Eating and Existence on an Island in Southern Uganda
This article examines contemporary ontological conflicts between people who make their living on an island with fish that fisheries managers consider "commercially extinct" and people who make their living managing "commercially important" fisheries for this region as a whole. What follows is an experiment in worlding, the work of wading between content and contexts to configure webs of relevant relations through which the ontological politics of livability play out along Uganda's southern littorals. Although violence both stark and slow sometimes erupts and is often simmering within the kinds of conflicts I describe, accounts of violence here evidence the ethical stakes involved in this analysis, rather than comprise the content of it.
Ontology, in the anthropological sense, concerns what and how entities exist in the world.1 By attending ethnographically to observable actions and concrete practices that are always already situated within webs of relationality, it becomes possible to examine reality as enacted (rather than existing by default).2 Fisheries, for example, do not exist outside of relations between people and fish. Fish and fisheries come into existence (and sometimes into extinction) differently through the work of catching and transforming fish into edible products and objects to be scientifically managed.3 The methods, material forms, and aims of these practices, as I have come to understand them, are sufficiently distinct along Uganda's southern littorals as to enact fish and fisheries there as ontologically multiple. Attending to this multiplicity is crucial for considering already existing alternatives to an overdetermined future of death, depravity, and collapse that features within scholarly, popular, and policy-oriented accounts of fish and fisheries as singular entities there. This is a politics of what might already also and "could be."4
To be clear, the point of this essay is not to argue for the definitive existence of multiple realities or to solidify descriptions of them. Reality itself is not at issue. Rather it's the shape of the relations through [End Page 2] which knowledge, wealth, and power circulate to enact realities that are in play and at stake.5 I will consider this experiment a success if readers consider alternatives to the crisis continually unfolding in conventional accounts of fish and fisheries in this region as merely plausible (rather than absolutely real). We begin now with one such worlding, where a possibly ancient spirit, a definitely ancient fish, and a multiethnic assemblage of fishworkers work together to enact a plausibly livable present.
Somewhere in a fishing camp …
Somewhere in a fishing camp along the shores of an island in southern Uganda dwells a being who defends ways of being that most formally trained fisheries experts consider extinct, or to have never existed in the first place. My friends and colleagues who live and work in the camp call this figure Sirya Maluma, a title that means "I do not eat pain," or more specifically, "I do not eat food without sauce."6 Admittedly, it is difficult to describe figures like Sirya Maluma. Their ways of being in the world alongside people and fish do not readily exist in the minds, practices, and, ultimately, realities of most who have never lived and worked there. For now, it is enough to consider Sirya Maluma as a spirit of this fishing camp whose continued existence foregrounds an ontological distinction between food and sauce practiced widely throughout the region (and possibly many others farther afield). The politics of food in Uganda is necessarily a politics of sauce.
In recent years, from March through June, hundreds of women and men have started to converge in a fishing camp within Sirya Maluma's littoral domain (see fig. 1). Most are from Uganda, but others travel from as far as the neighboring nations of Kenya, Tanzania, South Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some residents have settled in this camp more or less indefinitely, while many more come for a few months out of the year to make a good living catching, processing, eating, and selling a seasonally abundant type of fish they call nkolongo. When hot smoked over fire, sprinkled with salt, and carefully packed into cardboard boxes, nkolongo find a ready market. Consumers throughout the region value these fish for the rich flavor, juicy texture, and obvious nutritional value they embody when prepared as sauce and served with food as part of a complete meal. Nkolongo make exceptional sauce.
The fishing camp as viewed from Sirya Muluma's place. Photograph by the author
Fisheries scientists and managers may recognize nkolongo as one of several species of the genus Synodontis (fig. 2). Perhaps unconcerned with or simply unaware of the growing local and regional trade in these fish, most fisheries experts consider Synodontis to have been "nearly eliminated from the commercial catch" by broader ecological and economic transformations.7 Instead, fisheries managers are preoccupied with sustaining stocks of large Nile perch, a species of fish introduced into this body of water some fifty years ago that now comprises a commercially important but struggling intercontinental export fishery. Recent efforts to increase stocks of large Nile perch for export have rendered all fishing for nkolongo and other comparatively small indigenous species illegal, because the nets used to target these fish are assumed to threaten juvenile Nile perch and ultimately [End Page 3] the sustainability of this body of water as a whole. Neither Synodontis nor nkolongo matter much to managers.
Synodontis Victoriae (bottom) and Synodontis Afro- Fischeri (top). George Albert Boulenger, Zoology of Egypt: The Fishes of the Nile. London: Published for the Egyptian Government by Hugh Rees, Ltd., 1907, plate 67
Despite the persistence of professional and popular accounts that highlight the economic and social marginality of fishworkers in this region, particularly of women who process and trade fish, many dedicated fishworkers make spectacular sums of money. During the 2012 nkolongo season, when I too was living with, processing, eating, and sometimes selling nkolongo from Sirya Muluma's shores during several months of my extended ethnographic dissertation research, many of my colleagues made a satisfying living. Several women who owned their own fishing nets and worked closely with a male partner who fished reported making at least US$2,500 from nkolongo that season. This is no trivial sum. That same year Uganda's per capita gross national income was estimated at just under US$630. In only four months, with a fish that "almost disappeared from the catches in the main lake," it was possible to earn almost four times what the average statistically abstracted Ugandan makes in a year.8
When I returned to Sirya Maluma's shores in July 2016, just after that year's nkolongo season had ended, residents were quick to point out visual evidence of progress on their own terms. Large portions of forest adjacent to the fishing camp had been cleared and were fenced off and planted with a variety of cultivars. The number of fishing boats belonging to residents had almost doubled. Many more goods and services were now on offer, including restaurants, bars, and lodges, as well as a new clothing boutique and a barbershop (that also charged mobile phones). Many more home and lodge owners had replaced their roofs once covered with plastic sheets and local grasses with corrugated iron, and the government had finally built a cement toilet block. Despite the appearance of economic prosperity, my closest friends there admitted that their own progress lagged behind because some longtime residents brought malevolent figures to the camp, which deeply disturbed Sirya Maluma.
This article is inspired by fishworkers' efforts to continue catching, processing, selling, and eating these ostensibly commercially extinct and illegal fish for sauce. It is similarly inspired by the persistence of nkolongo amid recent dramatic—some say catastrophic—ecological transformations in and around the body of water where they still seem to flourish.9 Or perhaps more accurately, it is haunted by Sirya Maluma. The distinction that Sirya Maluma and fishworkers draw between food and sauce keeps appearing in the pages of my fieldnotes, in audio recordings of formal interviews, and in remembered moments and phrases that still flash before and reverberate within me, even when I do not invite them to.10 Sirya Maluma and nkolongo combine to amplify a consistent, indeed insistent refrain found in these documents and fragments of memory. Whether or not women who work there find smoking, frying, drying, and selling fish to be difficult or easy, those I work with almost all insist at least in sauce we do not suffer. [End Page 4]
The worlds within which Sirya Maluma and nkolongo still exist and matter and the one within which they do not are not timeless, static, or always already existing. They come into being, as well as sometimes into contact with each other, through the practices of working with fish and managing fisheries. Fish feature within these worlds, as well as within this account of them, as partners in the work of worlding.11 After all, one cannot make a living selling fish or scientifically managing fisheries without actual fish to transform into edible sauce or data to be analyzed. Viable alternatives for living well within capitalist ruins may be found by attending to emergence, especially when so many others are preoccupied with emergency.12
Up to this point I have intentionally avoided naming the body of water within and about which these worlds come into existence. The next section begins by worlding this body of water "from above" as Lake Victoria and "from within" as Nyanja to configure two relatively distinct versions of these bodies of water.13 Lake Victoria and Nyanja then serve as conceptual shorthand for examining multiple sets of power relations that congeal and conflict around materially and metaphorically linked aspirations for eating and living well in and around this body of water.
