Today, I took a bus to Entebbe and met up with Luke from Holland, who runs a boat service on Lake Victoria. We agreed to meet at the Four Turkeys restaurant at 10am, at which point he would ferry me out to the Sese islands. He was a good guy, pleased and at peace with himself for leaving his stressed life behind him in Rotterdam and embracing his new life as a boatman on Africa’s largest lake. He has an exaggerated limp from a bad motorcycle accident back in Europe which shattered his lower leg. His voice was a low baritone which would rise in pitch with the progression of his speech that made everything he uttered sound extremely authoritative. His boat was a few rotted wood planks cobbled together under a torn up canvas shade cloth (which provided more sun than cover). He never spoke unless answering my inquisitive questions while contemplating the distant horizon out over the lake.
Once he loosened up, we got to talking about the fish. He told me the Nile Perch were destroying the fish stocks in Lake Victoria, an introduced alien species back in the 1970’s for commercial fishing. Evidently, over two hundred species of fish have disappeared in the last decade in the lake due to the voracious Nile Perch. In collusion with illegal fish harvesting, it has devastated native fish. Local fishermen glide just fifty feet offshore and pound the water surface with large sticks to scare the fish into the nets which they drag behind them. Luke points them out to me and tells me he has given up screaming at them. His protests are ignored. Uganda does not have a Fish & Wildlife agency which patrols the lake.
We dig up, chop down, pave over, burn, uproot, siphon, drain, and poison in order to mould the environment to suit our greed-driven consumption. We homogenize the globe; eventually we may achieve our aim by eliminating every competitor for space to enable ourselves to overpopulate the planet. Because we have conquered this land we believe that we are masters of all creatures. Where is the humanity in that? We’re due for a lesson in humility. If only a species higher than ours would come along to displace us, disgrace us, as we have done to the others below us. We’ll make great pets.
For thousands of years, this great concentration of animals has managed to evolve & survive. Mankind has managed to decimate even this last gathering of wildlife in the last 30 years. This is a pervasive theatre of war, showing no signs of a ceasefire. Corrupt governments at war with rebel groups. Rival chieftains at war over tribal disputes. Drought and locust at war with crops. Pestilence at war with humans. Farmers at war with wildlife. Welcome to Africa, friend. Have a cup of tea and listen to the war drums.
Luke dropped me off at Banda island, where I was greeted by four barking dogs, five humans, and one column of army ants, the only inhabitants of the island (aside from the snakes, which I had the distinct pleasure of not being introduced to).
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