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.