My parents have strange taste in music. When Dad is metal-smithing, he likes to listen to everything from Queensryche (a hair band from the 80s) to Bach Cantatas. I guess it just depends on his mood. My Mom is the same way, she listens to Bob Dylan, Italian opera, and occasionally I’ll catch her bopping her head to Snoop Dogg. It’s so weird when that happens.
So it’s normal that I enjoy listening to all kinds of music, and in my preparation for The Big Trip to Tanzania, I learned there is a style of hip hop music that’s native to Tanzania, just like Gam’s cichlids are native to Lake Tanganyika.
It’s called Bongo Flava, and it comes from Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania. It is a combination of East African music styles like afrobeat and dancehall, with global hip-hop styles. The lyrics are a blend of Swahili and English, and the sound is truly unique.
After gaining independence from Britain, the East African territory called Tanganyika and the island of Zanzibar merged to create Tanzania in 1964. Tanzania borders the Indian Ocean, lies south of Kenya and north of Mozambique. It has a total area of 365,754 square miles (947,300 square kilometers), a bit less than one and a half times the area of France.
Mount Kilimanjaro is in Tanzania, as well as the Serengeti Game Reserve and the mythical island paradise of Zanzibar. It is where Mary Leaky discovered the footprints of our earliest known ancestors, Australopithecines, and Jane Goodall lived with her chimpanzees. It’s where Henry Morton Stanley spoke the immortal words, “Dr. Livingstone I presume?” and it houses Africa’s largest refugee camp. Two Rift Valley Lakes can be found in Tanzania: Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika.
Our story focuses on Lake Tanganyika.
Lake Tanganyika lies in Tanzania, Zambia, The Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burundi. Tanzania possesses 41% of the lake, and the DRC has the other lion’s share.
Lake Tanganyika incredibly old (around 6 million years) and is the second deepest lake in the world (just behind Lake Baikal in Siberia). At its deepest point, the lake is 4,800 feet (1,470 meters) deep. Because of this immense depth (nearly a mile), the waters in its deepest regions have been sealed off, like an underground aquifer. When water is cut off in this way for thousands or millions of years, it loses its oxygen and becomes known as ‘anoxic’ or ‘fossil water.’
There are two kinds of water in the lake. Freshwater and anoxic (fossil) water. In the southern end of the lake, the top 200 meters (656 feet) of water is freshwater, and the rest is anoxic. In the north only 100 meters (328 feet) is freshwater. This means that, in the north where our story takes place, the bottom 93% of the lake’s depth is uninhabitable anoxic water, and all life happens in the top 7%. There is a clear division between the fresh and anoxic waters, and they rarely mix. On the occurrences that they do, because of strong weather effects, for example, there are deadly effects on the animals in the lake.
Our story is concerned with fish called cichlids (pronounced “sick-lids”). They are of the Perciform order of vertebrates which comprise 41% of all bony fish. There are 250 species of cichlids in Lake Tanganyika, and 150 non-cichlid species. Most of the cichlids (98%) and other water creatures (including molluscs, crabs, shrimp, and jellyfish) living in the lake are endemic, meaning they cannot be found in any other place in the world. Because of this, scientists are drawn to studying the endemic species of Lake Tanganyika as well as other Rift Valley Lakes.The
When I wrote the first draft of Antoinette’s Fish, I was too excited about the story to do any research. I decided to do it afterwards, and I cobbled something together with the limited fish-knowledge I had garnered from my husband’s hobby-ism and a travel guide for Tanzania. Now that I am rewriting, I am required to go back and check the biology and geography of what and where I am talking about.
I hoped that most of my facts were roughly accurate, so when I did fill in the details I wouldn’t change them so much that it altered the story. But I didn’t expect that one of my primary characters would already exist.
Ethelwynn Trewavas
In the beginning of Antoinette’s Fish, young Annie Velter is setting out on her long awaited adventure to Tanzania, to visit her grandmother, Dr. Antoinette Beauregard, a world renowned ichthyologist whose work is to study the cichlids of Lake Tanganyika.
While reading about cichlids yesterday, I found the real life (but unfortunately no longer living) ichthyologist Dr. Ethelwynn Trewavas (1900-1993). She was the lead fish scientist at the British Museum of Natural History for almost 50 years, her work on African Rift Lake cichlids is widely known.
Nineteen new fish species have been named after her, including the Aulonocara ethlewynnaeand the Copadichromis trewavasae (how cool to have a species named after you), and she was mentor to Ad Konings, the researcher who has written THE book on Lake Tanganyika cichlids, a book that is sitting right here on my desk and has already reached bible status in the writing and rewriting of Antoinette’s Fish.
There is an article posted online about Dr. Trewavas’ career, but it costs $34 to purchase the digital version. Do I have to get a book deal before I can learn more about her?