Nightmares and Other Bodies of Water
Approximately one hundred and twenty islands skirt Uganda's highly crenellated southern coastline. These islands vary in size and character from large and densely settled landmasses with fertile soils, rolling hills, and hardwood forests, to uninhabited clusters of rocky outcroppings appearing to offer little more than a temporary resting place for weary birds in flight. The physical territory of these islands, however, remains absent from many important maps of the Lake Victoria basin, including those used to analyze and illustrate population density in this region.
Around 20 percent of all geographical territory now known as Uganda is composed of open water or permanent wetlands. During rainy seasons, about 40 percent of the country is fully saturated with water. The view from land toward open water in southern Uganda must resemble the view toward water from coastal countries fringing the Gulfs of Mannar or Aden, the Wadden Sea, or the Puget and Long Island Sounds. Although there is open water farther than anyone's naked eyes can see, geographical accounts describe Uganda as having no actual coastline, because without a coast that borders an ocean, Uganda is considered completely landlocked.14 Descriptions of this country as landlocked appear absurd from any one of the hundred and twenty islands that fringe Uganda's southern shores. These are places that exist precisely because they are surrounded by water, not by land.
More than simply cartographic or classificatory errors, Lake Victoria's lack of islands and Uganda's contemporary landlocked status draws our attention to methods and materials of apprehension that shape and are shaped by the bodies of water in question and at stake. When this body of water is first apprehended visually as a totality and interpreted through Euro-American categories and methods of analysis, vital material and metaphoric forms through which the politics of eating and living well play out at the littoral may be scientifically studied out of existence. Attention to Nyanja helps configure a world otherwise, where it is still possible to live well with a body of water that continues to feature within popular press accounts as "dying" or "already dead."15 [End Page 5]
Lake Victoria Is a Nightmare
Lake Victoria is shared by Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania in eastern Africa. It is the second largest lake in the world and also one of the most frequently studied.16 Although Lake Victoria still supports the world's largest freshwater fisheries, scholarly studies, policy documents, and popular media accounts alike continue to compose Lake Victoria as a system in constant crisis. There seems to be always too much sickness, pollution, criminality, and immortality along Lake Victoria's shores, and never enough fish, cash, clinics, sanitation, and schools. This magnitude of popular attention, research findings, and resulting developmental interventions, however, has thus far failed to "save" Lake Victoria from its always imminent future of death and collapse.17 Solutions posed in these accounts of Lake Victoria's fisheries and fishing communities, if posed at all, suggest that more and better fisheries management, and especially more and better research, is needed to empower (or sometimes "sensitize" or "build the capacity of") fishing communities to know what their needs are and how best they should be met.
Most of what the latest generation of Euro-American-trained researchers working on Lake Victoria's fisheries know about working with fish and managing fisheries here, myself included, begins with the compelling 2003 documentary film Darwin's Nightmare.18 Artfully curated by Belgian filmmaker Hubert Sauper and nominated for an Academy Award in 2004 for best documentary film, the New York Times has called it "harrowing, indispensable" for the film's portrayal of a "scene of misery and devastation … presented as the agonized face of globalization."19
Darwin's Nightmare chronicles the introduction of the invasive Nile perch into Lake Victoria and its subsequent export to Europe in the form of industrially processed fish fillets. It offers a compelling account of the social complexity of Lake Victoria's fishery situation where fishermen, pilots, prostitutes, scientists, bureaucrats, owners of industrial fish processing plants, street children, artists, night watchmen, and invisible arms dealers converge around Lake Victoria's Nile perch export industry. It offers a classic, indeed horrifying tale of the exploitation of African resources and African labor. Sympathetic viewers of this film, and it is almost impossible to view it without being sympathetic, if not outraged, are left with the impression that all Africans around Lake Victoria have no choice but to live hungry on the putrid byproducts of the Nile perch export-processing industry and die of AIDS.20
Most accounts attribute the Nile perch introductions to Uganda's colonial government in the very early 1960s or Uganda's postindependence government after 1962. Bruce Kinloch, chief game warden from 1950 to 1960 of then-colonial Uganda Game and Fisheries Department, claims to have clandestinely initiated the Nile perch introduction in 1954. Despite a prohibition on the introduction of invasive species in the lake at the time, and ongoing scientific debate about its introduction, Kinloch believed that there was "overwhelming evidence" that Nile perch was valuable "not only as a sporting and tourist amenity, but as an important factor in maintaining the productivity of rich tropical fisheries."21 He was not wrong. Productivity for Kinloch and his managerially minded colleagues was and largely still is measured in fillets of table fish, rather than in whole-bodied fish that Ugandan consumers prefer, or in less clearly articulated forms of biological or economic diversity.22
Nile perch are potentially massive fish. They are able to grow over 2 m in length and over 200 kg in weight.23 Although most are much smaller, these are fish that can grow to be as big as—or even bigger than—a human being. Prior to the introduction [End Page 6] of Nile perch into Lake Victoria, the majority of fish available in southern Uganda were small, diverse, brightly colored, and known as enkejje. In the decades that followed the Nile perch introductions, an estimated 200–300 distinct forms of these fish disappeared.24 Although oral histories and the comparative ethnographic record suggest the importance of these fish as a source of nourishment, economic activity, and cosmopolitan cultural identity, most fisheries development experts posit that enkejje, much like nkolongo, "have never constituted a significant fishery and have never been particularly popular."25
The Nile perch and the infrastructures that developed alongside them frame scholarly and popular attention to Lake Victoria's fisheries in a particular way. For most scientists and policy professionals, the ecological extinction of hundreds of indigenous fish species is now a foregone conclusion. The Nile perch, an introduced predator, has become naturalized in Lake Victoria fisheries, just as the Nile perch export industry has become naturalized in Lake Victoria's fisheries economy. It is the predicted extinction of the Nile perch that now features within Lake Victoria's extinction crisis narratives, not the hundreds of distinct species that seemed to disappear alongside the growth of Nile perch populations.
During the peak years of the Nile perch boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s, industrially processed Nile perch fillets had become one of the most important export commodities in eastern Africa, with an estimated 600,000 tons of fish exported outside of the continent. An estimated 500 million USD were generated in fishing sites around the lake, and an additional 250 million USD of foreign exchange flowed into the three countries that share the lake each year.26 Industrially processed fish fillets soon became Uganda's second most lucrative export commodity after coffee. These high levels of exports and earnings did not, however, last long.
By 2010, as a result of the combined effects of declining stocks of large Nile perch, increased local and regional demand for fish, an influx of cheaper whitefish substitutes on global markets, and a global financial crisis, Nile perch exports to Europe had fallen to just under 32,000 tons.27 To attempt to return to the high levels of Nile perch exports experienced during peak years, eastern African fisheries managers acted under the guidance of European and American technical advisors and donors and began enforcing prohibitions on forms of fishing (specifically the use of gill nets with less than five-inch stretched mesh size) and forms of processing, trade, and consumption (specifically Nile perch under twenty inches), rendering most fishing for forms and species of fish preferred in local and regional markets, including nkolongo, illegal.
The presumed socioeconomic impacts of Lake Victoria's predicted commercial fisheries demise do appear incredibly high. Experts argue that when Nile perch populations collapse, tens of millions of eastern Africans will be without livelihoods and that many more will be without Nile perch to eat. Industrial fish processing plants will close and the three governments that share the lake will be without an important, and an importantly shared, source of much needed foreign exchange. From this vantage point, armed with these numbers, sustaining stocks of Nile perch may appear a worthy, if currently impossible goal. Indeed, at a high-level fisheries meeting sponsored by the Lake Victoria Fisheries Organization that I attended in June 2014, participants lamented the recent lack of donor funding for fisheries management and toyed with the idea of declaring "the whole thing a disaster" to attract more national and international financial support. Lake Victoria may be dying, but Nyanja still lives on.
