sister Steven. Sister Perpetu, and Sister Teckla Plunkett. who told me themselves about the flowers they made for that film. When I met them, they lived in Sandymount, Dublin and Mount Oliver, Dundalk. They were interviewed by Gay Byrne for the radio in the 1970s.
So now what became of the boats. Well, one of the original two boats still works in Uganda. Another was taken to the Florida Keys where it was transformed into a floating restaurant.

As I looked for information on the African Queen I wondered who the real African queen was.

There is another story. A story of a true African queen. A 60-year-old woman warrior who in 1663 defied slave traders and fought against colonisers. But this story would take centuries to write about. So, the African Queen I talk about today.
Is a story.
Of colonisers in East Africa.
It is a story of the love of Rose and Charlie.
It is a story of war.
A story of Hollywood.
But it is a story about paper flowers that were made by some wonderful nuns who no one really knew about.