Beatrice Achieng Odhiambo

Mama Achieng would have told you the secret of her business was the first hour: be at Dunga Beach before the sun lifts off the lake, greet the fishermen by name, and never haggle a man out of his breakfast. Beatrice Achieng Odhiambo was born in 1948 at Nyakach, one of nine children, and left school after Standard Six when the money ran out. By sixteen she was selling omena from a basin on the roadside in Kisumu.

By the 1980s she had a proper stall at Kibuye Market, a loan from Kenya Commercial Bank, and the first chest freezer in the fish section, which the neighbours at first mistook for a coffin and later queued to rent. She married Zablon Odhiambo, a Kenya Railways clerk and a diehard Gor Mahia supporter, in 1970. When he died in 1998 she raised their seven children, and four of her late sister's, on tilapia money and sheer arithmetic. She kept her savings in an old Blue Band tin and her ledgers in her head, and every term she paid school fees before she paid for anything else, including her own shoes.

Her children became a teacher, a nurse, two engineers, an advocate and two traders. All of them will tell you she never let them skip Sunday service at ACK St. Peter's in Nyalenda, or leave the table without finishing the fish, bones included. She chaired the Kibuye women's chama for twenty-two years with a firm hand and a loud laugh. If a trader fell sick, the group sold her fish for her until she was well.

'Erokamano' was the last word she said to every customer, whether they had bought a kilo or only asked the price. Mama Achieng died peacefully at her Nyalenda home in January 2022, aged seventy-three, with her children singing around her. The Kisumu lakeshore is a little quieter without her.