Sell a man a fish: colonialism, capitalism, and ecology in Africa's Great Lakes

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This study considers the ways authoritarian states construct internal enemies to legitimise policy decisions and justify failures and neglect. The research project centres on the changing place of fishing in local economies and imaginaries in Africa's Great Lakes region, focusing on three of Uganda's five largest lakes - Lake Albert, Lake George and Lake Edward - in the Albertine Rift (also known as East Africa's Western Rift Valley). The fishing villages of Africa's inland littoral are popularly coded as the epitome of immorality, excess, illegality, degradation, and destitution - threats to environment, development, security, public health, and nation-building, catapulted to notoriety since the 1980s for their implication in particular in the rapid spread of the HIV/AIDS. Dominant accounts of the plight of these communities and their lakes have asserted the impacts of post-colonial state collapse in the late 1970s and retreat over the following decades as growing populations turned to lake fishing in a context of increasing precarity. This study offers a new perspective on the region by looking at the ways the economy, ecology, and external image of lacustrine Uganda developed since mid-to-late nineteenth century, when lakes became targets of Europeans discovery, to the present day. The study consists of qualitative research using published accounts, a variety of official government and missionary archives, and private papers held by British and Ugandan institutions. It orients the analysis around three key interrelated themes: state violence and punishment; religion and ritual; and capitalist socio-ecological relations. This research project recasts the lakes as zones of vigorous and enduring indigenous resistance, evasion, and religious practice, but also early and intense capitalist penetration and accumulation by both Europeans and Africans. The study examines the ways this unusual combination of ruptures and continuities made lakes and their shorelines a source of deep and abiding ambivalence for colonial and African authorities and missionaries. In emphasising the importance of lacustrine spaces, this study challenges the bias towards studies focused firmly on land - of both farming and herding communities - in social and economic historiography and geography. Imagined by many outsiders as depraved, dangerous spaces, lake fisheries have suffered from a toxic combination of general disregard, occasional authoritarianism, and prolonged, unrestrained plunder. My aim in this Fellowship is to demonstrate the consequences of this history in a way that will inform the behaviour and objectives of local communities seeking to manage this resource and the interventions of government and NGOs. Various stakeholders in the lake fisheries have tended to adopt rather static, romanticising, victimising, or demonising images of fisherfolk as individualists exhibiting preternatural competitiveness and reduced perceptions of risk owing to their environment. With reference to pre-colonial, pre-capitalist economies and systems of tenure and the harrowing legacies of what succeeded them, this research project's impact activities and publications will map out possible futures and future-making agendas for a low-lying lacustrine environment which has already experienced the sharp end of global climate change and today faces another looming threat in the form of the extraction of large reserves of crude oil discovered since the mid-2000s. Through this process of research and dissemination, the project will contribute to the following Sustainable Development Goals: (2) Zero Hunger; (10) Reducing Inequality; (12) Responsible Consumption and Production; and (14) Life Below Water.