Dar Es Salam. Meeting Alex around six in the morning. He tells me that his father was a fisherman who has spent nearly fifty years in the sea around Pemba, one of the three largest islands in Tanzania. Thanks to his father, he grow up developing a very special relationship with fishing. He soon learned to recognize the different species, but especially to respect what each day accompanied his father on board of the Dhow. The Sea. As we enter the fish market of Dar Es Salaam, the largest in East Africa, Alex tells me how times changed and how traditional fishing activity is no longer economically sustainable. Dhow are going out in the open water for several kilometers, while larger vessels, controlled by large corporations, manage to return with large quantities of fish. “At the base there is a completely different relationship with the sea. It’s a resource to be squeezed and exploited, such as oil or minerals that are extracted as right here in Tanzania”, he says. “We failed to understand that we are guests in these waters. And that we have been able to survive because of what we fish. Instead, we have once again chosen to impose our interests”
Alex is an intermediary, a fish consultant. He is working at the fish market since almost 10 years. We cross the first benches. The shrimp are placed in circles, with the hope that the aesthetics of composition may lead the buyer to his bank, rather than its neighbor. I realize that Alex wants to show me hos everything is similar to an assembly line, a gear going from fishermen who dock and start to process the product of a night’s work. The fish is immediately on the bargaining table. Business women, restaurateurs, “small” sellers. Everyone is participating and buying all. A few meters, a large group of “cleaners”, sits on old plastic buckets. For a few cents, they scale, open, empty and rinsed the fishes.
“The fishing methods have changed”. “Today you do everything to come back with something in the basket. No one is caring if someone is destroying seabed or coral. Fishing is all about money, only money. Nobody would think to free species caught by mistake. I wish our government would address the issue of fisheries reform, which should give legal recognition, protection and respect the collective rights of small-scale fishing communities to access and use in a sustainable way the fisheries and resources liner.
But it will continue. Nets will be longer, someone will clean the fishes in factories, and other will sail trough these waters every day but increasingly unrecognizable.