Nyanja Still Exists
It strikes me as strange that a single word in English—lake—is used to describe not only truly massive bodies of water like Lake Superior and Lake Bikal, but also tiny backyard ponds (that are mere puddles when compared to these "Great Lakes").28 [End Page 7] Indeed, there is no scientific consensus on what exactly constitutes a lake or what precisely distinguishes a lake from a pond or even a sea. Bodies of water called lakes tend to be larger than ponds, and both must be completely encircled by land. Seas tend be much larger and more turbulent than either ponds or lakes, and they are generally not fully enclosed by land—oceans, after all, are also called seas. Most seas are salty, but the Sea of Galilea holds freshwater (and is also fully encircled by land). The Aral and Dead Seas are both salty, but they too are completely landlocked. There is analytical leverage within this conceptual ambiguity.
Women and men who live and work with fish along Uganda's southern cosmopolitan shores can and do speak many languages—Luganda, Lusoga, Lunyoro, Langi, Alur, Acholi, Adhola, Ateso, Rukiga, Ruyankole, Lingala, Kinyarwanda, Kiswahili, English, and others. Most, however, use a similar term when referring to the body of water that most English speakers only know as Lake Victoria. They call it Nyanja.29 Nyanja is not a lake.
Nyanja is a term that references the uncontainable material and metaphoric qualities of impressively large bodies of water. A particular Nyanja could be a wide flowing river, like the long famous Nile, or the lesser-known Mayanja and Namayanja, twin streams that spring forth from the top of a hill in south central Uganda and combine to flow as one in a northwesterly direction for almost one hundred miles. Or it could be a body of water that is known to be surrounded by land, but is so large and unpredictable that it is dangerous, maybe even impossible, to navigate a straight course directly from one end to another. Fishworkers tell me that if they were standing on the shores of the Indian Ocean or the Mediterranean Sea, they would also call these bodies of water Nyanja.
The waters of the particular Nyanja that surrounds the island where Sirya Maluma still dwells are perfectly placid some parts of the year, certain times of the month, and some hours of the day. During others, winds and waves are so strong that even the bravest fishermen will not board their wooden boats to fish, and even the island's wealthiest landowners will not trust their large fiberglass speedboats to return them safely to their mainland homes and places of work. Wind, waves, waterspouts, and lightning are all possible and potentially deadly on the Nyanja. Strong currents that flow within the Nyanja itself make it even more dangerous to travel long distances when this sea is rough. Stormy waters sometimes stop water travel for days on end.
When I first encountered Sirya Maluma in March of 2012, a large beach of white fine-grained sand separated the Nyanja from the wooden buildings of the nearby fishing camp. The sandy beach was still there when I left the camp four months later. When I returned in July 2016, the sandy beach had completely disappeared. The waters of the Nyanja had risen so much that they now almost touched the buildings closest to shore. Tan-colored rocks (about the size of one's fist) were stacked everywhere the beach once had been, both below and above the water. I was told that Nyanja's wind and waves brought these stones to shore several months ago. Storms were soon expected to come again to take these stones back into the Nyanja, returning the shore back to sand. The water level, I was told, would soon fall back to what I had experienced as normal. This was all part of a usual cycle that somehow had not occurred when I was living there four years earlier. In any case, storms that turn sandy shores to rock and back to sand again are not something that I think of when I think of lakes.30
This variability is vital at the littoral. It is no coincidence that the vernacular term for Nyanja's shores, olubalama lwenyanja, is semantically linked [End Page 8] to the concept of being in good health by water that overflows.31 The "line" in the English word shoreline draws too stark a distinction between where the waters of a given Nyanja end and solid ground begins. Indeed, it is difficult to draw accurate boundaries between the dry world of humans and the wet world of fish.32
Emputa, mukene, ngege, nkolongo, enkejje, mamba, semutundu, mpongo, kasulubana, male, and nsonzi are all species of fish that still appear along the shores of the Nyanja. Some of these fish are used to make sumptuous meals at the littoral, the kind toward which Sirya Maluma draws our attention. Many others are smoked, dried, salted, or fried in fishing camps and sold to make sauce for residents inland, providing fishworkers with financial resources to direct toward their own aspirations for good living and many others with fish for sauce. Much of this eating, processing, and selling continues without any managerial oversight or assessment, and much of it is conducted by women. The practices of fishing, processing, selling, and eating these fish in Nyanja engage materials, methods, and meanings that enact a body of water very different from Lake Victoria.
Fishworkers living along Sirya Maluma's shores recognize the multiplicity of the bodies of fish and bodies of water with which they work. They experience different species and different forms of fish moving through distinct networks of traders, processors, and buyers where they are manipulated, valued, and consumed differently—so differently that they are no longer the same thing.33 This recognition of difference and the importance of it is reflected in practices of signifying fish and the bodies of water from which they were fished. Whether or not fishworkers are fluent in English, when speaking about activities related to the Nile perch export trade, fishworkers often use the English terms Nile perch and Lake Victoria to refer to these fish and the body of water where they are caught. Some even refer to Lake Victoria as the "World Bank." When speaking about activities related to this same species of fish when processed in fishing camps and traded in local and regional markets, fishworkers use the vernacular terms emputa (to refer to "Nile perch") and Nyanja (to refer to the body of water).
To be clear, I am not arguing for the radical alterity of fishworkers or the radical incommensurability of the worlds they inhabit in relation to those of formally trained fisheries experts. Indeed, both of these worlds are accessible enough to anyone willing and able to live and work in either context. Instead, I am arguing against the radical singularity that has directed scholarly and popular attention to Lake Victoria's Nile perch export fishery for far too long. In so doing, I follow the lead of fishworkers themselves. Fishworkers know that the Nile perch export industry motivates a managerial politics for Lake Victoria that is often at odds with their own aspirations toward eating and living well with multiple species of fish in and around the Nyanja. It is to these sumptuous meals and the situated ethics implicated within them that I now turn.
A Complete Meal (or, There Is No Food without Sauce, without Sauce There Is Pain)
Along Uganda's southern littoral, a complete meal is referred to as ekijjulo, a noun derived from the verb–jjula, which references being or becoming full and the act of uncovering or serving a meal.34 The meal pictured here (fig. 3) was one I shared with my research assistant, Akello, in 2012 inside the home of a woman we call Mama Tabby. Mama Tabby was born into a fishing family on a large island like Sirya Maluma's where there is plenty of land for farming. She has spent the last twenty years living, working, and raising her family on a small, rocky, and distant fishing island where almost no farming takes place and where we first met in 2008.
On this island, Mama Tabby makes her living managing four large fishing boats equipped [End Page 9] with powerful engines that target Nile perch for the export trade. Although Mama Tabby is clearly a biological female, the fishermen who work for her call her Ssebo, or Sir.35 Mama Tabby's husband has a large home and garden on the mainland; however, she rarely travels to his home. She prefers life on the island, where her economic success and authority are appreciated and respected within the dense sociality of this fishing camp. When we first met, her youngest daughter, Tabby, was still in primary school. Soon, with the proceeds from fishwork, Tabby plans to join her other sisters and brothers at Makerere University in Kampala—an iconic East African intellectual institution, once widely recognized as the Harvard of East Africa—where she plans to study law.
This is not (just) food. Photograph by the author
Had I not spent two years living, working, and eating with fishworkers along Nyanja's littoral since I first met Mama Tabby, and not been visited by Sirya Maluma periodically ever since, I would still consider everything pictured here to be food (fig. 3). After all, it seems perfectly edible. This assemblage of littoral residents and experiences has taught me that the only portion of this meal that is considered emmere or food proper is the bowl containing sweet potatoes and two kinds of cooked bananas. The other two bowls, featuring the head and body of a fish, respectively, are considered enva or sauce. Sirya Maluma reminds us that in the absence of sauce, food does not exist. Without sauce, would-be food is instead called maluma, reflective of "biting, gnawing, hunger, or pain."36
Emmere (or food proper) is derived from the verb–mera (to grow, sprout). One early lexicographer of Luganda noted that participles that end in "e" express a passive state and suggested that emmere is "that which is grown."37 Most Luganda-English dictionaries simply define emmere as "food." But again, for Luganda speakers, food is not everything that could be eaten. Cultivated crops only become food (emmere) when they are served with sauce (enva). When cultivated crops are served without sauce, they are instead maluma.38
On the mainland, beans, groundnuts, or greens make fine sauces. On the islands where Sirya Maluma and fishworkers live, however, the only sauces strictly considered enva are those made with fish.39 Fish served in warm, wet sauce are mediatory substances that transform cultivated crops into edible foods. Together food and sauce make the kinds of complete, satisfying meals that contribute materially and metaphorically to good lives made working with fish.
