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City Lights Emblaze Village Fishing Grounds: The Re-Imaginings of Waterscape by Lake Malawi Fishers*

This article describes the remaking of fishing practices by the Lakeside Tonga fishers of Malawi, in relation to the local and regional redistribution of power since the colonial era. It first reviews the centrality of the regional waterscape in shaping interventions that eventually turned Lake Malawi's western shore into a reserve for long-distance migrant labour. Previous reports have tended to treat the resultant ‘returned labour migrants’ as advocates of the commercialisation of fishery. Bringing new types of gear, they are said to have introduced technical and organisational innovations, most notably urban labour relations, into the local fishery. The outcomes have been represented as an irreversible destruction of the indigenous modes of fishing. Such teleological representations disregard any continuity in tenure regimes on the lake, and have been used to justify various reforms, including ‘co-management’ with the government and international development agencies in the postcolonial era. The article challenges the view that indigenous fishing practices in Malawi have been destroyed by returning male migrants interested only in commercialisation, by revealing the agency of Malawian fishers in remaking fishery practices and institutions. The Lakeside Tonga fishers do indeed form fishing units that resemble urban labour relations. However, I argue that their practice is not a disruptive break but an artful recombination of previously known techniques and organisations, which they represent and realise through urban-related terms. This transformation was not a passive, irreversible dislocation or dismemberment of fishing and its economy from the village context. Instead, it is an active progress in which fishers appropriate and project models onto the lake, creating a multi-layered waterscape on which they manoeuvre distances relative to different loci of power.