The name itself refers to the specialized lung that serves as the creature’s main organ for breathing. This lung allows the fish to gulp air as an adaptation to low-oxygen water environments, such as swamps or bodies of water that frequently dry up. Most fish use their gills to pull the oxygen out of the water. Lungfish also have gills, but theirs are relatively small compared to their fellow denizens of the deep. Young African lungfish have true external gills, which degenerate with age. The single lung on the lungfish is more like a modified swim bladder, the air-filled organ that almost all fish use to help them float at a particular depth, saving energy while swimming around the ocean, but in lungfish the modified swim bladder can also absorb oxygen. Freaky!
When kicking back and chilling out, lungfish excrete carbon dioxide through their gills or skin, just like most other fish, but most other fish get oxygen only through their gills. The special lung on the lungfish also removes carbon dioxide waste when the lungfish is very active, an anomaly in the underwater world. African lungfish actually rise to the surface to breathe and can “drown” without access to air.
Lungfish have elongated bodies with a double set of fleshy limbs that resemble cylindrical fins. Their oddly shaped fanlike teeth act like an under-counter garbage compactor, ideally suited to their diet of fish, insects, mollusks, worms, crustaceans, and plants. These animals are very territorial and extremely aggressive, building nests where the male protects the eggs that the female lays until they hatch.
African lungfish aestivate, meaning they can become dormant, literally hibernating during dry periods or droughts for a few months if need be. If necessary, they can hit the rack for years at a time—that’s years … plural! These fish burrow into the mud and secrete a covering of mucus around themselves. This mucus hardens into a cocoon, but the lungfish leave a small, closable breathing hole in the mummylike covering. The fish reduce their metabolism to a bare whisper and simply shut down, becoming essentially inactive. The protective cocoon softens when it gets wet—say, at the end of the dry season—and the fish can reemerge and live in the water again.
The lungfish, like its cousin the coelacanth, are commonly thought of as living fossils, a reference to the fact that these animals have essentially remained physically unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.
Oh yeah, and one more thing: When lungfish are in that cocoon and they get hungry, they eat their own bodies, tail first … and they grow back.
All of which begs the real question: What in the name of all that is holy was I doing fishing lungfish?
Let’s start from the beginning. The moment Travel Channel picked up Bizarre Foods, I wanted to live with an African tribe. It seemed to me to be the ultimate family of Bizarre Foods experiences: Getting in with real indigenous people, many who live the same way their ancestors did thousands of years ago, would allow me the best opportunities to experience food and share cultures, and that’s exactly what we found in Uganda.
Uganda is located in East Africa, and is landlocked by Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Zaire, and the Sudan. Much like its neighbors’, Uganda’s past has been turbulent at times. Despite the fact that Uganda achieved independence from Britain in 1962, the establishment of a working political community within such a diverse ethnic population has been a Herculean task. The dictatorial regime of Idi Amin (1971—79) was responsible for the deaths of some 300,000 Ugandans. Guerrilla wars and human rights abuses under Milton Obote (1980—85) claimed at least another 100,000 lives. Since 1986, the rule of Yoweri Museveni has brought relative stability and economic growth to Uganda. However, the country is still subjected to regionalized armed conflict, partially due to its large refugee population and the prevalence of the Lord’s Resistance Group, a separatist terrorist organization concentrated in the northern part of the country, which, for many travelers, has been essentially a no-go zone.
You’re probably wondering if this is a safe place to be traveling in the first place. Trust me, I had plenty of those thoughts myself, and it seemed anytime I researched this trip, I stumbled upon words like “insurgent activity,” “armed banditry,” and “roadside ambushes” each time I opened up my computer. We were staying in the city of Kampala, located on the northern edge of Africa’s largest body of water, Lake Victoria, for the first few days and last night of our stay, but for the majority of our trip we lived in an isolated village well outside the city. I always felt very safe in Uganda, but that’s a relative term. Flying in to Entebbe Airport, you can see the decades-old hull of the famous Lufthansa jet, hijacked in 1972 and left as a “training tool” on the runway where it finally came to rest. Not the most charming of welcome mats in the Kmart catalog. Armed guards watched over us in Lwanika, hired to keep us safe. Frankly, I wondered how one old guy with a rusty AK-47 would fare against a jeep- or truckload of rebels intending to do us harm or steal our equipment. I bet my producer a hundred bucks that it couldn’t fire if he pulled the trigger a dozen times, which was a bet he wouldn’t take. Thankfully, it didn’t come to that.