On the distant islands where Mama Tabby still lives and works, food is more difficult to come by than sauce. Because her island home is small and rocky, there is no possibility for farming there like there is on Sirya Maluma's island, and food must be imported from the mainland and other islands. When researchers visit islands like these, and ask whether residents have difficulties sourcing food, fishworkers honestly report that yes, food is a problem.40 Because most Europeans and Americans and European- and American-trained researchers do not recognize differences between food and sauce, sauce rarely, if ever, enters into the conversation. The result is that researchers too often [End Page 10] leave fishing sites thinking that everything that could be eaten is scarce there, particularly fish.
Eating and Refusing to Eat
"Eating" and "refusing to eat" are actions that inspire metaphors for the transfer, consolidation, and differentiation of political power near this and other Nyanja. Indeed the verb–rya (as found in Sirya, I do not eat) means both "to eat" and "to become the owner or lord of."41 The region's kings were considered to "eat the kingdom" upon ascending their thrones. Things that were not eaten by some, say particular animals, fish, or small beans, served as living, material symbols for consolidating notions and practices of clanship around what scholars still call a "totemic avoidance" that marked both social cohesion and difference along the northern shores of Nyanja and the diverse therapeutic and agropastoral economies that developed alongside each other there.42 Sirya Maluma does not now belong to any particular clan, ethnic group, nation, or family. Her refusal to eat food without sauce is more than simply a dietary preference; it is a practical, political act.
The language of eating continues to lend a visceral quality to popular explanations of the failures of contemporary developmental projects in the region, including those for Uganda's fisheries. Rather than the bureaucratic language of transparency or the accusatory language of corruption used to explain the failures of state, corporate, or nonprofit developmental efforts, in Uganda, as elsewhere in the region, projects are said to fail—often with a shrug of the shoulders—because one or more individuals involved "ate the money." Of course one cannot eat money directly, and the insinuation is that whomever "ate the money" distributed at least a portion of their possibly misappropriated largess among friends, relatives, lovers, and other influential constituents. Indeed, as Parker Shipton has shown for Luo communities along the eastern portion of Lake Victoria, those most able to access the forms of financial and material capital that developmental projects distribute are those who, because of their comparatively high social status, are least expected to pay it back.43 Still, the sight of a particularly corpulent body in the region draws attention to the differential distribution of consumptive agency within the body politic, initiating conversations about whether or not individuals and groups are "misusing food" or "misusing funds." Of recent, the region's most savvy contemporary leaders have recognized the political importance of appearing appropriately lean.
Sirya Maluma Does Not Eat Pain
Sirya Maluma may initially appear to be a very local being. The proto-Bantu roots of rya (eat) and luma (bite or pain), however, are evidenced throughout most historical and contemporary African Great Lakes Bantu-speaking communities, as well as throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa itself wherever Bantu-based languages are spoken.44 As already mentioned, women and men who live on and work from Nyanja's northern islands were born in many different places and grew up speaking many different languages. The phrase Sirya Maluma, however, is intelligible to all.
To break this down: Sirya reflects the common negation, [si], meaning "I do not," of the verb [rya], meaning "eat." Sirya: "I do not eat." Maluma is a bit more difficult: [ma-] is a prefix indicating the plural form of the verbal noun [luma], which references biting, aching, pain, or even grinding one's teeth.45 Maluma then reflects the physical act of biting and metaphorical sensation of pain related to eating food without sauce and the broader situation of precarity this activity suggests.46
The persistence of Sirya Maluma, a being [End Page 11] who refuses to entertain the possibility of that pain, illustrates the endurance of a situated ethic of abundance tied to the practices of sumptuous eating at the littoral. The wide range of intelligibility throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa afforded by Sirya Maluma's title, and possibly also in other contexts and even continents where complete meals—even food itself—do not exist without sauce, illustrates the breadth and historical depth of this refusal.
Sirya Maluma Is an Ethical Being
Sirya Maluma is neither a man nor a woman, neither a ghost nor god. Residents of the Nyanja refer to Sirya Maluma as "spirit of the place."47 These spirits are called musambwa (pl. misambwa), a category of being unique to, but almost ubiquitous around this body of water. These are figures that compose an innumerable pantheon of what David Gordon has recently described as invisible agents, spirit beings who intervene in both mundane and spectacular ways in the day-to-day lives and large-scale political projects of those who know them to exist.48
Historians of the Great Lakes Region of Africa, and the southern shores of Uganda where Sirya Maluma dwells in particular, situate figures like misambwa within the realm of public healing.49 Attention to the work of spirit mediums who speak on behalf of misambwa and their followers enact misambwa as a form of practical reason. Mediums who spoke for figures like Sirya Maluma were "concerned not with expressing belief but rather with reorienting their situation in the world of practical ends—to cure the sick and bring an end to famine and epidemic disease."50 Misambwa, spirit mediums, and their followers worked together to constitute networks of knowledge through which the conditions of abundance in their territories was guarded in support of and at times in opposition to the political projects of ruling elites.51 It is entirely possible that my friends and colleagues in Sirya Maluma's fishing camp were doing something similar by sharing Sirya Maluma with me.
Consider one everyday way that Sirya Maluma exists. Two fishermen return to shore in the early hours of the morning after a long night of fishing for Nile perch (not emputa). Their catches were not particularly good. When their wives come to greet them, each man hesitates to hand over the two medium-sized fish that they each usually reserve from the rest of their commercial catch to give to their wives for sauce.52 One man hoped to sell his two fish before his wife came to the shore and spend the extra cash trying to win more in an ongoing card game outside a local bar. The other had hoped to give at least one of his fish to an attractive young woman who recently moved to this fishing camp to set up a hoteli, or local foods restaurant. His gift of a fish might endear him to this new, attractive woman. Instead, both of their wives insisted, Sirya Maluma, I do not eat food without sauce, and went home each with two fish to prepare for sauce. That day, like most other days, these two pairs of people and those they eat with all ate a complete meal.
Misambwa, like Sirya Maluma, are rooted in particular places and the spectacular material formations found in these places (including springs and waterfalls, large anomalous rocks or tree trunks, and potentially dangerous animals like pythons, hippopotami, and crocodiles), but also in more understated ones, for example, a group of smooth rocks between two villages where it makes good sense to sit and rest a while when traveling between the two, or under a tree that offers the last bit of shade before a stretch of open grassland. Sirya Maluma still dwells in a flat section of dark rock that buttresses the land from the sea just next to where many fishing boats still land along a [End Page 12] sometimes sandy and other times rocky beach. Although Sirya Maluma may have once had a formal retinue of a spirit medium, priest, supplicants, and regular ceremonies, this figure is still regularly acknowledged by residents who place a few coffee berries or some small money in a basket located at the inland fringes of this fishing camp. Through this relatively simple act of acknowledgment, residents are ensured safe passage in their journeys on foot overland to nearby fishing camps, farms, and other places of work and leisure.
I first encountered Sirya Maluma on my second day living in the fishing camp within which this figure dwells. I was staying in the home of a woman I call Mama Laticia, who, in addition to working with fish, also volunteered her time mediating domestic disputes as the camp's Local Council for Women. Her husband and four children often found her work resolving disputes to be burdensome. Sometimes meals would be drastically delayed, or not prepared at all, because Mama Laticia was handling a particularly difficult case.
