At the foot of Mahale Mountains
- gcallah2
- Oct 13, 2022
- 6 min read
Habari!
I have spent the past three days at the Greater Mahale Ecosystem (GME) Management field office, a set of one-story dormitories and offices operated by the Tuungane Project in Magambo village at the base of Mahale Mountains National Park. The Tuungane Project is a collaborative effort between The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Pathfinder International to foster sustainable food systems, microfinance, reproductive health, education, and forest management in the GME. It began over a decade ago, and this field station houses a few permanent project staff.
Magambo village is one of a necklace of small villages along the shores of Lake Tanganyika, ringing the deep green craggy mountains of the park. The lake starts just 20 feet from my doorstep, and to the south Mount Nkungwe looms over the beach in the distance. The GME is home to 93% of Tanzania’s chimpanzees, incredible endemic plant diversity, and a couple high-end tourist lodges (there is no budget option here, as the remoteness of the park necessitates boat or air travel). I came with some staff from the Nature Conservancy by land cruiser: a bumpy but scenic four-hour drive from Kigoma town.
A quick thank you to all the TNC staff who helped me arrange this visit, and to all the wonderful people here who connected me to motorbike drivers, translators, and fisherfolk. I am thrilled at the chance to have met you. Thank you for your generosity and kindness!
The two dozen villages in Buhingu (this administrative region) have only been connected to the rest of Tanzania by dirt roads within the last decade. Before that, they were only accessible via boat. Most people are engaged in subsistence farming and/or fishing to some extent. Poverty rates are extremely high, and the birth rate hovers around 7.1 children per woman – one of the highest in the world. Pathfinder International is a reproductive health organization, and they are working to provide health infrastructure, family planning education, and contraceptive access to women here to make maternity safer.
From the perspective of Lake Tanganyika and fisherfolk, the main challenges here lie in agricultural and fishing practices. Clearing forest for cultivation increases erosion, which flows into the littoral zone (the area close to shore). Incidentally, this is the area of the lake where most fish breed. Increasing turbidity and sedimentation poses a threat to their reproduction. An agricultural specialist here at the GME field office told me that Tuungane staff are working to counteract this by educating villagers on mulching, cover crops, field placement, and building ridges of soil to prevent erosion and boost yields. The rapidly growing population demands more tilled soil, so keeping that soil in the field is critical to both fish and people.
There are many kinds of fishing employed on Lake Tanganyika, from longline mgebuka fishing (kachinga) to fish trapping (makila), ring nets, and beach seines. Beach seine fishing involves a large net that is cast into the water parallel to shore and then pulled in by hand by the fishers and various ad-hoc helpers. As you don’t need a boat to fish with a beach seine, the technique is very cheap. However, it is also illegal.
Beach seines drag over the littoral breeding grounds, damaging the benthic habitat and gathering adult, juvenile, and baby fish indiscriminately. Growing scientific evidence of these harms led to the nationwide ban in the mid 1990s.
Ironically, beach seines were originally introduced to impoverished rural areas of Tanzania by the government in the 1960s as part of an effort to promote ujamma, a socialist ideology promoted by President Julius Nyere after Tanzania gain independence from Britain in 1961. The government hoped that this high-yield, low-cost fishing technique could provide greater food security and even allow for new opportunities for commerce and wealth-building.
Illegal beach seine fishing is still common in Tanzania, and there has been significant pushback to the policies attempting to eradicate it. Brehm et al 2022 (thank you Professor Marianne Moore for sharing this fascinating paper with me!) delves into the various social reasons for this continued attachment to seine fishing, beyond basic economics. I won’t attempt to summarize the whole paper here, but my main takeaways were:
- As it was introduced to these areas via government education campaigns, this technique was institutionalized and legitimized. Fisherfolk were explicitly taught that this is a way to build a better life. These campaigns took place within the lifetimes of many elders, and for many these beliefs have not changed.
