Trade, development and destitution: A material culture history of fishing on the western shore of Lake Turkana, northern Kenya

Abstract

Turkana fishing communities have operated along the shores of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, for well over a century and yet are rarely the subject of in-depth historical or ethnographic research. These communities are regularly situated within broader synchronic considerations of economic adversity and destitution, and it is arguably this propensity that has served in large part to overshadow and perhaps even exclude an understanding of locally constituted narratives of change and continuity. In attempting to address this absence, this article draws on fieldwork undertaken in several villages located along the southwest shore of the lake. Using historical photographs and images of ethnographic object collections in interviews and group discussion sessions, this fieldwork was concerned with tracing changes in the production, use, and exchange of everyday material culture through recent history as a means of drawing together personal narratives of socioeconomic, ecological and political change. In exploring the dynamically changing practices involved in the fishing livelihood, a unique understanding emerges of the ways in which fishing communities have negotiated a series of key historical periods, from colonial era taxation to the development and rapid decline of a large-scale commercial fishing industry in the 1970s.