When it came time to bathe after a long afternoon of removing nkolongo from fishing nets, Mama Laticia led me to a nearby but relatively secluded place by the shore where newcomers to this camp often tried to bathe. Mama Laticia noted that the spirit of this place, Sirya Maluma, did not appreciate women bathing along these shores and that she often took it upon herself to tell newcomers to stop bathing there. Still, Mama Laticia said it was perfectly fine for me because Sirya Maluma only caused problems for bathers if and when they actually know that Sirya Maluma exists. My desire for physical immersion in the refreshing waters of the Nyanja trumped my then limited knowledge of figures like Sirya Maluma. I bathed there regularly throughout multiple stays with Mama Laticia in this fishing camp.
It seems Sirya Maluma was not amused. Months later a friend and healer who had also once bathed with me at Sirya Maluma's place told me she was repeatedly disturbed and visited by Sirya Maluma in her sleep.53 Sirya Maluma would appear in a large fishing boat filled with her children, enter my friend's room, and scold both of us for disrespecting this spirit's authority by bathing inappropriately. Before leaving my friend's presence, Sirya Maluma requested a white goat with black spots pregnant with twins, a basket filled with coffee berries, a jug of banana beer, and some small amount of money. It was only after we together purchased these items, dedicated them to the spirit of Sirya Maluma, and asked for this spirit's blessing that this figure finally stopped visiting my friend. Strangely, it was this same ceremony that confirmed the salience of Sirya Maluma's existence for me, or at the very least within my fieldnotes. When I returned to Sirya Maluma's fishing camp in 2016, I found a different place to bathe.
Fish Entangled between Worlds
Nkolongo are abundant in the deep waters off of the southern shores of Sirya Maluma's island from March to June, roughly corresponding with the long rainy season, but are also common in many central and southern African freshwater bodies.54 Its three serrated bone-like appendages that stick out from its scaleless body just behind the top of its head and on both sides of its body (behind what scientist call its "humeral process") are capable of easily piercing through the flesh of careless humans and fish alike, signaling the evolutionary advantage of this fish's ancient body armor. Even the voracious Nile perch have learned to avoid them.55 Nkolongo are also the most delicious smoked fish I have ever tasted. Their persistence inspires hope in the contaminated diversity that Lake Victoria has left in its wake.56
During the nkolongo season hundreds of fishworkers live for a time in rented rooms constructed with repurposed timber sourced from old fishing boats near Sirya Maluma's place. Most come to fish, smoke fish, or buy nkolongo for sale on the [End Page 13] mainland, though others come to sell clothes or domestic goods or work in newly opened restaurants and bars. Permanent and seasonal residents alike appreciate the activity of the nkolongo season, not least because they may earn as much, if not more, cash during the four months of the season than they probably will throughout the rest of the year, whether they spend their time farming, trading, or working with other types of fish.
Fisheries ecologists working on Lake Victoria believe that Synodontis spend most of their lives in open water, traveling only to rivers and wetlands to spawn, or at least they did when they were abundant.57 Most fishermen working near Sirya Maluma's island in Nyanja know the opposite to be true, that nkolongo usually live in wetlands and rivers like the Kagera and Katonga in the west and come into the open waters between February and March, where they spawn, feed on insects and mollusks disturbed in the turbulent waters there, and wait for their young to become big enough to safely make the journey back into the wetlands and rivers from which they came.58 Because the few available scientific studies of Synodontis reproduction were conducted in Kenyan rivers, it is possible that both are correct. In Ugandan waters, most female nkolongo begin becoming gravid, that is, ripe with eggs, in February, just as the nkolongo season is beginning, and by May and June, the last months of the season, many more small nkolongo are caught. If and when these fish return the following year, most will be sexually mature and ready to spawn the next generation of their young.59 Without looking at a calendar, fishworkers know when the nkolongo season is coming to a close, because semutundu, a fish scientists recognize as Bagrus docmak, begin appearing in their nets and in their saucepans.
Whatever their seasonal origins and reproductive proclivities, the nkolongo constitute one of the only fisheries in the region that appears from the Nyanja to be increasing in size. Its significance, however, is systematically—though likely unin tentionally—obscured by methods used to assess fish abundance and the economic value of fish for Lake Victoria as a whole. Neither research method is designed around the seasonal abundance or dearth of Synodontis in mind, and only very few studies have been designed for Lake Victoria with these fish in mind at all.
Fisheries-Independent Scarcity
Two modes of assessment inform scientific fisheries management in Lake Victoria. "Fishery-independent" data are collected from gill- and trawl-net surveys. During these surveys scientists, managers, and their assistants board large research vessels and drag even larger nets along transects visually represented as lines sketched onto maps of Lake Victoria. After their variously heavy nets are hauled on board by mechanical wenches (some that can lift up to two tons of fish out of the water), fish are sorted by species and size, then counted and eventually used to estimate total quantities of fish in the lake.
"Fishery-dependent" data is collected from frame surveys that are ostensibly "a complete enumeration of all fishing inputs at all fishing sites."60 Data from these surveys are then used to identify sampling units and strata for catch assessment surveys in select sites where data on species, sizes, and quantities of fish caught are then combined with estimates of fishing effort from frame surveys to extrapolate quantities and values of all fish caught in the lake as a whole.
The bulk of nkolongo in the Nyanja are caught by fishermen at night between submerged rock outcroppings close to islands like Sirya Maluma's. These same submerged rocks make it very difficult for large research vessels and their even larger nets to safely pass and catch Synodontis in Lake Victoria. According to scientists affiliated with Uganda's Fisheries Research Institute, these fish "seem to be hiding around in rocky matrices within the lake."61 Indeed, a report on results from an exploratory trawl survey conducted between 1969 and 1971 noted that these areas "could easily be [and [End Page 14] by extension should be] detected and avoided."62 Perhaps it was researchers who were hiding from Synodontis, rather than the other way around.
When Synodontis were caught in research nets, they were rarely counted. According to a particularly well-connected Ugandan fisheries manager who participated in a trawl survey decades ago as part of his training, when he hauled a trawl net full of Synodontis onto his research vessel, the European advisor directing these efforts instructed him to throw these fish and the nets in which they were impossibly entangled back into the water. This practice of hauling in research nets full of Synodontis, feeling surprised and frustrated, and discarding both fish and nets back into the water is not a new phenomenon, but rather reflective of how particular kinds of fish abundance (or dearth) become real in Lake Victoria.
Similar accounts in published literatures affirm this practice. As early as 1961, E. L. Hamblyn, a scientist then briefly affiliated with the East African Freshwater Fishery Research Organization, noted in the same organization's annual report, "It will be noticed that the gill net was not fished after the large haul of Synodontis. … These Machochid fish are dangerously armed with serrated pectoral spines, which may be locked at right angles to the body. This behaviour, coupled with the strong dorsal spine, causes them to become almost inextricably entangled in a gill net which is ruined by a heavy catch."63 In a 1997 publication analyzing declines of catfish populations recorded in trawl surveys conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s, two world-renowned fisheries scientists noted similarly that "Synodontis … were not consistently recorded on these trawlers [even when they were caught]. Moreover, their records underestimate the actual catch since many individuals of these species, entangled in the nets by their serrated spines, were overlooked."64
These same fisheries-independent vessels and assessment techniques documented the population explosion of the Nile perch throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Because research vessels actively avoided areas where Synodontis are known to congregate, and often avoided counting Synodontis when they were caught, these fish were studied out of existence (or at least out of importance) through the practices of fishery-independent research. So few were documented that these fish were grouped with "other species" that together were considered to contribute less than 1 percent of the total weight of all documented catches.65 Because these "other species" seemed to contribute so little to the total quantities and types of fish in Lake Victoria, they were rarely included in authoritative tables and graphs that circulated widely to underwrite managerial intervention into the lives of Lake Victoria's fish and fishworkers.