- Because beach seines are cheap, they are seen as flexible and accessible to youth and poor people. It’s appeal as a “fishery for the poor” lends it legitimacy in many communities. This also increases general pushback against new government policies seen as oppressing poor people.
- Boat fishing often only employs a few people, but beach seines are hauled up by large groups of onlookers. These people (often youth) are paid with a few fish or some small change. This gives it the additional appeal of being a communal activity for the benefit of many villagers.
I didn’t see any beach seine fishing, which I have heard is more common further south.
I did however get to talk with Richard Nkayamba, a local leader in the Magambo Beach Management Unit (BMU). These BMUs are collections of local fisherfolk and stakeholders who collectively set and enforce the rules for fishing activities within their village’s area of lake. Richard explained that a major responsibility for the BMU is enforcing net mesh sizes (the holes must be big enough to allow baby fish to escape). Fishing with bed nets is a big issue here: the mesh is extremely fine, but bed nets are often given to people by NGOs and are therefore free, making them a tempting option for poor fishers. BMUs fine illegal fishers and confiscate or even burn illegal nets. This often stokes resentment and anger, but everyone I talked to said the BMU is doing great things for the village. (However it must be noted that I am a white person loosely affiliated with TNC, so I don’t think I can count this as unbiased data).
Women in Buhingu do not generally participate in the act of fishing themselves. They are mostly processors who dry or smoke the fish to preserve it before selling it at the market. I also spoke to a boat owner in Magambo: one of two women boat owners in the village. She bought her vessel using proceeds from selling smoked mgebuka and splits the profits of each catch with her hired fishermen.
On one point, all these ladies were emphatic: they really liked their jobs. Each of them expressed pride and satisfaction at being able to provide for themselves and for their children’s school fees. A couple also said that they liked being able to manage their own work, the opportunity for independence.
This does not mean that it comes without challenges. The villages are far apart, and the processors often walk great distances between villages to buy and sell fish. Fresh fish spoils very quickly, so any delays in these journeys can decrease the quality of their final product. During the rainy season, fish laid out to dry can spoil if it is too cloudy and wet.
One of my interviews took place right next to the blackened proof of another occupational hazard: fire. Fish are smoked in mud brick buildings with thatched roofs, which can catch on fire if drips of rendered fish fat cause bursts of flame inside. Watende, the lady who owned this burned-out hut plans to use a loan from her village’s COCOBA (conservation banks established as part of the Tuungane project) to cover the cost of rebuilding.
The timing of fish catches was another concern that I heard repeatedly. BMUs regularly declare fishery closures, called ndenga, to allow for the stocks to recover. The opposite is giza: the time around a new moon, when nights are at their darkest and drawing fish into your next with lamps is most effective. These closures, coupled with the instability and general decline of fish stocks in the lake during recent decades makes the supply of fresh fish unreliable. However, this isn’t all bad for the processors. With no refrigeration, preservation is the only way of ensuring that people can still eat fish when the nets are resting on the shore. Their supply may be unstable, but their demand is steady.
My final takeaway from these conversations concerns the generation below these women. I wanted to know: are their kids are following them into the work, or looking for some other path?
Most of the women I spoke to were on the younger side, with their children still in school. Only one woman said that she had a son who was a fisherman, and four of the other women with older children said that their kids had left the village in search of other employment. When I asked why, one of the ladies laughed and said that her daughter was educated, so she didn’t want to fish.
Subsistence and commercial fishing are obviously still a huge part of life in these villages. But as they become increasingly connected with the rest of Tanzania, the way this plays out in people’s lives and plans will continue to shift.
One final note: Kudra (my translator in Katumbi Village) is Tongwe, one of the tribes who formerly inhabited Mahale National Park. I say formerly, because the people living there were forcibly evicted from their lands when the park was officially founded in 1973. A story too familiar in the USA, but I was struck by how recent this was. A few Tongwe are allowed to live within its borders as advisors to the Japanese biologists who have been working in the park since the 1960s.
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