Tanganyika!

It is 5:00pm. The air is bone dry and still warm from the blazing mid-day sun, though tonight it will be cool, even cold. Through the metal grated windows of my host family’s living room I can see mango trees, metal roofs atop earthen brick houses, and rounded, reddish-purple mountains beyond them. This is Kigoma, a city of around 200,000 on the eastern shores of Lake Tanganyika, the second largest lake in the world and the largest of Africa’s Great Lakes. In the rainy season those hills become leafy and green, but as it is the last month of the dry season everything but cultivated crops and deep-rooted trees has withered. The packed red earth gives the landscape slightly martial look, and my feet are always stained with the dust.

Lake Tanganyika was formed between 9-12 million years ago in the Albertine Rift, a branch of the East African Rift System. It has a maximum depth of 4,826 feet and contains more water than ALL of the North American Great lakes COMBINED, 16% of all the fresh water in the world. This ancient behemoth is also a hotspot for biodiversity, home to over 2,000 species. The rate of endemism is very high - 98% for cichlid fish, and 60% for other fish (this basically means that most of these fish are found nowhere else in the world). The name Tanganyika comes from two kinds of fish found only in the lake: the tanga and the nyika – this last one produces electric shocks when touched.

This abundance of fauna is strictly depth-limited, however. Mixing of surface and deep water generally stops around 450 feet, so the lake is hypoxic (no oxygen) at depth. This water is pretty much never disturbed or moved, and thus is sometimes categorized as “fossil water”. It’s also rich in hydrogen sulfide, a toxic byproduct of microbial respiration pathways (I think this explains it? If someone has a more detailed chemical explanation of this, please email me). If you could get in a submarine and observe the bottom of Lake Tanganyika, you’d see lots of ancient mud, and maybe some anaerobic bacterial sludge. Not beautiful perhaps, but incredibly interesting.

Climate change is warming the surface waters of the lake, increasing stratification, and thus shrinking the band of viable water available to lake fish. Overfishing, coastal nutrient pollution, and sediment runoff have also damaged fish populations.

Fishing is enormously important to the communities surrounding the lake. I have eaten fish nearly every day here, mostly fried in oil and then stewed with tomato, onion, carrot, and bell pepper. The bulk of this fish is dagaa, also known as the silver cyprinid or Lake Victoria sardine. This tiny fish is caught en masse using nets and then sun-dried in flat woven baskets or long raised strips of cloth before preparing. You eat the whole thing head and all! I have tried and failed many times to like sardines, but these are delicious, almost sweet and no fishy taste at all.

High in protein and omega-3s, these fish provide crucial nutrition to riparian regions where poverty rates are extremely high. Subsistence farming and fishing are predominant here. On my walks around the city, I see plots of land are carefully cultivated by individual farmers with cassava, greens, and peppers nearly everywhere there is space and water accessible. The

opposite shore of the lake (just visible as a tiny pale blue strip of mountains in the distant horizon) is the DRC, where bloody ethnic and political conflicts have been raging for decades. Refugee camps in Kigoma region are filled with people fleeing violence the DRC and Burundi.

The local landing sites are lined with brightly painted wooden fleets waiting to go out each night to catch dagaa using lamps to lure them into their nets. Women account for most of the processors who dry, pack, sell, and occasionally smoke these fish. Apparently, the Tanganyika ones are the best quality, so they are sometimes exported to neighboring regions and even nearby countries.

I will have more to say on these important little fish later, but I want to talk about my host family! I have been staying with inspiring lady named Elizabeth and her adorable family for the past 1.5 weeks or so, first in Muleba (a tiny village near Uganda, google it!) and now in Kigoma town. She runs her own tourism business here in Kigoma, offering historical, cultural, and outdoorsy tours of the town and region she grew up in. Most tourists visiting Tanzania go straight for Arusha (the gateway to safaris and Kilimanjaro) and Zanzibar (white sand beaches, what have you), neglecting the vast and beautiful lake zone out West. What tourists do come typically book with large, often foreign-owned safari companies and head straight for their luxury resorts in Gombe and Mahale Mountains National Parks. Elizabeth’s company is here to change that, so if you are in the mood for some lovingly crafted trips around Lake Tanganyika, give her a ring. https://kigoma-eco-cultural-tourism.jimdosite.com/ !!

She has also taught me a lot about the power or tourism to be transformative and empowering, if done right. Community-based tourism (like her company) has the potential for economic reverberations far beyond the actual salaries of direct employees. Elizabeth leads visitors to local craftspeople and artisans who can provide a more lucrative market for their goods, which are prohibitively expensive to export. Unemployment, especially youth unemployment, is a huge issue here and Elizabeth is in search of funds that will help her employ more ad-hoc tour guides from the community and market her town and her services abroad. She also plans to integrate lake conservation into the fabric of her company's activities, hosting educational events for her visitors and community alike. If anyone reading this knows of any pools of funding she could access to help mission this along, please let me know!

Until next time,

Grace

The shores of Lake Victoria! Another Great Lake

Tomatos galore in a market in Muleba!