A constellation of dispersed torchlights moving across the water, moving along the shore, signals the arrival of the fishermen who are returning to shore just as the first rays of the dawn begin to creep over the gentle hills of western Tanzania.
The clusters of towns and villages along Lake Tanganyika’s eastern shore come to life when fishermen transport their catch to the beach and women stake their positions in the market to sell the day’s catch.
Shaped like a thin, outstretched finger tracing the borders of Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Burundi and Zambia, Lake Tanganyika is a place of superlatives: more than 400 miles (644km) in length, it’s the world’s longest freshwater lake, and with a low point nearly 5, 000 feet (1, 524 metres) below the surface, it’s one of the deepest.
One brisk morning in Kaseke, a fishing village in northwestern Tanzania, Dunia Omari Kiswabe, 54, hauls in his catch. He splashes through the surf with bucketfuls of dagaa, a type of sardine fishers that are drawn to torches during moonless nights while wearing an enormous football jersey and waterproof cargo pants.
On this day, Kiswabe, who has been fishing on the lake for at least two decades, unloads only 10 buckets of dagaa. It’s a disappointing amount and a haul size that is becoming all too common for Lake Tanganyika’s fishers.
“I used to get maybe 50 buckets a day”, he said. “Fishing has always been difficult for us, but it’s been getting harder”.
Teenager boys who have already completed their work with Kiswabe run by him while loading catches from other boats onto the village’s drying racks.
“It must be God’s plan”.
The millions of people who live close to Lake Tanganyika are a vital source of fresh water for Africa’s longest reservoir. But in recent years, fish catches have declined sharply.
According to some research, fish populations in lakes have decreased by up to 38% since the 1940s. Later this year, a new survey will be conducted to assess the extent of the collapse, but the lake’s changes are starting to show up as the lake’s flatline. Between 2020 and 2024, fish production dropped nearly 20 percent, fisheries officials told local media last year.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Lake Tanganyika accounts for 40% of Tanzania’s fish catches. Locals are becoming aware of the possibility that the lake may never be as productive as it once was as the potential insurmountable challenges confront fisheries become clear.
In May 2024, the Tanzanian government decided to shut down all fishing for three months to aid in the repopulation of the country. Overfishing may be the lowest-hanging fruit of Lake Tanganyika’s problems, which range from rising population pressures to climate change. According to experts, policy adjustments may struggle to keep up with the changes occurring within the lake as productivity declines and economic conditions become harder.
The majority of fishermen along the lake’s Tanzanian shore set out every night for smaller and smaller hauls, preparing their boats, and packing their nets. For so long, the lake was all there was and all anyone needed.
That is becoming less and less accurate.
Standstill in the fisheries industry
Locals in Lubengera, a town of crumbling structures along a hillside that descends from the lake, alternate between speaking Swahili and local tribal languages, and French, an unexpected third language.
In recent decades, more than 200, 000 refugees from Burundi and the DRC, two former Belgian colonies, have flowed into Tanzania. The majority of asylum seekers from these nations remain in cities like Lubengera and nearby camps, close to the lakes that share their homeland’s waters.
Population pressures brought on by migration along Lake Tanganyika are made worse by national demographic trends. Rapid urbanisation and high birth rates are set to double the country’s population every 23 years, according to a 2024 World Bank report. As the population rises, so will the need for food. By 2030, a report from WorldFish, a research institute focused on aquatic food systems, states that population and economic growth will more than double Tanzania’s demand for fish.
“The land and lake is not increasing. It’s only people who are increasing”, said Lukindo Hiza, director of the Tuungane Project, a development initiative in Lake Tanganyika managed by the Nature Conservancy, an international nonprofit.
Last year, the government lifted the fishing ban to lessen the pressure on the lake’s waters. Patrols regularly checked popular fishing locations for indications of illegal fishing during the closure. In September, after the lake had reopened, reports in government-owned media celebrated the ban’s success, claiming fish stocks had rebounded.
However, the FAO assisted in the last time in 1996 when officials performed a lakewide assessment of fish stocks. According to Hashim Muumin, an FAO fisheries officer based in Kigoma, the only large city on the lake’s Tanzanian side, another survey is scheduled to begin this year.
Without reliable data, it’s difficult to say with certainty whether the fishing ban had a long-lasting effect on the economy, according to Tumaini Kamulali, a researcher at the Tanzania Fisheries Research Institute, a government agency.
“If you don’t have data about what you have before you close, then you can’t tell us about what you have after you open”, he said.
Lack of data is not the only problem.
The natural internal circulation of Lake Tanganyika, which mixes nutrients from its depths with surface water, is thwarting due to warmer water temperatures and slower wind speeds, which are both related to regional effects of climate change.
One 2016 study, published in the academic journal PNAS, identified warming patterns in Lake Tanganyika over the past 150 years and their impact on fish abundance, revealing that fish populations were beginning to decline “well before the lake’s explosive growth of commercial fisheries in the mid-20th century.”
Periodic fishing bans might reduce pressures from overfishing, but if climate change’s effect on fish populations is indeed as pernicious as scientists suspect, lake closures might not be enough, Kamulali said.
Aquaculture’s ‘ generational opportunity ‘
The government provided loans to fishermen looking to establish their own fish farms as well as five days of training on how to run them in order to replace the lost income from the closure.
Interest in fish farming, also known as aquaculture, soared during the closure as locals sought ways to keep producing fish, said Alexander Chetkovich, who since 2022 has managed Tanganyika Blue, the lake’s first commercial fish farm.
