Renaming Lake Victoria Nyanza
The world changes when new technology that allows us to reduce the amount of energy we need to do the same things we do on our daily lives, intersects with new ways of transportation that, in turn, brings disparate spaces together to create new societies.
Our grandfathers across the great lake Nyanza not only imagined how the people of the lake could reach across its shores and trade across its basin ecosystem that is integrated in diet, culture and reverence to its waters, but built an entire system of peace through intermarriages and markets that birthed the city of Kisumu.
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Our children may yet be able to reclaim this old but sustainable economy, with better technology, they may upgrade the small wooden boats, not with poisonous Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) of plastics but hopefully with more eco-friendly material like their ancestors.
An industry to produce these crafts will also probably use better technology that can make it safer to cross its expansive and dangerous waters, which kill nearly 5000 every year due to lack of early warning, search and rescue infrastructure that can adapt to its unique and unpredictable ‘lifinda’ waves of the Nyanza Storms.
Our time has been lost chasing Nairobi, for a social contract that has refused to bear fruit and instead repaid us with indignity and unemployment, returning our children in colorful cortèges instead.
The future may yet lie in the past, across these waters, and how we choose to imagine nationhood. These great waters, whose origin we are not taught, hold overwhelming knowledge on the origins of man on this 3-billion-year old Tanzanian craton, and is so immense it creates its own weather patterns and virulent Nyanza storms that are not witnessed anywhere on earth.
The great waters of East Africa await our curiosity, come along if you are interested in sailing on the future. Our issue this month explores ways you can land in Kisumu and explore the waters of our grandfathers, with its breathtaking beauty, nail-biting experiences and its charming people as we connect across the waters with Uganda’s Jose Chameleone who lands in the city this month for another Kisumu Old School Brunch Experience.
But first, did you know a motion in the East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) in 2019 to rename Lake Victoria to Lake Jumuiya failed to garner consensus or support.
Let us fix this, sign THIS petition to change the name of lake Victoria back to Lake Nyanza