Years in the making, anthropologist Triniti Goldsmith explains how she, an Island girl from the Caribbean, found her way to a small Island in Kenya’s western region, and what that trip has meant to her, and the people she came into contact with.
Our national saying in Jamaica goes, “Out of many, one people” speaking to Jamaica’s history of individuals who were brought or migrated from all around the world to form one people. My family is a symbol of this truth. My grandma’s father was a Chinese migrant who came to Jamaica in the 19th century, and her mother was a black Jamaican. My grandfather’s mother was an Indian Jamaican who married a man with a Spanish father and an English mother. My own father hails from the island of Trinidad and is a descendant of those brought over from Benin and Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Mali.
On my mother’s side, my grandma and grandpa spent their entire lives cultivating connections with their local and global community. My grandma was a business owner and respected member of the St. Ann Parish. My grandfather was a sea merchant who sailed to Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America; always sending letters and gifts back home to us. As a woman of Caribbean descent, with roots from Jamaica and Trinidad, who was raised in both America and Jamaica, I have always been inspired by communal, ancestral, and environmental connections that actively preserve our local and global histories in sustainable ways.
Top left: Picture of my grandma in her business in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, Bottom left: Picture of my grandpa on the ship as a sea merchant and On the right: My mother home at our family home in Jamaica in the 80’s.
From my youth, I have been nurtured by my multicultural familial roots and enriched by the many cultures I encountered in America. My mother migrated to America in her 20’s, and she would fly me back and forth between Jamaica and America throughout the year. My entire life, I watched my mother solo travel to new and far places, inspiring me to do the same at a very young age. As I grew older, my layered upbringing helped me understand the importance of protecting and uplifting my Caribbean roots. From being in spaces where I felt pushed to whitewash myself, to returning to Jamaica feeling Westernized, the need to protect my roots has been a spiritual journey.
For as long as I can remember, there has been a fighting relationship between Jamaica safeguarding itself from globalisation and assimilation, while at the same time heavily relying on tourism as its biggest income stream. Over the years, Jamaica’s natural resources and social environment has changed to accommodate global tourism in suffocating ways that put the foreigner first, and the citizen second. What aspects of culture and community can be preserved when the island is being forced to sell itself to feed its people? This question has inspired me to tap deeply into healthy cross-cultural empowerment and communal exchange. As my ancestors did, I am using travel and creative ingenuity to teach me and help me navigate these facets of culture and heritage in modern life. It is a blessing to be part of a global persevering, empowering, and sharing of stories even as our environment continues too drastically.
My first steps…
In May 2021, I graduated from university with a Bachelor’s Degree in Anthropology, guiding my passions to work in the field of community advocacy, cultural and environmental preservation. My first opportunity to follow these passions came soon after graduation when I connected with a family in Kenya who wanted to create projects that would empower their community. Although it was a leap, I decided to trust my intuition and travel to Mfangano Island, located on the Eastern part of Lake Victoria; West of Rusinga Island.
Mfangano Island is home to the highest concentration of the Abasuba people, one of Kenya’s smaller tribes. In 1999, the population on Mfangano Island was around 17,000, but no additional census updates have been made to update these numbers since. Most of the locals speak Luo, Kiswahili and English.
The family that I lived with specifically are descendants of Witewe, the first ever man accompanied by his brother Kiboy to migrate to Mfangano Island over from the Buganda Kingdom in Uganda. Witewe arrived after the early nineteenth-century murder of their Kabaka Juju (king). My host family, consisting of Florence, Gabriel, Vero, and their remaining children, are very involved with the community’s well-being. Florence for example created a women’s microfinance group to help support the women in their community and Gabriel is a paternal figure for many families who provide conscious counsel. In a short time, I noticed that many women often came into the home, seeking support, and that’s when I realised why I was led to the Island.
A care project that grew into an initiative of freedom
I ended up working with the women in the community who were experiencing sexual exploitation from the prevailing fishing practices. In this abusive microeconomic environment, fishermen force women and girls to barter sex for the fish they sell in the markets. This pervasive and harmful practice has damaged numerous lives and caused HIV to spread rapidly within the community. Women, who have lost their husbands to this disease, are left to provide for their families. But the struggle becomes compounded because fishing is the main source of income, and the cultural norm is that men fish and women sell, leaving many women extremely vulnerable.
When I first arrived, Gabriel was building a boat for a widowed woman who was a victim of these practices. Although we raised money to help complete this boat, it became painfully apparent that we needed to build boats for as many vulnerable women as possible. To support this I created a gofundme fundraiser that facilitated the building of 3 more boats, the payment of labour costs, materials, and fishing gear. These boats are now shared among the widowed women of the community, who’ve chosen trusted men to fish for them- which is in turn changing the working relationships between women and fishermen.
Sustainable living and Regenerative practices
Waking up at sunrise to watch the fisherman scattered across the Lake, spreading their nets became one of my favourite pastimes. On some occasions, I would join Gabriel on the fishing boat to check the nets for our daily catch. Floating in the middle of the lake and witnessing Mfangano Island in all her beauty was a gift. For hours everyday, shore men and women cast then pulled in huge fish nets; a strenuous exercise that cannot be avoided because it is the community’s main source of income and daily sustenance. Just down the shoreline women wash clothes, pots and pans or use designated areas to bathe (separate from the men). In all, most of the day is spent on the Lake’s shore.
