A tall woman with a strong gaze is standing by the shores of Lake Victoria. It’s a busy morning. Boats are coming in full of fish: Nile perch, catfish, tiny silvery fish called omena aka the Lake Victoria sardine.
She has her eye on one boat in particular. Like the others, it’s made of wood. It’s about 30 feet long. And it has a majestic white sail.
“That is the first boat which we started with for No Sex For Fish,” she says.
The woman is Justine Adhiambo Obura. She’s a big presence full of energy and righteous indignation in the village of Nduru Beach, population about 1,000. Wearing bold prints and colors, she strides along the beach as if she owns it.
Justine’s life didn’t turn out the way she’d hoped. She once dreamed of being a doctor but dropped out of high school after she became pregnant. She has nine children, one of whom has developmental disabilities, and nine grandchildren. She has been a paid community health worker, counseling people who are HIV-positive. She’s on the board of the local hospital. She owns some cows, chickens and goats.
And since 2011, she has been the head of the women’s cooperative No Sex For Fish.
It’s a bold name. A revolutionary name. A name that tells you what Justine, now 61, and other women in the village have been fighting for years to change.
Along Lake Victoria, the fish business is divided by gender. Men own boats and go fishing. Women buy fish from them to sell at the market.
The lake’s fish population began dwindling in the 1970s because of overfishing and environmental problems sewage and agricultural runoff in the lake, for example.
Fishermen weren’t catching enough to supply all the women fishmongers.
So the fishermen started offering a quid pro quo: Give me sex, and I’ll make sure you get fish to sell.
In the local language, Luo, the practice is called jaboya. Boya is the word for the plastic floater attached to the edge of a net. Ja means “mine.” The term is also used as a nickname for the fisherman who is part of the exchange.
For many women, the survival of their family depends on getting fish to sell. So they felt there was no choice but to engage in jaboya.
“I give my jaboya a plastic bag. He goes to the lake; when he comes out with the fish, that fish is mine,” says Milka Onyango, a 40-year-old mother of six who is very open about the practice.
“I exchange sex; I get fish,” she says. “I don’t care about getting HIV. Me, I need fish. I need earning to sustain my family.”
She points to a young fisherman: “He’s my jaboya.”
For the women and men who are part of the jaboya network, the risk of contracting HIV is high. Fishermen typically travel from village to village and may have different sex partners at each location. The men may or may not know their HIV status. They do not like to use condoms, the women say.
The result is that the fishing communities of Kenya have a high rate of HIV prevalence 30% to 40%. That’s an enormous public health problem that the government is wrestling with.
Because of the lack of economic opportunities in small fishing villages, the women fish traders have been powerless to stop the practice. And so they find themselves in a situation familiar to women around the world.
“There’s a spectrum of men having access to resources and power, and women doing what they need to do to get these resources, to move their careers, to feed their family,” says Rebecca Fielding-Miller, an assistant professor in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, who’s on the staff of the school’s Center on Gender Equity and Health. She does research on transactional sex and HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.
The spectrum is quite broad. In the U.S., she says, it may mean smiling at your boss and “putting up with more nonsense than we want.”
But in many places far from the shores of Lake Victoria, it can also mean a sexual encounter.
Justine has always been outspoken in her opposition to jaboya. She remembers when she first started selling fish and a young fisherman said to her, “I don’t want your money. You are so cute. What I want is just your body. ”
She was embarrassed and infuriated: “I said, ‘You are very stupid. How can you tell me that!’ ”
Justine was eager to see a change. But what kind of change? And how to make it happen?
Then came a momentous conversation with Dominik Mucklow, a Peace Corps volunteer stationed near Nduru Beach back in 2010.
Working with a local nonprofit called VIRED, the Victoria Institute for Research on Environment and Development, Mucklow periodically visited Nduru Beach and met the women there. One day, they all began talking about jaboya how it worked, how much they hated it, how they wanted to stop it.
Mucklow asked if they had any solutions.
And then it came to them: What if they owned their own boats? And hired the fishermen to work for them?
It was a mind-bending proposition.
“You know, our culture does not allow women to have boats,” Justine says. They can’t even set foot in a boat.
And now the women of Nduru Beach had this brainstorm. “The seed just came from [us],” Justine remembers. “We were like sleeping, and Dominik waked us up!”
The women were excited but uncertain how to proceed. Mucklow told them he’d come up with a plan to get funds to, as Justine puts it, “empower women to come out from this selling sex for fish.”
He was true to his word. He secured a grant from the U.S. government’s largest foreign HIV program, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR.
PEPFAR paid for the first round of five boats. A charity called World Connect issued three subsequent grants. All in all, nine villages got boats around 30 in total. They got nets as well. Another Peace Corps volunteer, Michael Geilhufe, helped provide business training.
The women also got turquoise T-shirts that state their cooperative’s name (and raison d’être) in Luo and in English: “NO SEX FOR FISH.”
For the women who got boats, the moment was transformational.
2019 NET Foundation for Television