Kampala isn’t exactly a hotbed of international tourism, but three minutes after leaving the airport, I saw traffic lights, an ambulance driving on another road, and a speeding police car, sirens blaring. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Infrastructure like that means someone, or something, is at least nominally in charge. Having just come from Ethiopia, where I never saw an ambulance or police car during our entire eight days in-country, I can safely say that I was relieved to be in Kampala and not Addis Ababa or Harrar. Walking down the streets of Anytown, Uganda, from the biggest to the smallest, has the same challenges as walking down Mainstreet, USA. Look like a fish out of water, get treated like one.
Arranging a stay with an isolated African tribe is no easy feat. You can’t exactly call or e-mail in your reservations. Our “in” with the Embegge tribe was through our local fixer, Haruna, a member of the tribe and a legendary local Ugandan musician in his own right. We wound up visiting and staying with his tribe in the village of Lwanika, located about six hours east of Kampala. It just so happened that our arrival coincided with the anniversary of his grandfather’s death. Haruna’s family, and his late grandfather in particular, are highly regarded in the community. In honor of him, they had prepared a huge celebration for the second night of our proposed stay, complete with a big, festive meal for the entire extended village. It was exactly what we were looking for.
We headed out to Lwanika by Range Rover, where we would stay with the tribe for four days. The drive was pretty much what you’d expect in eastern Africa. We started off on a main, paved highway heading out from the city of Kampala, snagged up for a good half hour in the early-morning traffic of the congested city. Eventually, that road morphs into a simple, paved road, then to a dirt road, and finally you’re actually going all-terrain, driving over rutted grass byways to get to the heart of the village. In and around the village itself, we encountered a system of primitive dirt roads that connect the isolated villages of the region to each other. Villagers from one cluster of simple mud and straw homes would walk or bike from one to another to visit family or friends, or to help with work. While it’s extremely rare for most villagers to venture into the big city, modern civilization has touched their lives just enough that they have the occasional need to go into another village or a bigger town. The most traveled members of the tribes always seemed to be those involved with dance or music, and most of these villagers spent a lot of time traveling throughout eastern Africa performing in regional festivals and contests.
This explains why we were greeted in Lwanika with an impressive amount of fanfare. All the women turned out, dancing and singing us into the main town square—just a dirt area surrounded by a cluster of four or five homes. It seemed everyone was curious about the arrival of these “mazungos” and their cameras. Mazungo basically means “whitey” in Ugandan culture, which never felt derogatory—they use it more as a term of endearment mixed with a healthy dose of good humor. The Embegge have an incredible sense of
humor, and laughter is a regular part of the daily village cacophony of sounds. And why ignore the obvious? Mazungos just don’t show up in their village all the time, especially soft fluffy ones like me. The Embegge were very found of using that term around me, mostly because I totally embraced the culture, even if it meant I ended up making a complete ass of myself. Unlike me, most mazungos don’t dance with them, eat their traditional food, work with them, and sleep in teeny pup tents alongside their huts. I even went as far as joining the village’s all-female cooking co-op for an adventurous lesson in cooking matooke—a common dish made from boiled and mashed green bananas. To the Embegge, this was probably the most bizarre thing they’d ever seen from any man, as the responsibility of preparing food belongs solely to females. In fact, once a male hits age twelve, he isn’t expected to even sit in the kitchen. Taking an active role in their everyday lives, instead of simply staring and gawking from the safety of my Land Rover as most visitors do, afforded me a singular experience that meant we bonded in a way that would have been impossible had I only hung out for a few hours a day, then bussed back to a cushy hotel room somewhere.
