A Sea in Spite of a Lake

• In Event: Ontologies of Environmental Governance - II

Abstract

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. Although Lake Victoria still supports the world’s largest freshwater fisheries, scholarly studies, policy documents, and popular media accounts continue to compose Lake Victoria as a system in constant crisis. This magnitude of attention, research findings, and resulting developmental interventions, however, have thus far failed to “save” Lake Victoria from its always seemingly imminent future of death and collapse. Solutions posed in these accounts, if posed at all, suggest that more and better fisheries management is needed to “sensitize” or “build the capacity of” fishing communities to know what their needs are and how best they should be met. In recent years, efforts to save Lake Victoria have increasingly required violent military intervention.

Based on long-term historic and ethnographic research in island and mainland fishing sites in Uganda since 2007, this paper offers a fresh account of Africa’s largest body a freshwater. By foregrounding gendered movements, meanings, and material forms of fish that circulate within and beyond these littorals, I examine three ontological problems (that is, problems around the nature of existence) that implicitly frame contemporary efforts to manage Lake Victoria’s fisheries crisis. These problems are: what constitutes a fish, a fishery, and a body of water itself. Attention to these problems configures possibilities for fisheries governance otherwise: where “saving” fisheries in Uganda may well require the death of Lake Victoria.

Author

• Jennifer Lee Johnson, Purdue University