Nachituti's Gift: Economy, Society, and Environment in Central Africa (review)

The so-called "fisherman's dilemma" is a well-known problem of forms of economics that places private property at the center of management systems of the natural environment. Fishermen obviously want to conserve stocks so that next year they can continue to fish, but it may be more "rational" for them to take all they can, as they have no guarantee that some other fishermen will not do just that, so that that their refusal of income at this point does not have the desired consequences in the future. The standard answers to this dilemma, in terms of the imposition of individual rights over resources ("property") cannot work in open waters, or indeed rangeland, and other forms of communal management have to be found, at least where the danger of overfishing exists.

In this book, David M. Gordon describes the working out of this dilemma in the rich fisheries of the Luapula Valley, including Lake Mweru, on the border between Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Katanga Province). The book happily straddles the customary periodization in terms of the presence or absence of colonial rulers, but nevertheless the forms of political authority and technological change have had crucial consequences, at various times, for how the valley's fish have been exploited by the valley's humans. Successive rulers have seen the valley as a source of power and income. In precolonial times, it must have been just about the most thickly populated, and thus attractive, regions of the southern savanna, and came under the control of the Kazembe Lunda, in forms of rule justified by a number of myths, including that of Nachituti, a self-willed woman, whose marriage to the Kazembe Lunda legitimized their rule. Gordon analyzes this myth with care and skill, as he does the shift to colonial domination, in which the unitary valley was divided, as it has remained.

It was with the introduction of colonialism that the management systems which had been developed under the aegis of the Kazembe began to break down. The various chiefs no longer had the power to hold the lagoons shut until they had given the word that fishing might begin. The successive Kazembe kings lived under British rule, while the economic power was on the Belgian side, both because fish was primarily marketed to feed the laborers on the Belgian Copper Belt—the Northern Rhodesian mines served beef, rather than fish, as protein—and because the valley was much closer to centers of Belgian power than to those of British power. As a result, the Belgians introduced large-scale mechanized fishing, run primarily by Greeks, which would, in the early 1950s, result in a major economic disaster. The mudfish mpumbu was effectively exterminated by overfishing at its spawning runs, partially because of the expatriates' motorized boats and partially because the colonial-organized elimination of crocodiles from the lake meant that larger nets could be used without being broken. A species that had made up close to half of the Union Minière's (a major copper mining company in Congo) purchases had disappeared as a commercial proposition.

What this has meant, over the subsequent decades, has been a reorientation of the fishing effort toward the smaller species within the lake and the swamps. There was the increased human exploitation of species that have not suffered under the potential for overfishing, either because their spawning grounds could in general be protected or because, like the tiny chisense, their reproductive cycle was so short and so prolific that they could hardly be destroyed by heavy predation—and they may have benefited from an increase in the lake's vegetable plankton as artificial fertilizer from the surrounding hills leached into its waters. Since chisense could easily be caught and traded, the result has been a shift in gender relations, as individuals previously excluded from the trade for lack of capital—in other words, women...