Tanganyika Blue raises native tilapia in nine offshore cages close to Kigoma, with plans to grow in the coming year. This new trend, according to Chetkovich, offers “generational opportunity,” where communities can sustain themselves through aquaculture while reducing their natural pressures on the lake and avoiding reliant on erratic fishing, will naturally lower.
In Kipili, a town nestled between a chain of small islands on the lake’s southwestern shore, the nonprofit organisation, Sustain, and a local lodge, are piloting their own aquaculture experiment. In 2020, they established a pond farm, raising fish in artificial inland basins. They are putting the focus on a hatchery business, breeding about 60,000 fingerlings each month and distributing them to new fish farms.
However, it might be difficult to transition fishers to independent fish farmers.
Few fishermen can offer enough collateral to qualify for a loan, and there is little awareness of the government loan program in remote villages. Those who do receive one are not also guaranteed success. Given that the training was only offered for five days, which is unusual in a field like aquaculture, where first-time operators can have a high failure rate, several fishermen were skeptical of the company.
The government faced delays in issuing cages to loan recipients, leading to the Kipili fish farm’s contract to supply fingerlings for the loan program. In recent months, the farm even experienced a slowdown in its shipments.
Some locals are looking for a new livelihood as fishing bans are likely to become a regular feature and the government’s ambitious aquaculture project has yet to take off.
Carving their own path forward
To reach the minuscule lakeside village of Rukoma, all-terrain vehicles are necessary to navigate uneven dirt paths, which become all but unreachable during Tanzania’s rainy seasons. Beyond farming and fishing, its remoteness has long provided only limited employment options.
Life in Rukoma is changing quickly, however. In the past year, Juma Hussein, a driver, bought a new motorcycle to taxi residents to different towns in the area. A tailor named Rahma Juma secured funding to expand the range of products and colors available to clients. Methusela Meshak, a fisherman, took out a loan to build ponds in his backyard for farmed tilapia.
Rukoma’s community conservation bank, established by the Nature Conservancy in 2016, is a testament to the village’s continued growth of business. Each of the initiative’s 44 members contributes to and can take out loans from a common fund, which currently holds about 100 million Tanzanian shillings (almost $40, 000).
Community funds can be a critical lifeline for Lake Tanganyika’s secluded villages. Only 58 percent of residents in Tanzania’s Kigoma region, which includes the city of Kigoma as well as smaller towns such as Rukoma, have regular access to financial services, according to a 2023 government survey. In terms of financial inclusion, Kigoma was one of only five of the nation’s 31 regions to experience a decline compared to 2017. It was also ranked second-lowest among the nation’s 31 regions.
Community-driven initiatives can help rural communities diversify incomes and explore business ideas, said Clement Mabula, a Nature Conservancy officer based in Buhingu, a village near Rukoma.
“It’s hard to get by now if you’re only catching fish”, he said.
Mabula’s role also includes promoting better fishing by supporting Beach Management Units, a program run by the Nature Conservancy that trains communities to control their own fisheries and teaches more effective methods, such as policing fingerling use with small mosquito nets or using buoys to mark important breeding grounds close to shore.
But even the best community-managed solutions have their limits. For large, shared resources like Lake Tanganyika, community management’s record has been “mixed at best”, according to Christopher Anderson, a fisheries economist at the University of Washington, who researches the economic effects of different fisheries management structures, including community rights systems.
When managing these resources, priorities and definitions of success can get muddled, Anderson said. It can also be difficult to institute a completely decentralised system, and government intervention, even when necessary, can paralyse community efforts. Members of the village of Kipili were forced to pause patrols for four months last year due to confusion over a recent zoning dispute in the Kipili archipelago, which is run by 11 separate management units.
As population growth strains job opportunities and resources, places like Kipili, Rukoma, and Kigoma are faced with a myriad of challenges. Smallholders looking to start their own fish farms face a significant challenge due to the steep learning curve and high upfront costs associated with aquaculture. Conservation-oriented fishing practices do little to address the lake’s other challenges like climate change.
The communities who live on Lake Tanganyika might have to look beyond what the lake has to offer in order to ensure its future.
Voices of the future
Kipili, a traditional father-son trade, is generational in nature. However, fishing is gaining more and more of a burden in this village and nearby villages.
A complex of white single-storey buildings rises from the landscapes of rice farms and cassava plantations across the bay from Kipili’s bustling fish markets and landing sites. It is the local high school, where Paul Kaluse, a teacher, kicks off his geography lesson.
The focus of today’s class is conservation, specifically how to protect Lake Tanganyika’s fisheries. Of the 40 students in attendance, many have fathers who fish, Kaluse said.
Not everyone is eager to see their children follow their footsteps, though. Gaudens Kasokota, the chairman for fisheries activities in Kipili, said he would rather his children not tie themselves to fishing as he did, preferring to see them farm or run other businesses, like producing fingerlings. If they must fish, he added, they should do it to feed themselves and their families, not to earn a living.
The students at Kaluse were well aware of the challenges and nature of fishing in Lake Tanganyika, and they were fluent in information on everything from the importance of leaving fingerlings alone to grow. The answer to the lake’s problems is simple, in their telling.
“We don’t need to close the lake again, as long as people just use the right gear”, one boy exclaimed.
“The problem isn’t closing the lake, it’s making sure fishermen are educated on the right places to fish and the right equipment”, a deskmate contributed.
“Close it for the really small nets that catch a lot of fish, so everyone fishes for themselves”, another said.
As the voices of Lake Tanganyika’s future made clear, even a generational attachment to what fishing once was might not be enough to stop what’s coming.
“As long as people have resources they can change”, Kasokota said. “Our history isn’t going to be what holds us back”.
Source: Aljazeera
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