A Name Given by an Explorer and a Fishery Remade by an Introduction

The lake carries the name given to it in 1858 by the British explorer John Hanning Speke, the first European to reach its shore and to argue, controversially at the time, that it was the Nile's principal source, a claim Speke could not fully prove on that expedition and that took further exploration to confirm. The name has stood ever since, unrelated to any of the languages spoken by the peoples who had fished and settled its shores for centuries before Speke's arrival and who call the lake by other names in their own tongues.

The lake's ecology underwent its own transformation in the twentieth century when the Nile perch, a large predatory fish, was deliberately introduced in the 1950s to boost commercial fishing. The perch reshaped the lake's food web, contributing to the collapse of numerous native cichlid species, while also creating an export fishing industry that reordered the livelihoods of lakeside communities, Luo fishing villages among them, whose relationship to the lake's waters, framed in older practice through ritual observance as much as through subsistence, was remade by an intervention made for economic reasons that had nothing to do with the religious life it went on to affect.