[Depicted in Oganga, The Giver and Taker of Life, the 11th episode from the Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, produced by George Lucas - released in 1999 - it’s original edit is from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles; Episode: German East Africa, December 1916 - released in 1992]
Indiana & Remy finally make it to their Belgian unit by Lake Tanganyika where they assigned to a company of native Askari’s under the command of a ruthless Major named Boucher.
During combat Indiana (still under the pseudonym Henri Defense) sees an opportunity to advance thus he orders an attack overriding Boucher’s call for a retreat. In the process Indiana is shot in the chest, yet he miraculously gets up and single handedly captures a machine gun nest and turns it one the Germans.
It turns out that Indiana escaped death thanks to the locket that Princess Sophie gave him many years before, the daughter of Franz Ferdinand who he grew close to during his first adventure in Austria.
For this development Indiana is thought to be some type of God through the eyes of the natives, yet Boucher is furious that Indy disregarded his order. All the same, Indiana is promoted to Captain for his role in defeating the Germans.
The next day the unit sets out for an expedition across the Congo for much needed weapons and supplies from Cape Lopez, a trip on foot that will be approximately two thousand miles. They travel through deserts and jungles and inevitably begin to lose men through accidents and more frequently disease. At some point they reach what looks like a deserted village, yet upon inspection they learn that all the occupants of the village had become victims of smallpox, separate from one small child who Boucher orders to be left behind.
As the the unit continues to move forward and more men fall ill due to yellow fever, Boucher’s strategy is to force the sick men to stay behind with limited rations, an order that Indiana has emphatic disdain for. Meanwhile, Indiana conspires with a sergeant named Barthelemy to hide the boy from the village, and upon Boucher’s discovery he again orders the child to be gone by morning.
That following morning, Barthelemy, Indiana, and the rest of the unit take a stand against Boucher, and for their insubordination he begins to lose his sanity. Indiana unofficially takes command as they push on through Christmas.
By that time Boucher himself falls ill as the unit finally reaches Franceville, where they hire a navigator to take them to Cape Lopez, 500 miles down the river. Along the way their boat is attacked by deserters, in which Barthelemy is wounded yet the unit is saved by the Ubangi child who takes hold of the rudder and steers it to safety.
Further down the river they arrive at a hospital yet an ailing Boucher orders them not to stop due to the fact that it’s run by Germans. For his decision Boucher dies along with more men before they reach Cape Lopez.
At the fort the doctors thankfully give the Ubangi child a clean bill of health, yet they unfortunately can’t save Barthelemy from succumbing to his wounds. Indiana then decides to leave the boy with the missionary nuns, yet not before giving him the name of the fallen sergeant.
During this journey Indiana has direction interaction with:
Askaris - local soldiers serving in the European colonial powers in Africa, recruited by Italian, British, German, Portuguese, and Belgian colonial armies, whom heavily contributed and were significant to both World Wars.
In this adventure Indiana’s life was spared thanks to former encounters with:
Princess Sophie of Hohenberg - only daughter of Franz Ferdinand (presumed to be Indiana’s first love).
Franz Ferdinand - Archduke of Austria and heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, whose assassination in Sarajevo (capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina), along with his wife Sophie the Duchess of Hohenberg, is considered to be the most immediate cause for the origin of World War I.
Key locations in this adventure are as follows:
Lake Tanganyika - African Great Lake, second oldest freshwater lake in the world, second largest in volume as well as depth, secondary to only Lake Baikal in Siberia. Tanganyika is divided amongst Tanzania, Burundi, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which flows into the Congo River system and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean.
Ubangi River - largest tributary of the Congo River in Central Africa
Democratic Republic of the Congo - known simply as Congo or DRC - country in Central Africa that is the second largest on the continent and eleventh largest in the world. The country has great history, tracing human settlement back from 90,000 years ago, and at the turn of the 20th century it was owned by King Leopold II of Belgium, who named it the Congo Free State while forming the Force Publique [the military unit Indiana would later be assigned to]
Cape Lopez - peninsula on the coast of west central Africa, in the country of Gabon, separating the Gulf of Guinea and the south Atlantic Ocean - named after Portuguese explorer Lopes Goncalves who found it in 1474.
Franceville - one of the four largest cities in Gabon - renamed in 1880 to mean ‘city of the freed,’ when Italian born French explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza chose it to resettle former slaves.
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