In March 2001, a young fisherman on the shores of Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe told me ‘I can't say where I learnt to fish, I grew up fishing. We are Tongas, people of the river… I was born on the river bank, I was born into this industry like my fathers before me. What I know is that I found myself fishing … when I started school I was already a fisherman. You don't have to teach a Tonga to fish’. By making this claim, the young man implied long-standing intimacy with the landscape of the Zambezi that stretched back through his family line into the mists of time and evoked a natural connection between Tonga people, the waters and the necessary skills to secure a livelihood from them, as well as an inalienable and privileged right to work the resources of the lake. His claim was echoed by other Zambezi ‘river people’. In Livingstone town in Zambia, Chief Mukuni publicized the special relationship between his Leya people and the famous waterfall at Victoria Falls. The chief invited tourists to appreciate the different aspects of the ‘thundering mists’, to understand that the ‘mists of the dead’ invoked Leya ancestors and to witness ritual river crossings to the island above the waterfall where Mukuni's ancestors had lived and commanded the Zambezi fords. By so doing, Mukuni also claimed political, economic and cultural rights by invoking natural, ancient, enduring mystical relationships with the landscape for the Leya people through their ancestors.

In both cases, of course, the claims were strategic in their essentialism. They were deceptive in so far as they implied not only unchanging tradition but also relations with a stable landscape. The forefathers of the Tonga fisherman had been displaced by the Kariba dam, an ambitious hydro-electric project that transformed the landscape and ecology of the river beyond recognition, creating a vast man-made lake – the largest in the world at the time. Traditional skills for fishing in the Zambezi, based on knowledge of the river's currents and pools and the annual pattern of inundation and retreat, needed total revision to be of any use in exploiting the wide expanse of the new lake.