Situated Seasonal Abundance
The nkolongo fishery is the only one where I have seen women removing fish from nets; indeed, this is one of the most straightforward ways that women can easily be given or earn fish for sauce (fig. 4). Even when women own the boats and nets that bring in Nile perch, tilapia, and mukene (the three most common commercial species of fish presently caught in the lake), they leave it to fishermen to remove fish from nets. During nkolongo season, anyone—woman, man, or child—who is willing to work for an hour or so carefully untangling nkolongo from fishing nets will be compensated with more than enough fish for that day's sauce.
Significant but unknown quantities of nkolongo are processed from fishing camps like those on Sirya Maluma's island and are transported from landing sites to traders taking fish for export to distant markets in Northern Uganda and eastern Congo, thereby bypassing most of the formal markets where fisheries statistics and formal taxes are sometimes collected. Because Synodontis do not fit into managerial modes of assessment—they either exist too much in research nets or not at all, and they do not consistently feature in market surveys and tax revenues for large fishing sites—they have ceased to exist commercially in Lake Victoria at all. [End Page 15]
Taking nkolongo from nets requires patience and partners. Photograph by the author
Patience hard at work. Photograph by the author
[End Page 16]
Most women on this island and on others like it with a solid relationship with a brother, son, husband, friend, or customer who catches fish can earn enough money to meet her everyday needs for cash any time of year.66 Particularly successful women fishworkers save enough to purchase land and livestock and build their retirement homes inland. Many provide their children with a better education than they have. During the 2012 nkolongo season, the woman smoking fish pictured above (see fig. 5) put an iron roof on her house, built a new shed to smoke and store her fish when it rains, paid for her two children to attend a good boarding school, bought four goats, gave her mother one million Ugandan shillings, and deposited the rest of her earnings in the bank. Despite scholarly and popular accounts enumerating the precarity of life on islands like Sirya Maluma's—particularly with respect to food security—there (at the very least from March to June) everyone eats well.
When Fisheries Meet
Fishworkers, whether or not they are fluent in English, use the English word Fisheries in a very specific way. For them Fisheries is a proper noun, and a pejorative one at that. When fishworkers use this term they reference an ensemble of people who seek to and sometimes do manage their activities—from high-level government ministers and the paramilitary enforcement teams they have helped establish, the leadership and staff of the Department of Fisheries, to anyone assuming the authority (whether officially granted or not) to apprehend the tools they use to produce fish for profit and fish for sauce, including researchers. When "Fisheries come," fishworkers tell me they run, disappear, or otherwise make themselves unavailable as subjects of the law or science, especially if they are busy working with fish.
Ugandan fisheries managers who work most closely with Nyanja navigate treacherous ontological terrain. Between Lake Victoria and Nyanja frictions are generated as assumed universal truths about what exists, what should be sustained, and how what exists should be sustained, encounter littoral practices of eating and living well that play out as part of the everyday work of provisioning complete meals and profiting from the sheer extent of the need for them.67 Even the most highly educated Ugandan managers know that they too need fish for sauce and that they too need sauce for food.
Beginning in 2011, unmarked boats filled with armed men dressed in military fatigues have been sporadically deployed to Nyanja's fishing sites as part of a new multinational governmental and nongovernmental collaboration known as Smart-Fish. SmartFish is financed by the European Union and implemented by the Indian Ocean Commission with the support of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, regional economic development funds, authorities, and organizations, as well as the national governments in the countries where they work, and the governments of South Africa and Mauritius.
SmartFish, in their words, "aims at contributing to an increased level of social, economic and environmental development and deeper regional integration … through improved capacities for the sustainable exploitation of fisheries resources." For SmartFish, all this development and regional integration explicitly requires increasing food security, a concept they specify as "access to adequate food at all times, with reduced risk of losing access to food due to sudden shocks."68 Their goals sound innocuous enough. Indeed, they sound great, especially since we now know that there is no food without sauce: for food security to increase, sauce must also increase! SmartFish, unfortunately, does not enact a version of this fishery attentive to sauce.
In their words and practices, SmartFish is particularly dedicated to reducing "illegalities" in fisheries. This, they claim, will produce "secure fisheries and secure futures," which is indeed their slogan. I was able to ask Mama Ssalongo, a woman in her mid-fifties who has lived near Sirya Maluma's place for at least half a decade, what she had to say about SmartFish and the possibilities for [End Page 17] secure futures that SmartFish brings into being there.
Mama Ssalongo (meaning she is a mother of a son who is the father of twins) began working with fish in the early 1980s under the tutelage of another woman who was then in her fifties. Together they would travel on foot to the shores of the Nyanja and buy several large fresh Nile perch (which they call emputa) bundled together through their mouths with strong banana fibers. In those days, emputa were abundant and in high demand (they still are in high demand). Mama Ssalongo would sell each emputa for around three times more than what she paid for them, and even more if she cut her fish into pieces and fried them before selling.
Many of her early customers were soldiers fighting for the National Resistance Army (NRA) under the leadership of Yoweri Museveni, who is still the president of Uganda, a position he has held since 1986. Just before the NRA gained control of Kampala, Mama Ssalongo was caught in the crossfire of their revolution while carrying her fish. After we had known each other for a few months, she showed me the scar tissue that had long since grown over a small piece of shrapnel still lodged in her upper back. It is probably unlikely, but still possible, that some of soldiers to whom she once sold fish for sauce are now supervising efforts to stop her from producing fish. In any case, she has learned to live with the twinging pain that still persists.
Although most women are not living with bullet fragments in their back, there are many women like Mama Ssalongo around the Nyanja, especially on Nyanja's islands. Many of Mama Ssalongo's contemporaries and colleagues are mothers with children ranging from freshly born to fully grown, and many live in their own homes alone or with their children. Most are now single, either through the death of their partners or through other processes of estrangement. When I ask women like Mama Ssalongo whether they'd like to find another husband, many have told me no, "a man is someone I cannot live with." This is not because men do not want to live with these women, but rather because these women do not want to live with these men. So they don't.
Many women in fishing camps, especially those who live there year round, engage in multiple arts of subsistence and accumulation—they work with fish, farm food for themselves and other camp residents, make and sell charcoal, own shops, restaurants, bars, and lodges, and trade goods back and forth between islands and the mainland. Women like Mama Ssalongo appreciate the conviviality that characterizes life in fishing camps. When moving between supervising work with her two fishing boats (and fishermen) and digging in her garden or smoking her fish, Mama Ssalongo might stop in for a beer and a chat in a local bar, deliver a bunch of matooke or a bag of sweet potatoes to a friend or business partner, or simply rest for a moment near her home looking out onto the Nyanja. She tells me that she has no desire to return to the mainland. "Why should I?" she says. "At least here I am never lonely, I do not get bored."
In 2011, Fisheries came to Sirya Maluma's place for the first time in recent memory. It was raining. Mama Ssalongo was working with emputa that day, the fish that Fisheries recognize as Nile perch. Men came dressed in military fatigues "like Marines" and stormed over to where she was starting her fire to start smoking her fish. When they asked what she was doing, Mama Ssalongo said, "I am making money for my children." She had fifty pieces of fish that she had bought to smoke that day, and she gave all of them to the Fisheries so he would let her go. "Fisheries just want money," Mama Ssalongo says. The women of Sirya Maluma's place, including Mama Ssalongo, ran to their farms for the rest of the day and spent the night there, because Fisheries were "caning them and breaking their covers [fish-smoking kilns]. It was chaos." Some owners of nets and boats, whether men or women, ran too. Those who tried to resist and did not (or could not) run were "seriously beaten."69 [End Page 18]
While the Fisheries were working out the details of which fish they would burn, which fish they would take with them to sell, and who still owed them money, fishworkers who had not run to their farms were corralled into a circle and made to sit on the muddy ground, saturated from the same rains that bring nkolongo. Another man who was there selling fishing paddles at the time told me that no one was allowed to leave the circle, even to "ease themselves." At least one elder in the community happened to have a running stomach at the time, but she was not permitted to leave. It was "violent, embarrassing, and inhumane," he said.
