Kapenta Sales

There are two paths one can take to get to the part of the lake where our kapenta rig arrives.

There’s a more direct path via the main Siavonga road that leads right down to the water. However, that path brings you to the opposite side of the lake from where our rig arrives, so you have to hop on a boat and ferry across. The ferry boats are small and have either one or two young guys paddling. It’s a short distance across, maybe about 75 yards, and you only have to pay 1,000 Kwacha (about 20 cents). Still, I prefer the second path and use it every day.

The second path loops around a bit more, but it takes me right to where our rigs arrive. I’m not on the main road for long. It follows mostly small dirt paths and, at one point, passes through a small village (where all the kids stare at me, pointing and yelling “mukuwa” ,the Tonga word for “white man”, every single day…sometimes they wave and smile, but mostly they just point). It’s quite a bit of up and down and is a pretty strenuous, but it’s nice because it gets my blood flowing in the morning. Plus, Saviour told me I got fat, so I have to exercise.

The boat usually arrives somewhere between 7:00 and 8:00 am (we have two boats but only one has an engine so the other stays out on the lake and all eight fishermen return on the other). Jere, one of our day-workers who stays with the rigs during they day and helps dry the fish, arrives about when I do. Since Mubita, our kapenta sales supervisor is still on leave, Kebby, the Namumu boys’ caretaker, has been showing up to help out as well.

100% of our customers are women. At the beginning of the month there were around 20 showing up each day. They buy in bulk from us and sell the kapenta all around town, mostly in the main market. They are business-savvy and, let me tell you, they can be vicious. I do as much flirting as possible to ease the tension.

It was madness on the first day. We tried to be fair and divide up our catches equally amongst the women, giving them all small quantities. This month we’re only catching around 80-100 kgs a night, so almost all of them wanted more than what they got. They crowded around us as we weighed out the catches, trying to get our attention and even putting their money in our faces to get what they wanted. Most of the women are from the surrounding villages and don’t speak much English, so Kebby did most of the communicating.

At first I thought, “Well, I guess this is just how businesses operate in Zambia. It’s crazy and unorganized, but that’s just the way things go.” To Kebby and the women it just seemed natural. I figured that to develop any formal system would be too American of me and that it was best just to keep doing what we were doing.

However, after a few days of dealing with middle-aged-cat-fighting Zambian women we tried something new.

It wasn’t anything fancy. One day we had a lottery. Each woman was randomly assigned a day on which they could come and buy from us, with two women assigned per day. If on any woman’s particular day they did not want to purchase all of their half of the catches they could designate any of their friends to receive the remainder, but only the day’s two assigned women control over the catches. To assign them days we just had them draw slips of paper out of a hat.

It was simple and it worked. Even the women themselves appreciate it and think it’s fair.

After talking with a number of other fishing camps I’ve found that some of them use a system somewhat like what we created. It just makes sense. So, things have calmed down around our area of the harbor and we're having no problem selling all of our catches every single day.

After we sell the fish there’s not much to it. We have racks set up, long wire sheets on top of wooden polls, where the customers spread out their fish to dry after buying them. Jere, our day-staffer, stays around to monitor and I head home.

So there you have it. Our kapenta business is coming right along, and every day we find some way to do things better than the day before.