The parallels to my own upbringing were not lost on me. As a Caribbean woman, I find that vitality is always connected to the vicinity of a natural body of water. In Jamaica, specifically Ocho Rios where my family hails from, much of life revolves around the ocean. Fishermen take to the sea to catch lobster, tourists travel from afar to experience our beaches, and local families pack cars with fresh fruit and patties preparing for a day at the beach. For most of my childhood in Jamaica, I was covered in sand and water. If not the salt water of the ocean, then the natural water from the rivers and waterfalls. I always felt my most free in this state. I was at home surrounded by my family and connecting with nature. I remember how invincible I felt because everything we needed was all around us. Mfangano reminded me of home; the people know the land as much as the land knows the people, and this is something we must protect.
Despite this intrinsic link between indigenous people and their land, current economic factors are constant disruptors. Back home, I’ve witnessed hotel chains grab our beaches and public land. Not only is this an unsustainable practice, but it also robs the community of the benefits that these resources give. Instead of this, my desire would be for unoccupied land to be turned into an asset that feeds the needs of local communities- think of regenerative food forests, for example.
In comparison, a deep concern on Mfangano Island is overfishing caused by destructive and profit-oriented fishing techniques and the disruption of repopulation cycles because of the constant need for bait. With all these issues in mind, we decided to create a community food forest and help train community members in regenerative permaculture and hopefully at a later point Aquaponics.
‘Overflow Spring of Hope’, the organisation I work with on Mfangano, is striving to promote sustainable living and regenerative practices. Everything from the way we cultivate the land, to the way we interact with the lake and its inhabitants affects future generations.
With the money left over from the boat project, Florence, Gabriel, and Vero travelled to Uganda to receive regenerative permaculture training. Shortly after, we created another fundraiser to help train a further 7 women and 3 men, and now the community has a food forest and a growing number of keyhole gardens!
Ancestral Documentation 2023
After my first trip to Kenya, I immediately travelled to Egypt for a few months. During my time in Egypt, I met my friend Charlie from China, who started a community think tank called ‘The Coalition for Global Health Innovation’. It is a think tank of community leaders and project builders from countries in Africa and Europe. She had learned about our projects on Mfangano Island and decided to have the coalition mentor me to scale the projects on the island. Over the next year, I learned a lot and was connected to amazing opportunities. With help from the Coalition, Overflow Spring of Hope got invited to present online at a conference in Lisbon, Portugal on June 17th 2023, on decolonising international development work. For me, this and a deep spiritual pull signalled that it was time to return to my roots in a whole new way.
With the utmost gratitude, I returned to Mfangano Island this year (2023) to continue the work I had started but from an ancestral lens. Growing up in Jamaica and witnessing the slow Westernisation of my culture due to an influx in tourism was hard. Fast-forward 20 years, and the Jamaica I grew up in is very different from the one I experience today. This accounts for my commitment to collaborating with communities in protecting their ancestral lineage in sustainable and holistic ways.
I was first introduced to Gabriel’s familial connection to Witewe in 2021, but this time around there was an urgency and importance placed on speaking about him. The elders were ageing, and the youth seemed removed from their Suba heritage, but at the same time vigilant about protecting their ancestry. As I met more community members from Witewe’s clan, I felt I had returned to a more grounded place to understand what was needed.
I also felt I returned with a level of pain in my heart for aspects of the island I hadn’t experienced the first time I came. Not only had the world around us changed immensely but other things also, like feeling nostalgia that some of the trees were gone, that there was less unity in the community, and an increased struggle to put food on the table. I know the latter was because the Lake had a diminished supply of fish and the Island was still recovering from a terrible drought. It all reflected how differently I felt within myself compared to the last time I came to Mfangano. The community was as beautiful as I remember in 2021, but it mirrored the questioning and introspective space I was in.
Despite these internal and external changes, we collectively knew that time was of the essence. We had to begin the process of collecting and documenting oral stories from the elders of the community, who are quickly passing away. The history of the migration of Suba people from Uganda to Mfangano and other surrounding islands is a meaningful part of the tribe’s lore, and their ability to still speak in the Suba language.
I had the honour to travel up the mountain to visit the Ancestral forest (shrine) where Witewe once resided. The Wetete people are the only ones allowed to enter this forest to perform sacrifice. Gabriel, the co-founder of this documentation project, has the responsibility of protecting the forest as a direct relative of Witewe. Gabriel also has very close connections and is respected by many of the elders in the community. He began reaching out to them, and one by one sat down with these elders to listen to and voice record their knowledge of the Suba people.
What now…?
The Mfangano community cares deeply about how these stories will be shared and documented for future generations. That we preserve the integrity of the perspectives shared with us and appreciate speaking to elders whose narratives Gabriel continuously provides validation for. Ultimately, we hope to create an online archive of the voice recordings in Suba but translated into English, with pictures, and videos we collect along the way.
Soon, the world will be able to experience and learn about the strength of one of Kenya’s endangered tribes.
If you’d like to support any of the ongoing projects mentioned above, you can visit these Gofundme links:
Generational Healing and Empowerment in Kenya: https://gofund.me/6ed58051
Revolutionary Regenerative Permaculture in Kenya: https://gofund.me/fef098f1
You can also join in the celebration of the Abasuba people by attending the Rusinga Cultural Festival, an annual two-day event held on the last Thursday and Friday before Christmas. Over this period the mixed festival puts different facets of Abasuba culture on display including artefacts, traditional music by local troupes, Abasuba cuisine, sporting activities and so on.
Find out more about the upcoming 2023’s event here.