In April 2012, Fisheries returned to Sirya Maluma's place during nkolongo season.70 This time they wanted to take nets used to fish nkolongo, because these are technically undersized and illegal. Fisheries assume that using these nets to fish nkolongo compromises stocks of the Nile perch, even though almost no emputa (or Nile perch) are fished from Sirya Maluma's place during nkolongo season (and those that are caught are caught with hooks, not nets). According to Mama Ssalongo, Fisheries came in the very early hours of the morning when most residents were still sleeping. They came with guns that they used to bang on and even break down the doors to residents' homes. Fisheries required each boat and net owner to pay them 50,000 Ugandan shillings each (about US$20), and fishworkers later calculated that they paid Fisheries 2.5 million Ugandan shillings (about US$1,000) not to break their boats and burn their nets. fisheries were not interested in taking their fish this time, probably because they did not know what to do with all that nkolongo.
After Fisheries assaulted Sirya Maluma's residents in 2012, took their money, and took off with the guns and boats that brought them there, residents called the police of their island. They wanted to know whether the Fisheries they encountered legitimately worked for the government. The police said, "No, those Fisheries are not real. They must be thieves." By the time they got their answer, it was too late. Those Fisheries had already gone.
After Fisheries leave islands like Sirya Maluma's, fishworkers gather what nets remain into the boats that remain and keep working. Others collect what money remains and head to the mainland to purchase new nets so that their colleagues can resume their work once they return. Fishworkers well know that their abilities to eat and live well at the littoral requires "tolerating open-endedness, facing tragic dilemmas, and living-in-tension," the very same work that doing ontological politics requires.71
Conclusions: "I Am Fed up with Your Briefcases"
Women now serve in the highest levels of government science and management institutions in Uganda, including, until only recently, the state minister of fisheries herself. This does not mean that all women's interests, nor men's for that matter, are being represented in every, or even any, meeting where "all stakeholders" come together to talk about and design policy for Lake Victoria's sustainable future. It should not come as a surprise that women, and to a lesser degree men, who actually purchase, process, and trade fish for growing local and regional markets are usually absent. fisheries view these individuals and the communities they represent at best as unsophisticated "fisherfolks" and at worst as actual criminals.
In late 2011, a well intentioned women's development organization convened a meeting in Kampala sponsored by the FAO and the International Federation of Fish Workers. The purpose of the meeting was to inform the development of the FAO's international "Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication."72 After two full days of presentations, breakout sessions to develop and workshop policy recommendations, and hearty meals and tea breaks accompanying informal conversations, one woman who makes her living smoking and selling fish for local and regional markets stood up and made the following statement. Because in my experience it is rare for women like her to be present at such meetings, [End Page 19] and because her statement was not translated into Luganda or English—the other two languages in use at this meeting—as most statements issued were, it is worth quoting her at length here.
You people [the conveners of the meeting] keep saying that you speak for us. I have been a member of this organization for years. Only once has any one of you come to see where I smoke my fish, and that was the time you asked me to join your organization. One said he would come again sometime back, but he has never shown his face again.
Every time you invite me to your meetings, I invite you to come experience where I live and work to know what we do, how we do it, and the problems we face. Every time you complain. It is too far. The journey is too difficult. The place smells of fish.
[She paused.]
You know, I left my home two days ago to make sure I would arrive here on time. I will not waste my time here again. For what? I am fed up with your briefcases.
If you want my opinion in the future, you will have to come get it.73
When she finished speaking, this woman—the only woman who earns her living processing and selling fish that I have ever observed in attendance at a policy meeting—literally stepped away from her seat at the table. Again, she issued her statement in Lusoga, one of several vernacular languages in use at this particular meeting. Although most statements from participants were translated into languages familiar to others in attendance, hers was not. There was just silence.
The meaning of the word briefcases, however, was intelligible to most. Ugandans familiar with the work of stakeholder engagement and empowerment use this English word colloquially to reference organizations that seem to have no real physical home, but rather exist by shuffling papers from place to place and from one meeting to the next. Despite the aspirational language of transparency, collaboration, and transformation that features within institutional objectives and meeting titles themselves, fishworkers enrolled as stakeholders in these meetings often leave with the sense that the outcomes of their engagement were already predetermined. The politics of these briefcases, bundled alongside cash to pay participant per diems or "facilitations," as they are known there, remain mobile but opaque, hidden in noticeably fancy luggage.
Nationally and globally circulating ideas about Lake Victoria's constant state of crisis submerge histories and contemporary realities of already existing forms of fish production, consumption, and trade that actually sustain, and even develop, fishing communities in Uganda. For me and those who have lived and worked with fish in Nyanja, the obvious flourishing of species and forms of fish considered by Fisheries to be commercially extinct offers more than simply compelling material with which to work. It calls into question the validity of other conventional wisdoms framing so much social scientific research and policy-driven interventions into the lives of fishworkers in Lake Victoria.
If Lake Victoria—a body of water that comes into being through the sometimes violent work of containment—does indeed die, Nyanja, a body of water that refuses to be contained, will almost certainly live on. Along the Nyanja—that littoral world where it is possible for Sirya Maluma and nkolongo not only to survive but also to thrive—littoral residents negotiate the composition of ethical life on their own terms. Between a living sea and solid ground, those who continue to produce fish for sauce along Uganda's southern shores engage an ontological politics of eating and existence that actively violates national fisheries laws, international fisheries management norms, and the advice of global food security experts, but nevertheless continues to nourish the bodies, minds, and plausible futures of many eaters of fish. [End Page 20]
Jennifer Lee Johnson is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2014 and has published her research in a variety of interdisciplinary venues, including the Journal of African Hydrobiology and Fisheries and Subsistence under Capitalism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. She is currently preparing a monograph that foregrounds women's work with diverse species and forms of fish—both indigenous and introduced—alongside the development of global whitefish markets to retheorize the intersection of gender, social history, and environmental governance in and around Lake Victoria.
Footnotes
The research for this article was made possible through the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Science Foundation, University of Michigan, and Yale and Purdue Universities, as well as the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology and the Center for Basic Research. An early version of this paper was presented at the Agrarian Studies Colloquium at Yale University, and I am most grateful for the generative feedback offered there. Many thanks to David Schoenbrun, Fallou Ngom, and Aimee Schecter for their careful comments on subsequent versions of this piece.
1. This differs from philosophical treatments of ontology as the ultimate constituents of reality. For a recent review of the ontological turn in anthropology, see Kohn, "Anthropology of Ontologies."
3. For a provocative examination of how scientific fisheries management led to the collapse of important commercial fisheries elsewhere, see Bavington, Managed Annihilation.
5. This is an ontological politics that attends to how "problems are framed, bodies are shaped, and lives [of fish and people] are pushed and pulled into one shape or another" (Mol, The Body Multiple, viii). See also Blaser, "Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe."
6. Luganda is the most commonly used language where Sirya Maluma lives and where the research informing this article took place. Standard Luganda orthography is used throughout this text for Luganda terms presented. Note that the liquid consonants "r" and "l" are used and understood interchangeably in this region; Sirya Maluma is also known as Silya Maluma.
7. The text quoted above is from a 1975 review of USAID technical assistance to the East African Freshwater Fisheries Organization. Sutinen and Davies, "An Evaluation of USAID," 3.
8. The quoted text is from Okaronon and Wadanya, "Fishery Resource Base," 24. For standard data on Uganda's economic status, see World Bank, "GNI per Capita: Uganda."
9. For accounts of this ecological catastrophe, see Kaufman, "Catastrophic Change in Species-Rich Freshwater Ecosystems"; Witte et al., "Species Extinction"; and Achieng, "The Impact of the Introduction of Nile Perch."
10. These were collected in fishing sites, in homes, markets, management meetings, and family and community-oriented places of healing along the island and mainland shores of southern Uganda (in the summers of 2007 and 2008, most intensively from 2011 to 2012, and most recently in the summers of 2014 and 2016).