Life for the Embegge is very rustic compared to life in the city of Kampala. For the most part, they do not wear Western clothes in the American sense. Women wear a traditional native shift, the same sacklike dress they’ve been wearing for years. Men wear pants and T-shirts in the village, or just shorts and flip-flops. Young men here dress like beach bums in Hawaii. But because national charitable organizations here in the States organize fund-raising drives on a grassroots level, you will often see whole families or villages decked out in prom shirts from 1997 in Cleveland, or see three boys walking together across a jungle field all wearing “Kimmelman Bar Mitzvah 2006, WE LOVE YOU KENNY!” Tees. The families live in small, circular mud and straw huts, which they share with their goats, cows, and other animals, depending on the predators who live in the jungles nearby. Some families are situated in homes made of brick with penned enclosures for their animals. With each passing year, this is becoming more and more the norm. They cook over small fires, farm and hunt off the surrounding land, sharing what they can with their community. It’s the pinnacle of sustainable living, except that buzzword doesn’t exist there. It’s just the only way of life they know. In America, eating well, eating sustainably, and eating off the land are increasingly becoming metrics of social status. In East Africa, it’s the norm. And no one here is hungry, despite the embarrassing cliché of starving children plastered all over the media. Food choice is limited, and other health issues are in desperate need of attention, but the soil is fertile and the animals are plentiful.
The Embegge people were gracious, kind, and generous hosts, more welcoming than I could have ever imagined. However, I’d be lying if I said these few days I spent with them weren’t one of the most physically, mentally, and emotionally stressful experiences of my life. You’re constantly fighting the oppressive dampness and moisture, the heat, hunger, hydration, the overwhelming stench of rotting plant matter, and the constant threat of disease. From dusk until dawn, all mazungos must cover themselves from head to toe in clothing that has been treated with permethrin, a powerful insecticide that you must soak your clothing in, and wear heavy-duty DEET repellant. Despite the fact that you’ve essentially bathed in these chemicals, the biting flies, some literally the size of cigar butts, continue to seek whatever purchase on you they can. At night, from the safety of our fire and wrapped tighter than Tutankhamen in fine cheesecloth, you could see the mosquitoes in cloudlike waves flying around our heads.
On the day we arrived in Lwanika, we drove through the village and spotted a man sitting on the steps of one of the common buildings with a giant swollen arm. When I say swollen, I mean grotesquely swollen to the point that it was bigger than his body. He had elephantitis. When you see that kind of disease symptomology caused by insects, it makes you think about seventeen times before you run out into the jungle to take a leak at 4 A.M. Later that evening, I remember looking at the flap on my pathetic pup tent, seeing thousands of biting flies hovering outside. And let’s not forget about the elephants or lions that could stumble into camp at any given moment. I spent most of those nights lying sleepless in my tent, too terrified to venture outside to piss for fear of being devoured by something. Ziploc bags come in handy.
I was quickly forced to face my fears on day two as I accompanied some of the tribesmen on a lungfish hunt. To be perfectly honest, I was really nervous about going lung-fishing from the first days of preproduction because of the horrific swamps in which they live. I was petrified of disappearing in a mud suck-hole or being devoured by snakes. I’m so thankful I never bothered to look at pictures of lungfish prior to this excursion. I never would have participated with such gusto had I known what was living just underneath the muddy water’s surface. Screw the bugs and mud, these lungfish are intimidating.
Early that morning, eight of us marched from our tents through the jungle to the swampy rice paddies where the tribe farmed their grain. There were dozens of paddies, each a couple acres in size, all bordered by mud berms made of swamp detritus. Reeds, branches, and grasses are cut by hand and piled like dikes between the ponds to regulate the flow. These organic items decompose very rapidly, creating a mud topped by spongy grasslike mossy compost, which acts as pathways between ponds after years of being cut and piled and shaped. The waters here are filled with poisonous snakes—several of the most deadly varieties in the world, in fact—as well as some of the most infamous disease-carrying insects. Fabulous. The mud berms were so brutish to walk on, they actually sucked my Keens right off my feet. I went barefoot for most of the day after that, encouraged by local pals who reminded me that the only thing in the water was mud and plant life. A lot could happen to me out there, but stubbed toes and cut feet were essentially physical impossibilities. I had envisioned my body helplessly succumbing to the mud after accidentally stepping in a sinkhole, however, so I insisted on tying a rope around my waist—just in case.
