My study seeks to understand everyday belonging and the material relations of fishing among the artisanal fishers on Lake Kariba’s shores, in Zimbabwe. I shed light on this by exploring livelihoods and access to resources, familiarity with the natural environment, and cultural norms pertaining to living on the lake’s shores. This will enable me to explore how the material relations of fishing in Zimbabwe’s unstable economy are central to the everyday life and understandings through which fishers belong in an economically and ecologically diverse place that Lake Kariba is. I define belonging in the broadest sense including people’s access to fishery resources, familiarity with the natural environment, cultural mores pertaining to living on the Lake’s shores, and formal and informal practices of natural resource entitlement. I also bring into my analysis the role of non-human elements – the physicality of the fishery and animals living in it – in shaping fishery (non)compliance in the face of Zimbabwe’s incessant economic and political crisis.