Plundered Seas
Saint Louis
Along the streets, in the coastal village of Saint Louis, Senegal, groups of young men and women can be heard chanting songs of camaraderie as they knit and pull large fishing nets together. These young men and women are fishers. They sleep, eat, and breathe fish. It is everything they have known since their childhoods. Their grandparents fished. Their parents fished. Now, they fish too.
But things are more difficult for them than for their parents and grandparents before them. Now they need bigger nets, bigger boats, and more petrol in order to compete with their new rivals in what is a battle royale for the heart of the Senegalese territorial sea. Their rivals are the huge European and Asian fleets, who having obtained licences from the government, now lord it over the coastal waters. No fish can escape their nets. In fact, they catch so much more than they need such that they often have to dump unwanted dead fish back into the water. And the Saint Louis fishers? Well, very little is left for them. In order to get fish, the fishers now have to do something their fathers and grandfathers never had to do. They have to build much bigger nets, stock their boats with plenty food and petrol and sail further and further out, several nautical miles away from the coast, into the high sea, in search of fish, spending days; sometimes weeks. They do not return until they have made a catch. The fishers say that the sea is dead since the arrival of the fleets from China, South Korea, France, Spain, and Greece. They call the fleets saxaar meaning ‘smoke’ in the Lebou dialect because of the big balls of black smoke they puff into the sky. The saxaar are not loved around here. They plunder the seas ridding the town of their single most valuable resource—fish.
Thiaroye
In Thiaroye, retired fishers can be seen chatting and laughing in a shed held by wooden poles.
They are reminiscing about the past—good old days when all the investment needed for fishing was a small rod and canoe. They made enough to fend for their families. Some even built houses. Now, artisanal fishing is a thing of the past. Without a huge boat and hundreds of litres of fuel, you cannot go far. But even these—the huge boats and fuel—are not enough to compete with the mighty powers of Europe and Asia. This is a war they cannot win—they simply do not have the tools. Somehow, it seems their own government have abandoned them, sacrificing their source of living on the altar of politics.
Bargny
In Bargny, two fishers are sitting in the sand, their gaze focused on the rising waves of the blue sea before them.
Occasionally, one of the men bends to draw patterns on the soft sand as he listens to the other speak. The men are discussing migration. Their inability to find fish in the waters has led some young, promising youths to seek another route. Migration. Senegal, it appears, no longer holds any hopes for them. They brave the dangers of the seas, in their pirogues, en route to Europe or the Canary Islands. Many do not survive the rage of the Atlantic. The one fisher continues to draw patterns in the sand. The other continues to speak, pausing now and again for a response; his gaze never leaves the sea.