Catching a lungfish is nothing like any sort of fishing I’ve ever done. First, you take a giant stick outfitted with four or five metal barbs, which are typically just pieces of stiff wire lashed to the end of the poles. It resembles a supersize fondue fork, maybe six feet long. Next, you jab the pole into these grassy, muddy walls, trying to find hollow spots where the fish nest. Occasionally, you’ll spot a fish as it surfaces, breaking the thick brown water for a breath of fresh air. The lungfish we found were about four feet long, weighed about twenty-five to forty pounds, and had ferociously large teeth sprouting from their powerful jaws. They are extremely ugly and angry animals, and, as it turns out, they don’t like to have their nests poked by mazungos. They like it even less when, upon finding their nest, you start hacking away at the mud walls with a machete. Here’s the best part: Once these crazed, prehistoric creatures start to slither in, around, or out of their nest, you must blindly reach down into the mud and muck and retrieve them by hand. And considering their giant, sharp teeth, you better hope you find them before they find you. As you’re trying to get your hands on the fish, your fishing mates attempt to jab the fondue forks into the fish to immobilize them. Trust plays an important role in lungfishing.
All the lungfish that we caught were found by hand, then speared once they were found. Holding on to a wiggling, thirty-odd-pound, ferocious half-fish—half-lizard animal, all while standing chest deep in filthy stagnant water in the middle of the Ugandan jungle surrounded by biting flies, leeches, ticks, snakes, and God knows what else, was one of the more intimidating experiences of my life. I couldn’t have been happier that catching them actually happened a lot faster than I’d anticipated. Within an hour, we had five or six lungfish sprinkled out throughout our eight-man fishing party. Surprisingly, I’d landed one on my second try. The guides were cheering and screaming “Mazungo! Mazungo!” the entire time. Apparently, they had never even seen a white person try to catch lungfish, let alone actually score one. I am
proud of many achievements in my life, but having dubbed myself the first mazungo lungfisherman in Lwanika is one of my all-time faves.
By this time in the morning, it had to be 95 degrees with 80 percent humidity. No joke. We were all such a dirty, muddy, sweaty mess, and I was just so thankful that the ordeal of collecting food was over. We carried the fish, impaled on our spears, over our shoulders and back to camp. Interestingly, lungfish is one of the only foods the women will not prepare. The lungfish is considered a “cosmic soul sister” to the female tribe members, and therefore the men take a turn in the kitchen. Unlike fish preparation in larger African cities, where a salt and sun-dried method is commonly used, the tribe usually hot-smokes them. This fancy-food term brings to mind images of these wonderful, touristy salmon shops in the Pacific Northwest, which couldn’t be further from reality. The Embegge build a huge fire of brushwood, then place the fish fillets on a cooking grate, drying and charring them in the fire’s smoke. Once the process is completed, you end up with an overcooked, rock-hard, blackened and brown slab of fish. In that state, it continues to dry out and can later be rehydrated in boiling water and braised in a stew with g-nuts, which is what we would call peanuts here at home. Peanuts are incorporated into a lot of Ugandan and East African cuisine, commonly mixed into a paste with sesame seeds and used as a condiment for meat, crushed and served sautéed with greens, steamed with beans and rice, or boiled in a soup that’s used to rehydrate the lungfish, which is exactly what we did.
This was one-pot cooking in its purest form. The fish reminded me of carp, an oversize whitefish I’ve eaten plenty of in my time: kind of fatty, a bit fibrous, but definitely mild. This ferocious, prehistoric animal was more benign on the plate than I ever imagined. In fact, I’ve discovered that most of the time, the more ferocious and horrific-looking something is in real life, the more mild the flavor and timid the eating experience.
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