Is a lake alive?

It breathes in the wind. It exhales salt. It does not announce its changes, it revises slowly.

Pasture becomes water. Water becomes memory. What was once a path for cattle dissolves into current. Palm groves burn, then drown. The horizon remains; everything else transforms.

I arrived at Lake Turkana, the largest desert lake in the world, while tracing ancient migratory routes across Ateker lands – a vast cultural geography stretching across northern Kenya, southern Ethiopia, South Sudan, and northeastern Uganda. For generations, pastoralist communities moved through the region following rain, pasture, and their cattle. Mobility brought knowledge: a way of reading land, wind, and season.

Today those patterns are changing.

Along the lake’s edge many of the people, who were once pastoralists, now fish. Droughts are longer and grazing lands less reliable. Learning the lake is its own craft. Boats are built, nets repaired, winds studied. Fishermen read the colour of the water and the pull of currents, searching for tilapia and Nile perch where the depth allows. What was once pastoral knowledge translates into another form of environmental skill.

Across northern Kenya, some pastoralist communities have turned to fishing as climate pressures reshape their traditional grazing systems which structured life there, for millenia.

The change is not simple. Nets replace herds; boats replace migration routes. Yet the deeper logic remains the same: attention to land, water, and season, and the willingness to adapt when those rhythms shift.

The lake continues to move. Sandbanks rise. And along its shores, identities continue to take shape in conversation with the lake.

Lake Turkana, Kenya
2024–2025