Mfangano Island

Lake Victoria, Suba District, Kenya

Part 1: Suba Origins: The Flight of the Abakunta...

Sometime around 1760, Kabaka Junju, the 26th King of the Buganda was assassinated in a great war. According to oral history, the King was killed by his brother, Semakookiro, with the help of two Suba warriors, Witewe and Kiboye. Semaakookiro assumed his brother’s throne, and seeking to tie-up loose ends, called a secret war council to eliminate Witewe and Kiboye. Fortunately for the Suba, a young court drummer named Mwembe overheard the Machiavellian scheme and warned the warriors. That same night, the three of them loaded up their canoes and fled across Lake Victoria with their families and possessions. 

They sailed and paddle east along the Northern shore of Lake Victoria, warning relatives along the way and sparking an exodus of numerous Abakunta clans who feared the wrath of Semakookiro. These clans dispersed across the Lake Victoria, finally settling on the remote islands and shoreline of present-day Kenya. Fifteen generations later, the direct descendants of the court drummer Mwembe live today in a remote beach village on the southern tip of Mfangano Island in a region known as "Wakinga". Our friends in these indigenous communities build boats, tend farms, and catch fish, as their ancestors have done two and half centuries. Yet, the Suba language and way of life is dying. The Suba people are in danger of disappearing.

Part 2: The Nile Perch Inoculation...

On an unknown day in August 1954, two Lake Victoria fisheries officers carried out a secret stocking mission for the British Colonial Administration near Entebbe, Uganda. With a single bucket, and a half-dozen juvinile Nile perch, they permanently altered this ancient ecosystem and the lives its indigenous people. Against the warnings of dozens of prominent ecologists, the Colonial Administration introduced this cannibalistic species, capable of growing to over 200lbs, intent on “developing” Lake Victoria into a profitable export fishery. They succeeded. By 1980, the “Nile perch boom” had begun. Like a gold rush, hundreds of thousands of migrant fishermen from across East Africa converged into these beach villages, sifting through their murky waters for a slippery fortune. 

Many carried with them a newly emerging pathogen, the human immunodeficiency virus. Over the next five years, what had been celebrated by ecologists as “the most spectacular freshwater species flock in the world” experienced the most rapid mass vertebrate extinction in recorded history. Over 300 native fish species, found only in Lake Victoria, where annihilated by an exploding population of Nile perch and fishermen. As nets began to overflow, dozens of multinational corporations, assisted by the World Bank and the European Union, began opening industrial processing factories. 

Soon millions of tons of perch fillet were being exported to European, American and Israeli markets; the remote communities on Lake Victoria began experiencing some of the highest levels of malnutrition in East Africa. While Western financers earned hundreds of millions of dollars a year, the people of Lake Victoria remained without roads, electricity, banks, schools, or hospitals. Lake Victoria reeled from pollution and overfishing, its forest were chopped down for charcoal and slum housing. Far from its original promise of economic prosperity, the Nile perch program has done little to improve the quality of local lives, activating instead a powerful chain of “structural violence” that has sickened and killed hundreds of thousands of people. 

The convergence of thousands of migrant fishermen, a cash explosion within impoverished and disempowered communities, vulnerable women and customary trade practices such as jaboya or “fish-for-sex,” increasing food insecurity, ecological destruction, and a near total lack of health infrastructure has culminated in a perfect storm of HIV. The Suba people in Nyanza Province are suffering from the one of the most critical concentrations of HIV/AIDS in the world.

Part 3: Mfangano Today...

Mfangano Island, in the heart of Lake Victoria, is home to approximately 19,000 people of Suba and Luo descent. The small beach villages that line the shores of these islands are accessible from the mainland only by a 3-hour ride on wooden outboard canoes. Fishing and subsistence farming are primary occupations for the majority of residents. People here speak English, Swahili, Luo, and Suba—a language spoken nowhere in the world other than the shores of Lake Victoria. Currently, Mfangano Island has no electricity and only one road that circles the base of the island. Mfangano is a place of stunning beauty and generous people. The warm communities of Mfangano face many serious and immediate health challenges. With local HIV prevalence estimated at over 30%, Mfangano Island is struggling to address the impact of one of the most critical concentrations of HIV/AIDS anywhere in the world. At the same time, poverty and disease has forced these vulnerable communities to make dangerous changes to their local environment in order to squeeze out enough to survive. Deforestation on the mountain and over-fishing in the lake have taken a huge toll, threatening annual rainfall and draining the local economy. This is a decisive time to address the serious environmental and health threats facing people living along Lake Victoria. With out immediate and effective action, the indigenous Suba language and way of life may disappear within in a single generation.