Lake Kariba and the Zambezi state border both achieved a new prominence as the Zimbabwean economy declined and then plummeted after 2000, and people turned to fishing and cross-border trading to offset the effects of mounting inflation and collapsing formal employment. Rapidly developing social networks criss-crossed the landscape of the lake and border, disrupting the image of uninhabited ‘wilderness’ long cultivated through state controls privileging conservation, large-scale commerce and tourism. Though a punitive regime of conservationist regulations on the use of the lake was still in place and intermittently enforced in 2000-01, state capacity was crumbling rapidly.

This chapter is about fishing, trading and the reconfiguration of authority over the lake, as revealed in the activities and perspectives of Binga's gillnet fishermen, who work the inshore waters of the lake on a daily basis. Although the landscape has provided a continuous theme for the book, my focus here is on perspectives arising from day-to-day material interactions with the water, rather than memories. The chapter uses the fishermen's own accounts of their daily life to explore the shifting material relationships governing fishing and trade, which link the micro-ecologies of the south-western shores of the lake through a web of social relations to distant Zimbabwean urban markets as well as across the nearby border with Zambia. These relationships were under strain, as inflationary pressures had contradictory effects in Binga, and one of the ways they were experienced was through an increased isolation from Zimbabwe's main urban centres, as soaring fuel costs cut off transport links and undermined the viability of small-scale fish trading, in turn reinforcing the need for a stake in cross-border trades. As livelihoods became increasingly risky, so disputes multiplied, pitting fishermen against each other, the authorities, and other users of the lake, such as the large population of wild animals – particularly crocodiles – that had flourished through half a century of state protection. Indeed, the mythologized figure of the crocodile could stand as a metaphor for the state itself, embodying state conservationist priorities and Tonga fishermen's marginality, as well as invoking older ideas of power.