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Hi, my name is Gary Baraka. I'm the author of Anise called A Drowning World, Kenya's Quiet Slide Underwater, which was published in the Guardian Longwood in 2022.

I first started thinking about the story around 2019-2018 because there'd been a case of like a bunch of lakes in Kenya,

which had started to all of a sudden rise.

And you hear about the first one called Lake Victoria, which is near my hometown, was rising

and was entering people's homes, like flooding people's property.

But then as I say hearing about other lakes in Kenya where the same thing was happening.

And then like further afields are saying about lakes in Tanzania, in Uganda, Burundi.

So basically, lakes in East Africa, which were all expanding at the same time.

And I'm wondering, is there like a common cause to all these things?

And it made me be like, write this

essay. And even though this essay focuses almost entirely on the lakes in Kenya, but it's the same

things that apply to the lakes in Kenya, applied to all the lakes in East Africa, which were all

rising at around the same time. In the time since the story was published, the lakes of continued rise, even though it

hasn't been as dramatic as it was in the late 2010s.

And I think the interesting thing to think about is that, of course, like, it's highly likely

that this rising is due to climate change.

But if you stretch it out for like over a longer period, these lakes have been big in the past, even as recently as 100 years ago, some of these lakes were bigger than they are right now.

So these lakes have always been undergoing a constant cycle of expansion and reduction.

And even though now they are still expanding, most likely there's going to be a point

in the next few years when they're going to stop and they're going to start reducing insights.

...