11. Here I am thinking with Donna Haraway's concept of companion species, as historically specific, contingent, and mutable co-constitutive relationships between humans and animals "in which none of the partners preexists the relating, and the relating is never done once and for all" (Haraway, "The Companion Species Manifesto," 103–4). Anna Tsing's extensions of the concept into multispecies landscapes encourages me to think with fish about the "politically-and-biologically diverse potentials of the seams of global capitalism," which she also describes as "unruly edges" (Tsing, "Unruly Edges," 141).
13. Tsing stresses that worlding is "always experimental and partial, and often quote wrong" ("Worlding the Matsutake Diaspora," 48). "As researchers and ordinary human beings, we constantly misjudge the situations we enter. We fill the blanks of our ignorance with prejudice or inappropriate 'common sense.'" If the work of worlding is to be useful, Tsing notes, it "must retain its place within the material encounter between analyst and unfamiliar material" (50).
14. For example, the US Central Intelligence Agency describes Uganda's geography as "Coastline: 0 km (landlocked) … landlocked; fertile, well-watered country with many lakes and rivers" (Central Intelligence Agency, "The World Factbook: Uganda").
15. See McDonnell, "One of the World's Biggest Lakes Is Dying"; Tenywa, "Lake Victoria Could Soon Be History"; and Baskin, "Losing a Lake."
16. It is the second largest by surface area, not by volume. For bibliographies of now classic ecological and socioeconomic literatures on Lake Victoria, see Crul et al., A Bibliography of Lake Victoria, and Geheb, "Overview and Bibliography."
17. This view is popularized in Uganda's national news media and sportfishing adventure television alike. See, for example, the series published each May in Uganda's news daily the New Vision, "Save Lake Victoria," www.newvision.co.ug/category/save-lake-victoria/ (accessed October 6, 2016).
22. For an excellent account of debates between the managerial and scientific arms of Uganda's colonial fisheries institutions, see Pringle, "The Origins of the Nile Perch in Lake Victoria."
24. Witte et al., "Species Extinction and Concomitant Ecological Changes in Lake Victoria"; Goudswaard et al., "The Invasion of an Introduced Predator."
28. OED Online, "lake, n.4," September 2016, www.oed.com/view/Entry/105168.
29. Nyanza is the term used often by residents of Kenya and Tanzania who grew up speaking Kiswahili—whether as their first language, their "mother tongue," or as a language taught in school and/or learned while interacting with other Kiswahili speakers. Luo speakers may refer to this body of water as Nam, or Nam Lolwe, but nevertheless will understand the term Nyanja or Nyanza. Nyanja is the term most often used by residents of northwestern Tanzania and most of Uganda, but also in Mozambique, Malawi, and Zambia. Because this study focuses on the history of the geographical territory now known as contemporary Buganda, which is centered between the Nile River in the east and Uganda's lacustrine border with Tanzania in the south, I use the term Nyanja throughout this text, the most commonly used term there.
30. Similarly violent storms are still experienced in and around North America's Lake Superior. Similar to early Luganda-English dictionaries that translated Nyanja as "sea," the earliest Ojibwe-English dictionaries translated "Lake Superior" as Otchipwe-kitchigami, "the sea of the Chippewas" (Baraga, A Dictionary of the Otchipwe Language, 153). Kitchigami, like Nyanja, is also not a lake.
31. Snoxall, Luganda-English Dictionary, 13; Schoenbrun, The Historical Reconstruction of Great Lakes Bantu, 208.
32. As just one example, one of the region's largest and most ancient fishes, the mamba, or lungfish, breathes only air once it has fully transitioned beyond its brief tadpole-like stage. These fish can live for many months without water, although they almost never have to around the Nyanja.
33. For Nyanja's fishworkers and fish-eating publics, a smoked emputa purchased whole and wrapped in paper is ontologically distinct from a flash frozen Nile perch fillet packed in a Styrofoam box for intercontinental export. Fillets, especially frozen ones, are not fish in Nyanja. For more on this, see Johnson and Robert, "Working with Fish."
35. Indeed, vernacular conceptions of gender here do not map easily onto biological definitions of sex. See, for example, Musisi, "Women, 'Elite Polygyny,' and Buganda State Formation"; Nannyonga-Tamusuza, "Female-Men, Male-Women"; and Stephens, A History of African Motherhood.
37. Participles are words formed from verbs that are used as adjectives or nouns. Crabtree, Elements of Luganda Grammar, 171.
38. They may also be called the specific name of the crop, for example matooke (boiled and mashed green bananas), lumonde (sweet potatoes), or muwogo (cassava), but without sauce these are not considered emmere.
39. At the littoral proper enva can also be made with meat. However, meat is rarely available and when it is, it is expensive.
40. Mama Tabby also has a home and garden on the mainland. Because she has her own fishing boats and is incredibly wealthy, she does not have a hard time sourcing food or sauce.
41. Pilkington, Luganda-English and English-Luganda Vocabulary, 65. On eating and power see also Bayart, The State in Africa, and Schatzberg, Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa.
42. Not every clan coalesced around avoiding eating particular things, but many of them did. For more on totemic avoidance, see Kodesh, Beyond the Royal Gaze, 10–11.
44. See, for example, David Schoenbrun's appendix of 100-word lists for Great Lakes Bantu languages: Schoenbrun, The Historical Reconstruction of Great Lakes Bantu, 266–313. See also Werner, Introductory Sketch of the Bantu Languages, 180.
45. For an early definition of the verb form of-luma in English-Luganda dictionaries see Pilkington, Luganda-English and English-Luganda Vocabulary, 61.
46. This is illustrated in the proverb "Sirikuleka wabi, akuleka ku mmere nnuma," literally, "I will not leave you in a bad situation, he leaves you (eating) food that causes pain." Murphy, Luganda-English Dictionary, 437.
48. A ghost (muzimu) is not a spirit (musambwa). Ghosts are shadows of the recently deceased. Misambwa are the spirits of mighty ancestors who died so long ago that no one remembers the specifics of their lives when they were living—except that they were once wealthy and powerful.
49. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, a Good Place, 199. For the complete etymology see Schoenbrun, The Historical Reconstruction of Great Lakes Bantu, 152–53.
52. The terms wife or husband here rarely imply a formal church or legally recognized union. Most often they refer to a couple who shares a child, or at least shares a dwelling. It may take as little as three days for a man and a wife to share a home officially, but it obviously takes much longer for them to share a child.
53. Mama Laticia did not hear about this haunting until 2016.
55. Fishermen and fisheries scientists report once finding nkolongo and Synodontis, respectively, within the stomach contents of Nile perch. Scientists describe this practice as a normal part of the Nile perch's diet; see Goudswaard and Witte, "The Catfish Fauna," 33. Fishermen, however, stress that nkolongo cause Nile perch a great deal of pain and can even kill them. The Nile perch have learned this, fishermen say, and now avoid the potentially deadly nkolongo.
57. See Whitehead, "The Anadromous Fishes of Lake Victoria," and Balirwa and Bugenyi, "Notes on the Fisheries of the River Nzoia."
58. As Webb Keane suggests, "It is the problem of killing animals that induces questions about their nature, and not vice versa" ("Ontologies, Anthropologists, and Ethical Life," 189).
66. In the region's littoral vernacular the English term customer is used. The term implies a business relationship and refers to both buyers and sellers, that is, customer references the relationship between buyer and seller as much as it references either party.
67. See Tsing, Friction.
69. Mama Ssalongo's account was substantiated by others from regional executives and ex-patriot operatives of SmartFish, who narrated variously valiant and sometimes sheepish tales of supervising deployments of paramilitary teams that too aggressively pursued their missions.
70. Although I was working from Sirya Maluma's place in March, May, and June of 2012, I was not there in April 2012 when Fisheries came.
72. The full report can be accessed online. See FAO, "Voluntary Guidelines."
73. Many thanks to "fisherman by birth" Bakaaki Robert for inviting me to this meeting (and to many others he has been invited to) and for helping me understand this statement (and many others).
